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« on: November 24, 2015, 05:30:22 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Digest 11-23-2015
From The Federalist Patriot
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Daily Digest
Nov. 23, 2015
THE FOUNDATION
“Measures which serve to abridge the free competition of foreign articles, have a tendency to occasion an enhancement of prices.” —Alexander Hamilton, 1791
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
Britain’s Climate Change: Slashing Wind, Solar Subsidies1
Next Monday, many of the world’s nations will meet in Paris2 to begin discussing ways to hamstring their economies to fight global warming. To sanitize Joe Biden, the summit is a big deal. For the most part, governments want to cut back emissions severely, and the best way to do that is by making energy more expensive so people use less of it. Remember, Barack Obama promised his policies would cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” But leftists also primarily target particular sources of electricity — namely coal and any other fossil fuel. Wind and solar are all the rage among ecofascists. So it’s a somewhat humorous coincidence that just before the festivities kick off in Paris, leaders in London are slashing subsidies for wind and solar, favoring instead a push toward natural gas. The Washington Post is apoplectic3: “The decision to cut hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of support for renewable energy at home, with a planned 87 percent reduction in subsidies for solar power, threatens to undermine Britain’s international authority, while showing just how difficult it can be for a developed nation to break a centuries-long addiction to fossil fuels.” Or perhaps it could be simple economics. We support an all-of-the-above approach to energy production so long as it’s the free market doing it. If the economics of wind and solar require massive subsidies to even hope to compete with traditional energy sources — and they currently do — then basic economics is going to eventually rule the day.
As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that Britain’s wind farms often do more damage than good4. Just saying.
Louisiana Goes Blue. Or Does It?5
Most reports suggest Louisiana Republicans suffered another blow this weekend. Not only did Governor Bobby Jindal recently end his presidential campaign6, meaning his political talents won’t be brought to the White House, but a conservative won’t be filling his vacated seat. On Saturday, Republican Sen. David Vitter dropped the gubernatorial election to John Bel Edwards, a state Democrat lawmaker, by a 12-point margin — 56% to 44%. The sting hurts even more considering Vitter was long believed to be a shoo-in. Ultimately, however, a prostitution scandal from 2007 and a well-resonating message from Edwards derailed Vitter’s chances.
Which brings us to a few critical points. This wasn’t, as some newspapers surmise, a “Republican loss” so much as it was a reflection on values. As Hot Air notes, “If you dropped [Edwards] anywhere else in the country he’d be a Republican.” Indeed, The New York Times describes Edwards as “a Catholic social conservative from a family of rural law enforcement officers who graduated from West Point and served eight years of active duty in the Army.” The Wall Street Journal similarly writes, “Mr. Edwards, a former Army Ranger, neutralized the usual GOP cultural advantages by opposing abortion and defending gun rights.”
We can think of a few worse candidates — like Senator Vitter. Commentator Erick Erickson points out7, “Vitter was a terrible, terrible candidate. … Republican primary voters want an actual conservative and at this point would rather go down fighting than sell out to candidates posing as Democrat-lite. Conservatives can win, but not with guys like Sen. David Vitter as their standard bearer.” Most importantly, he adds, “Running against Barack Obama with nothing to offer has to be done with good candidates, not men accused of paying for prostitutes' abortions.”
That’s not to say Edwards is a bona fide conservative leader. The Journal notes that Edwards “was a favorite of teachers unions and the plaintiffs bar, and we’ll see if he now does their bidding to roll back school choice and block much-needed tort reform.” That said, Republicans demonstrated their frustration with establishment incumbents and voters chose someone they believe to be the most qualified leader, regardless of that candidate’s party affiliation.
Princeton Ousts Woodrow Wilson8
Yet another student protest, yet another racist thrown under the bus. Except this one actually was racist — he just also happened to be a Democrat president and a father of the “progressive” movement. “The Black Justice League at Princeton had demanded that the president acknowledge the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson and remove his name from buildings on campus, mandate ‘cultural competency’ courses for all faculty and staff, and provide cultural space for black students on campus,” The Washington Post reports9. “President Christopher Eisgruber immediately agreed to the idea of a cultural space Wednesday night, but declined to sign the demands and promised to continue talking with students about the other ideas.”
Wilson believed in a malleable Constitution and a virtually all-powerful executive. In fact, he was in many ways the originator of the elite administrative state10 in which know-it-all bureaucrats make thousands of decisions that solve problems in wreak havoc on our lives. He was also quite a racist. But as David Harsanyi writes11, “Like most progressives of his era, Wilson wasn’t merely a common racist, he embraced the pseudo-scientific eugenics that would haunt millions. After his election, he didn’t only say terrible things — ‘There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place in the corn field’ — he institutionalized racism in the federal government, segregating the civil service in 1913. He personally fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors appointed to federal jobs, while his postmaster general and Treasury secretary segregated their departments. He’s the only president that I know of who’s ever celebrated the Ku Klux Klan in the White House.”
But you know something? We’ll bet these same student protesters are big fans of Planned Parenthood, which was founded by a eugenicist by the name of Margaret Sanger. Heck, Planned Parenthood still gives out media awards with her name on them. She and Wilson were peas in a pod on the issue, but you won’t hear that at Princeton.
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Attacking a Message as Corrupt as Its Messengers12
By Arnold Ahlert
In just over a week, the world endured three major Islamic terrorist attacks in Beirut, Paris and Mali. Be it the Islamic State or an al-Qaida offshoot, the current reality reveals that Barack Obama’s 2012 oft-stated13 campaign assertion that jihadis were “on the run” was as fraudulent as the commander in chief himself. In fact, there is only one thing more fraudulent than Obama, his equally feckless administration and the Democrat Party’s leading presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. That would be the progressive ideology that animates all of them. And it’s about time every GOP candidate for president made that reality crystal clear.
Make no mistake: Progressivism has metastasized to the point where it is no longer tethered to common sense and common decency. Thus we have “safe-space revolutionaries14” attempting to turn college campuses into speech-suppressing gulags where progressive orthodoxy must not be challenged. We have a Democrat Party totally embracing the rampant lawlessness associated with illegal aliens. And we have the insidious arrogance of a chief executive who insists that the Islamic State is “contained15,” even as its increasing lethality becomes undeniable.
Attacking Obama or Clinton personally may be somewhat effective. Absent the larger ideological context, however, it is far too easy for progressives, with an ample assist from their media apparatchiks, to dismiss those attacks as bigoted, xenophobic, Islamophobic or a host of other epithets designed to end the conversation. Republicans must illuminate the unmistakable nexus between unfettered immigration, open borders, sanctuary cities, the inability to call Islamic terror by its proper name, the desire to import improperly vetted “refugees” from terror hotspots, and the indoctrination occurring on college campuses. All of them are pieces of the same progressive jigsaw puzzle that must be put together so Americans can clearly see how determined the American Left is to fundamentally transform the nation.
In that context, it is no accident the Obama administration not only countenanced a two-year “surge” at our Southern border, but the deliberate dispersal of illegals throughout the entire country. Like the Syrians progressives would currently like to bring to America, they too were characterized as “refugees” fleeing crime and poverty in places like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, despite the reality that crime and poverty have been endemic in those nations for decades. When those illegals gained entry, the CDC waived the disease-screening process required for legal immigrants, and the media dismissed as “coincidental” an outbreak of the EV-D68 virus16 that killed and crippled American children — an outbreak 300 times larger than the infection rate seen in the 33-year period from 1970 to 2003. |
