The Patriot Post Digest 2-24-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 2-24-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Daily Digest

Feb. 24, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“There is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away. There is a time to fight, and that time has now come.” —Peter Muhlenberg, 1776

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Trump’s Royal Flush1

Alternate headline: “Casino mogul wins gambling capital.” Donald Trump is on cruise control (or, if you prefer, Cruz control) and headed for the Republican nomination. His decisive 20-point win in Nevada is just the latest marker along that road. “Now we’re winning, winning, winning the country,” Trump said in his victory speech, “and soon the country is going to start winning, winning, winning.” That is the draw for gamblers, isn’t it?

True, Nevada is an outlier (that will lose its No. 4 position in the primaries in 2020), but Trump barely even had to try to win the state where the tallest residential building bears his name. It almost goes without saying that Trump’s New York values2 play well in a state made famous by Sin City. While Marco Rubio (second place) and Ted Cruz (third) spent time and money in the Silver State, Trump held two rallies. Two. And he won across pretty much every demographic and interest. He ran the table.

One might say that’s easier to do when your supporters are the poll workers3. The odds are always in favor of the house, after all. But voter fraud isn’t why Trump won. No, this election cycle is, again, a perfect storm of anger, populist rhetoric and media adulation that Trump has exploited expertly.

Finally, after Tuesday, the theory that many, including us, have espoused — that Trump can be stopped by unified opposition — is looking less certain. In short, that’s because infighting has taken its toll. Cruz voters don’t think Rubio is conservative (which is laughable4), and Rubio voters don’t think Cruz is honest or electable. Uniting the clans would be a herculean, if not impossible, task, and it’s getting tougher every day to see a viable path for any non-Trump.

Now we move on to the 11 states voting on Super Tuesday, March 1. Trump leads in every state but Texas.

Senate GOP: We Won’t Consider Any Obama Nominee5

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee said they will ignore any person Barack Obama nominates to fill the vacancy in the Supreme Court. “Because our decision is based on constitutional principle and born of a necessity to protect the will of the American people, this committee will not hold hearings on any Supreme Court nominee until after our next president is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017,” the 11 senators wrote6.

Republicans are winning Obama’s political battle over constitutional powers by opting not to play. As Sen. Orrin Hatch said7, by cracking the door through signaling the judiciary committee might hold a hearing for an Obama nominee, it would only create more political posturing instead of answering a constitutional question. The principled stand comes with risk, though. A Pew poll8 found only 38% of Americans think the Senate should suspend the judge search until after a new administration comes into the White House, and 10% of those Americans could change their mind based on who Obama nominates. With many GOP seats on the line in November, the Senate could flip to Democrats.

In making this decision, the senators pointed to the precedent that no SCOTUS judge was appointed during the final months of a lame duck presidency since 1932. They also threw the hypocritical words Democrats made in the past9 arguing for the blockage of Republican nominees back into their faces. The letter cited the words Sen. Harry Reid said in 2005: “The duties of the Senate are set forth in the U.S. Constitution. Nowhere in that document does it say the Senate has a duty to give the presidential nominees a vote.” Goose, meet gander.

Debunking the Latest Sea Level Scare10

Well, so much for sleeping a little easier knowing the earth naturally curbs rising ocean levels by soaking up water like a sponge11. Yet another new study12 says that man-made global warming is causing oceans to rise at an unprecedented rate. As summarized13 in USA Today, “Global sea levels stayed fairly steady for about 3,000 years. Then, with the Industrial Revolution, global sea levels began to rise, the study said. Scientists say the seas rose 5.5 inches from 1900 to 2000, a significant increase, especially for low-lying coastal areas.” That combined with projections of even swifter ocean level rise has alarmists very concerned that our coastal cities will soon be submerged.

But before you begin work on an ark, read the response meteorologist Joe Bastardi had in an email to The Patriot Post: “When I moved to New Jersey in 1965, after the ‘62 storm, there was fear the barrier islands would be gone by 2000. Well, they aren’t. There is constant shifting going on and a 4-8 inch rise in a century is well within natural bounds. Greenland and Antarctica are fine overall.” The more important question, he posits, is how were sea levels being measured 50 years ago? Were the same methods used then as they are today? “The PDO/AMO shift coming will retard” the sea level rise, Bastardi says. “When they are warm, as they are now, sea levels are higher.” In other words, just like the earth sponge study showed, it’s all part of earth’s design.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Barack Obama: Another Castro Brother14

By Louis DeBroux

Barack Obama has always gravitated toward the worst of humanity, being an apologist and a cheerleader for them, accommodating them and seeking to expand their influence. His upcoming trip to Cuba is par for the course.

He got his political start in the home of radial leftist domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn. Frank Marshall Davis, a devout communist (and likely pedophile), was a father figure to him. His mother, father and stepfather all hated America. In his autobiography “Dreams From My Father,” Obama spoke of how, as a college student, he gravitated toward Marxist professors and leftist radicals.

Before he ran for president, he spent two decades in the church of the racist, hate-spewing Jeremiah “G-D America” Wright. After being elected president, Obama canceled a missile defense system with our Eastern European allies that would have protected them from Russian aggression. When Iranians took to the streets in peaceful protest following the rigged election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama was virtually silent as Iranian police and the Basij (paramilitary) clubbed, kicked, beat, and shot the demonstrators.

Deeply embedded in his ideological DNA, Obama has followed this pattern throughout his presidency. So it was disgusting, but not all surprising, when Obama in 2014 announced15 that he was reversing decades of U.S. policy regarding the murderous, communist Castro regime, and re-opening the U.S. embassy in Havana as part of a resumption of diplomatic relations. This week, Obama announced that he would be the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928 — though that was under far different circumstances.

His actual legacy is closer to John F. Kennedy’s — the president who lost Cuba by declining to act.

The Cuban embargo has been in place for half a century, primarily because the Castro regime refused U.S. offers to resume relations and implement favorable trade terms in exchange for the liberalization of Cuban policies toward human rights and political freedom. As a result, the Cuban people have spent decades in abject poverty, oppressed by a man who promised to save them from the dictator Fulgencio Batista, but instead became a more brutal oppressor than the devil they’d known.

So what did the Castro brothers have to promise in exchange for the resumption of diplomatic ties? Absolutely nothing. No end to the persecution, imprisonment and murder of political dissidents. No promises of free speech rights for the Cuban people. In fact, David Thorne, senior advisor to Secretary of State John Kerry, recently dismissed calls to tie favorable relations with Cuba to the protection of human rights for the Cuban people, saying, “As in other parts of the world, we are really trying to also say, 'Let’s find out how we can work together and not always say that human rights are the first things we have to fix before anything else.’”

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The Patriot Post Digest 2-24-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

You might get away with that while arguing for the necessity of diplomatic relations with global behemoths like Russia and China (for which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once stated that objections to China’s human rights abuses would not be allowed to “interfere” with more important issues like global warming), but Cuba has little strategic interest for the United States and an economy that can barely feed its own people, much less be a significant trade partner for America. In other words, there is zero reason for Obama to capitulate to the Castro brothers other than the fact they are his ideological allies, and he wants to.

It can be seen as nothing other than an absolute victory for the Castro regime after a half century of being marginalized and isolated by the U.S. Immediately following Obama’s announcement in 2014, Raul Castro declared victory over the U.S., and declared that the re-opening of U.S.-Cuban relations did not mean an end to communist rule in Cuba.

At a time when the U.S. would have been in a strong position — due to the collapse in oil prices and therefore the Cuban economy — to demand democratic changes from the Castros, Obama demanded nothing and got less. The Castro regime gets the prestige of formal diplomatic relations with the U.S. and an influx of U.S. dollars into the regime’s coffers from American tourists, even as the brutal crackdowns on democratic protesters have increased16.

Many pro-communist leftists have claimed that the ongoing embargo has been a failure because it has not caused the Castro brothers to step down or liberalize their policies, but that is a false standard. The embargo has limited Cuba in its efforts to further export communism to the Americas and financially support other communist regimes.

Obama knows he needs the support of Congress, which he assuredly does not have, to formally end the Cuban embargo. However, Obama has indicated he will use a series of executive actions to get around Congress and expand trade relations with Cuba as much as possible (just like he has done to bypass Congress on “global warming,” cap-and-trade, immigration, etc.).

In doing so Obama has revealed yet again that his heart lies not with the poor, downtrodden, persecuted and oppressed of the world, but with the oppressors and abusers. It is to America’s lasting shame that we elected such a man not once, but twice.

MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE

ANALYSIS: Obama’s Plan to Fulfill Foolish Gitmo Promise17
‘Freedom’? Nah, Just Inequality18
Cruz: ‘We Should Enforce Immigration Law’19
Louisiana Shows Why ‘Free’ College Education Doesn’t Work20
Are Chicago Homicides on a Historic Trajectory?21
About the Ceasefire in Syria Planned for Friday…22
Russia to Make Surveillance Flights Over U.S.23

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Walter Williams: Gullible Americans24
Tony Perkins: The Charlotte Letters: LGBT25
Mark West: Too Many Citizens, Too Few Soldiers26

For more, visit Right Opinion27.

TOP HEADLINES

Slippery Slope: DOJ Wants Apple to Unlock 9 More iPhones28
U.S. Marshals Secretly Tracked 6,000 Cellphones29
Ex-Gitmo Detainee Among Jihadists Arrested in Spain, Morocco30

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report31

OPINION IN BRIEF

Walter Williams: “The first law of thermodynamics, translated into plain English, states that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch.’ Conservation of energy is a basic law of physics that cannot be violated. … Tyrants do not trust free markets and what they imply, voluntary exchange, because people acting voluntarily might not do what the tyrant thinks they should do. That is why they favor compulsion in the forms of tariffs and quotas to stifle peaceable, voluntary exchange with foreigners. By the way, some of the political obfuscation about foreign trade is lifted when we recognize that it is not really nations trading with one another. In other words, the U.S. Congress does not trade with the federal government of Mexico, England’s or France’s parliaments or Japan’s Diet. It’s individual Americans who, through private intermediaries, trade with: Mexican Ford manufacturers, English clothing manufacturers, French wine producers and Japanese automakers. Too many Americans believe in the possibility of a free lunch. Politicians exploit that gullibility. The unpleasant task of a good economist is to teach that fundamental principle: One cannot get something for nothing.”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free — which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.” —Alan Barth (1906-1979)

Upright: “The great political irony is that Mr. Obama is the main cause of his own Guantanamo failure. If he hadn’t let Islamic State rise in Syria and Iraq, if he hadn’t let Libya become another terror incubator, and if he hadn’t let al Qaeda make a comeback via multiple local franchises, the American people might feel more relaxed about closing the terror prison. As the tide of war keeps rising, Americans know they need it.” —Wall Street Journal

A broken clock is right twice a day: “Sixty-eight percent [of my followers] would not leave under any circumstance. I think that means murder, I think it means anything, okay?” —Donald Trump

We’re wondering the same thing: “Why is there one standard for me and not for everybody else?” —Hillary Clinton responding to pressure to disclose her Wall Street speech transcripts

“Look, we look like hypocrites and fools to the entire world. What we have done is locked up people in a way that is causing all kinds of repercussions around the world. People say, ‘Oh, you’re a democratic society, we have locked people up in an island.’ And I think that has hurt us all over the world. … I think we should shut down Guantanamo. I think in the long run it will help us significantly.” —Bernie Sanders

Non Compos Mentis: “The real problem that we have when it comes to debt is very simple. It is that our population’s getting older, and we use a lot of health care. … The accident of how our health care system evolved means that we got private-sector involvement, and they’ve got to make a profit, and they’ve got overhead, and so forth. So there are a whole bunch of reasons, but essentially, we spend about 6 to 8 percent more than our wealthy nation counterparts, per capita, on health care. That delta — that difference — is our debt.” —Barack Obama

The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting: “We have a bunch of, you know — we’ve got assault weapons, all kinds of things you wouldn’t use to kill a white-tailed deer out there and they’re being used to kill people. So listen … we’re not living in the Middle Ages. My view on gun legislation is this: You will not solve this problem state by state. You need a 50-state solution, and we better come up with one fast.” —Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin

Late-night humor: “After doing poorly in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, Jeb Bush announced that he’s dropping out of the race. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are both hoping to pick up Jeb’s supporters. Then Jeb said, ‘Joke’s on you — I didn’t have any supporters!’” —Jimmy Fallon

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis!
Managing Editor Nate Jackson

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.