Michelle Malkin quotes:

9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us.

A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads.

At the dawn of his administration, President Obama opined: 'A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.' Magical rays of white-hot sunlight emanated from his media-manufactured halo. And then bureaucratically engineered darkness settled over the land.

Are your kids learning the right lessons about 9/11? Ten years after Osama bin Laden's henchmen murdered thousands of innocents on American soil, too many children have been spoon-fed the thin gruel of progressive political correctness over the stiff antidote of truth.

Tolerance is a one-way street in the Age of Obama. 'Choice' is in the eye (and iron fist) of the First Amendment usurper.

For the past two years, President Obama has promised our children the moon, stars, rainbows, unicorns and universal health care for all. But the White House Santa's cradle-to-grave entitlement mandates are a spectacularly predictable bust.

It's time for a 21st-century retirement age. If 40 is the new 20 and 50 is the new 30, why shouldn't 70 be the new 65? The last time Washington politicians tinkered ever so gingerly with the government-sanctioned retirement age, Ronald Reagan was in office and Generation X-ers were all in diapers.

Championing liberty begins at the local level. There is nothing more fundamental than the principle that a man's home is his castle. Donald Trump's career-long willingness to trample this right tells you everything you need to know about his bogus tea party sideshow.

Washington is gripped by crab-in-the-bucket syndrome. And there's no cure in sight. Put a single crab in an uncovered bucket, and it will find a way to climb up and out on its own. Put a dozen crabs in a bucket, and 11 will fight with all their might to pull down the striver who attempts escape.

Situational unawareness in the private marketplace or on the battlefield will cost you your livelihood or your life. In the Age of Obama, however, such willful ignorance is a job prerequisite. The less you know the better.

In case anyone needs reminding, it was the relentless drive of the tourism industry and kowtowing State Department bureaucrats that led to the Bush-era Visa Express Program, which relaxed visa policies, eliminated in-person consulate interviews and opened the door to the 9/11 hijackers.

If you aren't creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren't listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up.

No matter how you rearrange President Obama's inner circle, it still looks, smells and tastes like a rotten Chicago deep-dish pizza.

I think the thing that I admire about Rick Santorum is that he hasn't backed down or apologized one bit for his personal religious views, for standing up for social conservative values.

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It's about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who's next?

Instead of putting Americans to work, the Teamsters have been busy yanking members off projects and idling construction projects from California to Indiana to New York in order to shake down employers.

Pond scum stinks. And so do the Obama administration's enormous, taxpayer-funded 'investments' in politically connected biofuel companies.

In the 1970s, 'The Boys on the Bus' exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus - and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust.

Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.

During the summer of 2009, conservative activists turned up the heat on Democratic politicians to protest the innovation-destroying, liberty-usurping Obamacare mandate. In the summer of 2012, it's squishy Republican politicians who deserve the grassroots flames.

While Obama, the olive-branch poseur, has called for a restoration of 'civility' in Washington and liberal elites whine and whinny about the need for 'no labels,' class-warfare demagoguery has metastasized unchecked.

There is no such thing as a 'free' government benefit. Ask small-business owners who are footing skyrocketing bills for bottomless jobless benefits.

The current health care takeover proposals feature a crucial payoff to Big Labor - a golden exemption from any tax on union members' generous health care benefits. The friends and patrons of Obama may be making out like bandits. But for everyone else, the Democrats' ideological bankruptcy comes at a nauseatingly steep price.

Know your enemy, name your enemy' is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders.

It's the progressive left in this country that has viciously and systematically slimed female conservatives for their beliefs. We have the well-worn battle scars to prove it.

Team Obama is exploiting the power of high government office to intimidate lawful, peaceful contributors who support limited-government causes.

Raising the traditional and early retirement ages will mean extending workers' taxable earning years, fueling economic growth and putting a dent in our unfunded-liabilities crisis by delaying payouts.

Washington continues to encourage ever more ill-considered lending in a misguided attempt to stave off needed market corrections. The currently proposed combination of a nationwide infrastructure spending orgy plus tax-cut bribes does nothing to remedy that.

The deal looks bad and smells worse.

When bureaucrats talk about increasing our 'access' to x, y or z, what they're really talking about is increasing exponentially their control over our lives. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly approved government plan to 'increase' Internet 'access.'

It's not just that Miers has zero judicial experience. It's that she's so transparently a crony/"diversity" pick while so many other vastly more qualified and impressive candidates went to waste. If this is President Bush's bright idea to buck up his sagging popularity--among conservatives as well as the nation at large--one wonders whom he would have picked in rosier times. Shudder.

Most small-business owners will tell you they don't want Obama 'boosting' them. They just want him to get out of the way.

Environmentalists hate sprawl - except when it comes to the size of their expansive pet legislation on Capitol Hill.

As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama's snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.

Silence is complicity. Speak now or surrender your ground.

Within two weeks of moving into the White House, Obama signed a series of executive orders championed by union bosses. The new rules authorized sweeping powers for the labor secretary that essentially blackball nonunion contractors targeted by labor organizers and blacklist nonunion employees in the private sector from working on taxpayer-funded projects.

Who would have guessed that the shots heard 'round the world 225 years ago would fall on deaf ears in a nation now more sympathetic to the gun-grabbing Redcoat than the gun-bearing rebel?

Bank of America is to sweetheart loans and Democratic Party payoffs as Paula Deen is to sugar and bacon grease.

Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly.

Barack Obama and Jimmy Hoffa are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Lady Gaga and hype, the 'Jersey Shore' cast and hairspray: inseparable. The president can no more disown the Teamsters Union's leader than he can disown his own id.

We knew Chris Matthews had no shame. Now we also know the king of TV ghouls has no souls

The most dangerous lechers and creeps are not drunks wearing rags on the street, but respectable men wearing hairspray, pinstripes, and wedding rings who lurk in the halls of power.

In civilized societies, if you are offended by a cartoon, you do not burn flags, take up guns and raid buildings, chant death to your opponents, or threaten suicide bombings. You write a letter to the editor.

The newspaper is under fire for refusing to kowtow to left-wing word police and militant propagandists who demand unfettered illegal immigration. Last week, in the wake of angry protests against the publication, vandals threw paint bombs and spray-painted graffiti on its offices.

A city suffering from chronic poverty, out-of-control crime, a $76 million budget deficit and a 15 percent unemployment rate (nearly 50 percent for Oakland's youth) can hardly afford such social justice follies. But a pushover Democratic mayor and an overwhelmed police force have left what's left of gainfully employed Oakland taxpayers at the mercy of professional freeloaders and anti-capitalism saboteurs.

Instead of basic roads and bridges, infrastructure spending will go to bloated unions overseeing pie-in-the-sky construction projects like the $30 billion-plus high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which California officials fully expect to be funded.

The difference between past and present immigration experience is the existence of a defiant anti-assimilationist lobby that encourages legal and illegal aliens to resist adapting to the American way of life.

Here is the operating motto of the Obama White House: 'So let it be written, so let it be done!' Like Yul Brynner's Pharaoh Ramses character in Cecil B. DeMille's 'The Ten Commandments,' the demander in chief stands with arms akimbo issuing daily edicts to his constitution-subverting minions.

..Liberals see racism where it doesn't exist, fabricate it when they can't find it and ignore it within their own ranks.

Minority conservatives hold a special place of gutter contempt in the minds of unhinged liberals, who can never accept the radical concept of a person of color rejecting identity politics.

Nothing symbolizes American strength and vigor more than another unaccountable Washington bureaucrat.

We knew Chris Matthews had no shame. Now we also know the king of TV ghouls has no souls.

ACORN, you may recall, is the left-wing activist group with longtime ties to community organizer-turned-President Barack Obama. The nonprofit, which now takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers after four decades on the public teat, has a history of engaging in voter fraud, corporate shakedowns, partisan bullying and pro-illegal immigration lobbying. The Democrats' stimulus proposals could make the group - and its lesser known but even more radical ideological allies - eligible for upward of $5 billion in new public cash.

At a time when Democratic leaders are pushing rationed care in a world of limited resources, Americans might wonder where the call for shared sacrifice is from illegal immigrant patients like those in Los Angeles getting free liver and kidney transplants at UCLA Medical Center. 'I'm just mad,' illegal alien Jose Lopez told the Los Angeles Times last year after receiving two taxpayer-subsidized liver transplants while impatiently awaiting approval for state health insurance.

Bean-counting government bureaucrats are free to take race, ethnicity and gender into account when doling out public funds to non-white-male contractors. But God help law enforcement officers, air marshals and border agents who try to use those same factors to combat terrorism and protect American lives.

Contrary to the belief that Obama is America's Lightworker who can defy political gravity, H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, guarantees more of the same old borrow-spend-panic-repeat cycle that got us into our current mess in the first place.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan spurned the opportunity to condemn thousands of Wisconsin public school teachers for lying about being 'sick' and shutting down at least eight school districts across the state to attend capitol protests (many of whom dragged their students on a social justice field trip with them). Instead, Duncan defended teachers for 'doing probably the most important work in society.' Only striking government teachers could win federal praise for not doing their jobs.

History has shown us that 'Get Things Done' is mindless liberal code for passing ineffective legislation and expanding government for government's sake.

House GOP Leader John Boehner on Monday rightly sounded the alarm over billions in stimulus tax dollars that could potentially go to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). But the Republican leadership has only scratched the surface over what amounts to a bottomless slush fund for a bigger coalition of housing entitlement thugs.

I stand with the Santa Barbara News-Press. How about you?

It's time for ordinary Americans to come out of the shadows and remind Washington every day in words and actions that we are a sovereign nation, not a sanctuary nation.

Let me sum up in two words how the unhinged Left copes with the threat of global jihad: "Kill Bush!"

Let there be no doubt: Democrats are the party with two ideas: borrow and spend. The only vigorous internal debate on the left revolves around two questions: How much and how much more?

Liberals see racism where it doesn't exist, fabricate it when they can't find it and ignore it within their own ranks.

Out: Reading is fundamental. In: Feeling is fundamental.

Progressive feminists have shown nothing but the most reflexive, regressive contempt for women on the other side of the ideological aisle. It doesn't matter if you're a conservative stay at home mom, work at home mom, or work outside the home mom. If you're Right, the Left is gonna hate.

Since when did the American Dream become the American Guarantee?

So, what exactly is the News-Press' unforgivable crime? Calling illegal aliens 'illegals' in a headline for a story about illegal aliens descending on California DMVs. A new law went into effect last Friday allowing illegal aliens to obtain driver's licenses without proof of lawful residence. The article featured interviews with ecstatic illegal aliens, including one who has been in the country illegally for '22 years.'

The core failure of Team Obama is not a failure to communicate, but a failure to comprehend.

The only true allegiance a politician has is to his own re-election.

The truly bold thing for Obama to do would be to tell the panic-mongers and boondoggle-seekers to shove it, and to tell taxpayers to ride out the rest of the tough times while he gets Washington's own economic house in order.

Those of us and so many other stalwart critics and opponents and questioners and dissidents in conservative media were attacked for doing what those people in the mainstream media should have been doing. Do your job! Subject these political candidates to the same amount of scrutiny that you are now trying to compensate for with the incoming Trump administration!

Try walking the halls of Congress. It's Abercrombie & Fitch meets the Hair Club for Men. Lots of really photogenic young people kissing up to lots of insufferable blowhards. Separated by one or two generations, most of these players have only one real thing in common: They have never been weaned from the public teat. The closest they've ever come to meeting a payroll is when they come together to spend everyone else's payroll taxes.

We live in a different era now. And thank God for that.

Who needs enemies when you've got Republican Surrenderists for Obamacare waiting in the wings?

What our country deserves from everyone who enjoys its fruits and freedoms is a little more gratitude - and a lot less greed.