From Tuesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On Republican opposition to Democratic plans for tax relief for small businesses:
I think the Republicans have a pretty strong argument. Whatever goodies the administration is saying are packaged in the bill they want passed, the loans and the targeted tax cuts are going to be totally undone on January 1, when, if as the president and Geithner have said, they’re going to raise taxes by allowing the Bush cuts to expire, which will be taking a huge amount of money out of the pockets of small business.
This is how liberal economics works. The government takes your money in taxes, and then, it will deign to restore some of it as a loan, on which you have to go to a bureaucrat, you have to fill out a form, to get on your knees, you have to be nice, adhere to all the mandates. Then you get part of your money back with interest, or, in targeted tax cuts, which means the government will tell you how to spend your money, how to do your expansion of business, spend it on “x” and not “y.”
If you’re a Republican, you make a principled argument [that] it’s better not to raise taxes in the first place, not to raise them on January 1. Allow small business to keep its money and it will invest as it sees best. That’s the most efficient and it’s also the most fair.
On Robert Gibbs refusing to comment on the planned mosque at Ground Zero because it’s a “local” issue:
It’s no more a local issue than 9/11 was a local New York event. That’s a dodge and it’s disgraceful.
Now look, nobody in America would object to the construction of an Islamic center — however the question is: Why here? Why in this spot? This is a spot that was for hours bathed in the ashes of the Twin Towers and the thousands of innocents who died in it.
It’s not just any other spot. It’s sacred ground.
[This is] not to indict Islam. It’s not to indict the vast majority of Muslims who were appalled by this event.
But let me give you — in 1993, Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns who established a convent in Auschwitz to evacuate and to leave it. And the reason is not because the Carmelites had any involvement in, of course, Auschwitz — the Catholic Church was not the perpetrator — but because it was sacred ground and [the convent] was inappropriate. It was seen as a provocation and extremely insensitive.
In this case – in the case of the Carmelites it was an act of goodwill. They prayed for the souls of those who died. I’m not sure of the goodwill of this imam [Feisal Abdul Rauf] who [when] asked if Hamas is a terrorist organization answered: I’m not a politician, it’s a difficult issue.