Rep. Ron Paul won a landslide victory in the California Republican Party straw poll on Saturday, September 17 — an appropriate date considering September 17 is Constitution Day and the Texas Congressman is running for President as the champion of the Constitution.

The National Governors Association Annual Meeting is taking place in Salt Lake City, Utah, July 15-16. In addition to the usual business of discussing budgets, education, jobs, and economic growth, this year’s NGA meeting features a first-ever U.S.-China Governors Forum that has brought together provincial governors from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with their American counterparts. In addition to the many Chinese reporters stationed here in the United States who are covering the event, the Chinese governors brought along their own  gaggle of “journalists,” photographers, and videographers from China to chronicle their American odyssey.

In his weekly Internet and radio address on Saturday, President Barack Obama said that Memorial Day is “a time to reflect on what this holiday is all about; to pay tribute to our fallen heroes; and to remember the servicemen and women who cannot be with us this year because they are standing post far from home — in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world.” The president also said that “we have a responsibility to serve all of them as well as they serve all of us,” but that “all too often in recent years and decades, we, as a nation, have failed to live up to that responsibility.”

The John Birch Society had a significant presence at Congressman Ron Paul's "Rally for the Republic."

Many Americans view the release of secret U.S. government documents by WikiLeaks to be an attack on our country. Newt Gingrich, for example, said on Fox Business Network’s Freedom Watch that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “is an active enemy combatant who is engaged in information warfare against the United States. What he is doing is going to have incalculable damage to this country. It is going to have a number of innocent people killed, a number of our allies killed. It is going to put Americans at risk.... This is an act of war against the United States.”

Anyone who has frequented Tea Party gatherings has undoubtedly seen multiple signs sprinkled throughout the crowd calling on fellow citizens to “Throw the Bums Out!” Ditto for signs advocating terms limits. Oftentimes, exhortations for both are issued from the speakers’ platform.

When President Obama spoke to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute on September 15, he recited well-known words from the Declaration of Independence to describe what makes America unique and strong. He did so without identifying where the words came from or that he was even referring to something famous. But there was little need to, since the words in question should be recognized by any schoolchild who has even a rudimentary knowledge of American history.

Though President Obama did not actually hurl the “anti-government” epithet in his May 1 Ann Arbor speech, his meaning was unmistakable and the Associated Press was not really wrong in describing it that way. “[Obama] took direct aim at the anti-government language so prevalent today,” said the AP account of the President’s University of Michigan commencement address.

The “cash for clunkers” program is supposedly wildly successful. According to proponents, consumers are spending money once again on expensive, big-ticket items; gas-guzzlers are being removed from the road; and new-car sales are soaring, benefiting not just the automobile manufacturers, but the economy as a whole.

Both before and after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, the major media in America portrayed him as a champion of the Cuban people and a freedom fighter who was not a communist. It was not until December 1961, when Castro himself said he was a communist, that the media acknowledged this truth. Later, in an April 26, 1963 press conference, Dwight Eisenhower, who was president when Castro came to power, opined: "It would have taken a genius of prophecy to know that Castro was a Communist when he took control of Cuba." But Eisenhower did not say that Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society the month before Castro came to power, was warning at the time that Castro was a communist.