The Patriot Post Digest 3-15-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 3-15-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Mar. 15, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufacturers flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a state.” —Alexander Hamilton (1790)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Clinton Admits Her Energy Plan Will Destroy Jobs1

Hillary Clinton is now on record admitting her “green” energy policies will “put a lot of coal miners” out of their jobs. The politician who benefits from playing divisive politics went too far: she told the truth. What a gaffe!

“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country,” Clinton said2. “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

But never fear, coal-stained workers in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky (all contested states3 in the coming general election). While Clinton wants to destroy your jobs, she might offer you new ones in the heavily subsidized fields of green energy. We’re sure your skills of working decades underground translate well into working on a solar panel field or wind farm. Remember: Clinton cares.

“Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health [and] often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories,” Clinton continued. “Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”

Who does the Democrat Party serve? Not the blue-collar workers that used to be the backbone of the party. Under Barack Obama, the government waged a war on coal, and Clinton vows to continue to pick the winners and losers of the nation’s energy economy, courting the ecofascist vote. Clinton betrays a disregard for how her environmental policies4 harm ordinary Americans.

If you think that gaffe was bad, check out what she said about not losing “a single person5” in Libya.

Putin Declares Mission Accomplished in Syria6

In a move that was unexpected to the Untied States, Russia started withdrawing most of its military forces from the Syrian civil war Tuesday. The orders came after Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad talked by phone and just as some of the major players in the civil war come to the table for peace talks.

The question that remains is: What is Putin trying to do?

Syrian rebels wonder if Putin somehow came around to their side, pushing for a cessation of hostilities after a falling out with Assad. A spokesman for the groups fighting Assad, Salem al-Meslet, cautiously told The Wall Street Journal7, “It will be important if this decision is taken. It will be more important if Putin decides to stand beside the Syrian people, not beside the dictator.” This is a position Putin’s spokesman denies, however.

When Putin’s army first touched ground in Syria8 in September, some naïvely hoped that it was there to better beat up the Islamic State, to do the job the Obama administration didn’t want to do. As should have been apparent to everyone all along, however, Putin wanted his man Assad to enter peace talks with a position of strength. In the month’s Russia’s military has been in the country, it has beaten back Syrian rebels while Islamic State forces remain relatively untouched. Assad can come to the table with the upper hand, and Putin too arrives in a position of strength. He left the fight, so the West is pressured to make concessions, to keep Assad in power.

Putin’s goal all along was to gain diplomatic leverage in the Middle East, shutting out U.S. involvement. Thanks to the Obama administration’s foolish approach to international policy, Putin is well on his way to accomplishing his true goal.

Last Call for Rubio, Kasich9

Voters in five states — Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio — head to the polls today, with 358 Republican delegates on the line. Obviously, Marco Rubio and John Kasich hope to win their respective home states of Florida and Ohio, both of which are winner-take-all. But even if that happens, neither has a viable path to the nomination. In fact, Kasich would have to win more delegates than there are remaining. And Rubio is almost sure to lose Florida — he might not even finish second. So when you wake up tomorrow morning, this will be a two-man race, whether Rubio and Kasich admit it or not.

Donald Trump is already planning on a one-man race. “If we win Ohio and if we win Florida, then everybody agrees, every one of these guys, that it’s pretty much over,” he said. “Then I can focus on Hillary, because that’s what I really want to focus on. The Republican Party has to come together.”

Ted Cruz will have something to say about that. Trump could win the nomination while only receiving a plurality of votes, and even then Rubio and Kasich have each hedged on their pledges to support the nominee if that nominee is Trump. Cruz, playing on Trump’s boast about his loyal supporters, said, “If for example, he were to go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, I would not be willing to support Donald Trump.”

In short, the Republican Party has hardly “come together.” It’s quite divided, and a lot of that has to do with a complete misunderstand of the word “establishment10.” And today’s vote won’t even begin to settle that.

Don’t Miss Patriot Humor

Check out Hillary’s Job Application11.

If you’d like to receive Patriot Humor by email, update your subscription here12.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Thomas Sowell: Voting at a Crossroads13
Michael Barone: Will the Politics of Nostalgia Trump the Politics of the Future?14
Dennis Prager: The Left May Well Get Trump Nominated15

For more, visit Right Opinion16.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Who Politicized the Courts?17

By James Shott

The raging controversy over filling the Supreme Court vacancy of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose tragic death unleashed a political firestorm over whether Barack Obama should nominate his successor18, or whether the next president should make the nomination, must be looked at in perspective. It’s a true waste of time giving more than a bemused passing notice to the ranting of Democrats, who accuse the Republican-led Congress of all manner of wrongdoing in opposing a nomination by Obama, all the while hypocritically ignoring their own precedent-setting actions over the last 20-30 years, when they wrote the book on how to oppose Supreme Court nominations. This process is and has long been a political exercise.

And at least one high-ranking judge proclaims that the High Court itself is politicized. Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, explains19 this in a commentary published by The Washington Post. He wrote, “The significance of the Senate’s action lies in reminding us that the Supreme Court is not an ordinary court but a political court, or more precisely a politicized court, which is to say a court strongly influenced in making its decisions by the political beliefs of the judges.”

We expect Congress to be heavily political, and the president belongs to a political party and is chosen through a political process, so while it would be great if administrative agencies applied regulations and laws in a fair, neutral, non-political manner, bureaucracies are also often used as political tools.

Judges at all levels are expected and presumed to be impartial in applying the law and are sworn to follow the precepts of the U.S. Constitution. They must resist allowing their personal ideals or political leanings to affect the rulings or opinions they produce. The Constitution created three co-equal branches of the government; therefore all branches must employ restraint in order to remain within their constitutional boundaries.

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The Patriot Post Digest 3-15-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Quaint and outdated idea, we know.

Posner excuses the tendency of judges to fall back on their personal and political beliefs because there is no clear instruction from the Constitution in situations the Framers could not have foreseen more than 200 years ago. Justice Scalia, however, had little trouble following the Constitution’s language when deciding his position on cases before the Court.

Scalia, you see, was a “conservative” judge — an “originalist.” According to the Oxford Dictionaries, “conservative” means: “Holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation.” Applied to the federal judiciary, as viewed by believers in strict constructionism and originalism, the term means adhering to the meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as they were understood by those who wrote those documents at the time they wrote them.

On the other side of the spectrum, judicial liberals assert that the Constitution must be a “living” document20, the exact meaning of which changes with the times or depends upon who is interpreting it. Such a view not only allows for “judicial activism,” it demands it.

“Judicial activism occurs when judges write subjective policy preferences into the law rather than apply the law impartially according to its original meaning,” according to a definition21 from The Heritage Foundation. “As such, activism does not mean the mere act of striking down a law,” it also means making law from the bench.

But the Constitution clearly and unmistakably gives Congress — and only Congress — the authority and responsibility to make law.

Judges should consider what the Framers of the Constitution intended and whether the parameters they set allowed for the size, power or cost of the federal government, given the abuses that produced the Revolution and the deliberate efforts to restrict all of those features. Or, whether they would have allowed the Supreme Court or the executive branch to misappropriate the law making authority of the Congress.

If you still doubt that the Supreme Court has become an activist court, consider this tidbit from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who told The New York Times that “she was fully engaged in her work as the leader of the liberal opposition on what she called ‘one of the most activist courts in history.’”

Making laws from the bench and judicial expansion are not products of judicial conservatives, whose adherence to original intent maintains a stable legal foundation. That is unpopular among judges who want to expand the authority and power of the courts.

The Supreme Court must not reinterpret the Constitution. If what might prompt the activists to vote in favor of one side or the other in a case before the Court is something that is indeed a good thing for the country, and passes the standard of constitutionalism, then it must be sanctioned by an act of Congress, not the courts.

The increase in the number of activist judges illustrates the dire need for restoring judicial conservatism to the nation’s highest court. Obama is unlikely to nominate anyone other than a liberal activist. Reports say that the list of potential nominees for the Scalia seat on the Court has been reduced to five, and four of them contributed to Obama campaigns. That should tell us all we need to know about not only his choices, but how important it is that we elect a solid conservative in the 2016 election.

MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE

ANALYSIS: Activist Tantrums — The New Campus Speech22
We ‘Didn’t Lose a Single Person’ in Libya?5
Catch-and-Release Aliens' Crime Wave23
German Voters Demonstrate Frustration With Migration Crisis24
No Swastikas for You!25
New EPA Methane Regs All for Nothing. Literally.26
Carl’s Jr. Flees California’s Business Environment27
Seattle Provides a Lesson in Economics28

TOP HEADLINES

ObamaCare Enrollment to Cap at Just 14.7 Million Americans29
Watchdog Says Immigration System May Be Security Risk30
U.S. Confirms ISIL ‘Minister of War’ Killed in Airstrike31

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report32

OPINION IN BRIEF

Thomas Sowell: “It is seldom that the fate of a nation can be traced to what happened on one particular day. But that may be what happens in the United States of America on Tuesday, March 15, 2016. … As for the Republicans' front-runner, what is there left to say about Donald Trump? Almost daily he demonstrates that he lacks the maturity, the depth and the character required to lead a nation facing a complex range of dangers. It is not a question of his having flaws, which we all have. But what kind of warped character does someone have at his core who can mock a prisoner of war who was tortured for years by our enemies, mock someone else with a physical defect, reply to questions with gutter-level insults, and offer childish boasts about what he is going to do, instead of specifics about how? These are not subtle nuances. They are blatant revelations about something fundamentally wrong. Too many people missed similar revelations about Barack Obama. For that we have already paid a price, and we will continue to pay a price, even after he is gone. So will generations yet unborn.”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “Society is composed of men, and every man is a FREE agent. Since man is free, he can choose; since he can choose, he can err; since he can err, he can suffer. I go further: He must err and he must suffer; for his starting point is ignorance, and in his ignorance he sees before him an infinite number of unknown roads, all of which save one lead to error.” —Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

Upright: “Nostalgic politicians, such as central planners Clinton and Sanders and billionaire dealmaker Trump, promise to effortlessly reproduce supposed glorious pasts. Free market politicians, such as Rubio and Cruz, have the harder task of promising a better future they cannot exactly describe, because markets always produce surprises planners can’t anticipate.” —Michael Barone

Non Compos Mentis: “Libya was a different kind of calculation and we didn’t lose a single person.” —Hillary Clinton (Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were unavailable for comment.)

Why’s he still running? “If Kasich wins Ohio (and Trump wins Florida), Kasich will need to win 110% of remaining delegates to clinch nomination.” —Jonah Goldberg

With friends like these… “[John Kasich] is absentee. He goes to New Hampshire, he’s living in New Hampshire. Living! Where’s Chris, is Chris around? Even more than Chris Christie, he was there, right? Even more.” —Donald Trump (Trump followed up by telling Christie, who has endorsed him, “I hated to do that, but I had to make my point.”)

The BIG lie: “I never said I was going to pay [my supporters' legal] fees.” —Donald Trump on his supporters throwing punches (Actually, yes you did33.)

Next step — getting everyone enrolled in public universities: “I am not proposing free college for all. What I am proposing is free tuition at public colleges and universities.” —Bernie Sanders

Faith: “If we recognize [what the Islamic State is doing to Christians] as genocide, it is the first step in recognizing the truth that has happened to us. To not say the truth means you are giving to the terrorists a green light — go ahead and kill the Christians. The end of the story will be when people reconcile, forgive, and go to the next step — and live in harmony again.” —Father Douglas al-Bazi, an Iraqi Christian

And last… “Obama watched the live broadcasts of chaos in Chicago. Too bad they never had a community organizer. Oh, wait…” —Twitter satirist @weknowwhatsbest

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.