|
nChrist
|
 |
« on: November 08, 2013, 02:38:44 AM » |
|
________________________________________
The Patriot Post Wednesday Digest 11-6-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________
THE FOUNDATION
“Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that … he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.” –Samuel Adams
GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
Off Year Elections: Lessons Learned?
Tuesday’s main events were the off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and political prognosticators always look for trends that may be useful for the coming national elections. Let’s just say the lessons Tuesday are mixed.
Beginning in New Jersey, Republican Gov. Chris Christie won a resounding re-election bid with more than 60% of the vote in a blue state. Christie is no “Tea Party” conservative, but he has governed on the conservative side, winning pension reform for public employees, tenure reform for teachers that makes it easier to fire bad ones, and vetoing an ill-advised tax increase on the wealthy. On the other hand, he banned gender-disorientation therapy, has generally been ornery toward conservative national Republicans and runs a state still mired at the bottom economically. Still, Christie worked well across the isle and made significant outreach to minorities who supplied his margin of victory – that’s what hugging Barack Obama can do. He is well positioned to make a run at the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, and it’s worth remembering that Ronald Reagan was the last true conservative to win that nomination.
Perhaps the more interesting lessons, however, come from Virginia’s governor’s race, where Clintonista carpetbagger Terry McAuliffe edged conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. It was the latter who spearheaded the major lawsuit against ObamaCare, so Democrats will crow about their Virginia victory, but Cuccinelli was defeated by factors well beyond McAuliffe’s campaign, and if the GOP doesn’t learn from its mistakes, there will be more disappointments to follow in 2014.
Cuccinelli entered the race with an uphill battle created by a largely fabricated scandal involving former Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell. But more than any other factor, his narrow defeat was due to the completely avoidable liability created by the ill-conceived box-canyon strategy1 to defund ObamaCare, which enabled Democrats to hang the partial government shutdown around GOP necks. This was particularly true in northern Virginia, where some 30% of the state’s voters reside, including a heavy portion of government employees or contractors.
Indeed, Democrats certainly understand the principle of “divided THEY fall.” Too many Republicans, particularly in our conservative ranks2, have yet to figure out that “divided WE fall.”
Of course there were other factors.
The Republican National Committee virtually gave up on Cuccinelli early on, giving him just $3 million. McAuliffe raised almost $15 million more than Cuccinelli, thanks to help from his old boss, Bill Clinton.
In the end, however, McAuliffe victory margin was less than 3%, when he had led in the polls by double digits for months. Thanks to the calamitous rollout of ObamaCare, Cuccinelli nearly pulled off the upset – and undoubtedly would have but for the government shutdown baggage. Of course, it could also be argued that the third party Libertarian candidate, Robert Sarvis, who received almost 7% of the vote, handed the victory to McAuliffe.
And a final note on the subject of Democrats dividing and conquering their adversaries, it turns out that Sarvis had the benefit of an Obama bankrolling bundler3.
Judicial Benchmarks: Federalism at the High Court
A big constitutional law battle is about to reach its climax – a battle between the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution and the Tenth Amendment. The Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) states, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.” The Tenth Amendment reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Read how a domestic dispute may have huge consequences for federalism and comment here4.
NATIONAL SECURITY
NSA Gains Back-Door Access to Tech Giants
In the latest news regarding the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA), we learn that the agency accessed Google and Yahoo communications links connecting the companies' data centers. According to The Washington Post7, “By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.” In fact, the information was so vast that the NSA’s Special Source Operations complained of too much hay in the stack.
The project is called MUSCULAR, and it’s basically the other side of the coin from the previously disclosed PRISM. The latter allowed the NSA front-door access to data from cooperating web giants, while MUSCULAR is a clandestine back-door infiltration to collect any and all data that passed international boundaries between Google or Yahoo data centers. Simply put, while everyone knows Silicon Valley and telecom companies were cooperating with the NSA on some stuff, what a lot of people don’t know (and the companies themselves didn’t know until now) is that the NSA was also going behind their backs to compromise their networks. A lot of these companies probably thought there were good reasons to cooperate with the NSA, and at least by “cooperating” they had some oversight about what information was handed over. But now the whole thing just looks like a front, because the NSA had access to far more data than PRISM’s limited scope implied.
The information collected in MUSCULAR also doesn’t seem to be merely the “metadata” – information about emails or web searches – but in many cases the actual content of the messages, including attachments. Naturally, the NSA swears that it is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.” Perhaps it is, but the fact remains, millions of Americans are caught up in the dragnet for no other reason than they use technology.
CULTURE, SCIENCE & FAITH
Second Amendment: Are Gun Owners Racist?
There’s just something about foreign academics and their lack of understanding of the American system that makes their research questionable at best. Further evidence of that can be found in a recent study by Australian and British researchers, which concludes8, “Symbolic racism was related to having a gun in the home and opposition to gun control policies in U.S. whites.” They continue by asserting, “The findings help explain U.S. whites' paradoxical attitudes towards gun ownership and gun control,” before whining that “such attitudes may adversely influence U.S. gun control policy debates and decisions.”
In essence, what these academics are arguing is that those who legally own firearms automatically assume a racist attitude toward blacks, generally with the belief that their self-protection is required because blacks are a threat. The study authors leap to this conclusion by noting, among other statistics, that “blacks are disproportionately represented in U.S. firearm homicides … and would benefit most from improved gun control.” Yet, in the next breath they concede, “Research on the reasons for opposition to gun control is sparse.”
Much of their database comes from a single survey called the American National Election Study, with the researchers using data collected between 2008 and 2009 to test their hypothesis. Nowhere in the study, though, are other theories on attitudes toward gun control brought up, but without a great deal of effort we can conclude that our objection to gun control is based on a document drawn up two centuries ago. A plain reading of the Second Amendment is far from racist.
Parting question: Where is the study about racist attitudes and the general disregard for life and property exhibited by baggy pants, backward cap gun-toters?
ECONOMY, REGS & TAXES
Fighting Fracking Fiction
Providing yet more proof of the falsity of the anti-fracking fracas, a study performed by Public Health England (PHE), an agency within Britain’s Department of Health has found9 that hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” as a means of tapping into vast underground resources of natural gas poses few emissions-related health risks when operations are run properly. The study, which examined fracking operations in countries including the United States, also found that “contamination of groundwater from the underground fracking process itself … is unlikely.” |
