The Patriot Post Digest 4-13-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 4-13-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Apr. 13, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers.” —Alexander Hamilton (1788.)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Obama’s Climate Sleight of Hand1

Expect Barack Obama to pull out all the stops before he vacates the White House in January. That includes a sleazy effort to handcuff the next president — assuming that person is not Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders — when it comes to decoupling the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. Here’s how:

The Washington Post says2, “When at least 55 countries, who account for at least 55 percent of global emissions, have all moved to join the agreement … [it] then enters into force after a 30 day wait period. According to data just released by the U.N., the U.S. and China accounted for around 38 percent of emissions, meaning that if the two act swiftly, it will be much easier to meet the emissions threshold.” The signing off process gets underway on April 22, and since the U.S. and China are already on board it won’t take much to authorize the accord.

But timing is everything, and the speed at which the Obama administration is pushing to formalize the agreement suggests it’s preparing for a worst-case scenario. Article 28 of the agreement states, “At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement.” Furthermore, explains the Post, “The withdrawal itself doesn’t take effect until ‘expiry of one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal.’ So that’s 4 years — the length of a presidential term.”

It’s a sordid strategy. The Obama administration insists the agreement is legally non-binding so as to avoid the whole “treaty” thing in the Senate. But that means, under normal circumstances, a successor can simply reject it. Still, Obama’s savvy play here is to create a situation in which deviating from the deal’s terms once it becomes official results in a severe backlash from international partners. Consequently, the repeal process becomes convoluted. Arizona State University’s Daniel Bodansky claims, “It was not negotiated by the U.S. (or any other country) as a means of binding the next president.” Maybe, maybe not. But that’s not going to stop Obama from trying. Republicans had a chance to defund the measure last year, but ultimately failed. They will have only themselves to blame if the next president faces legal hurdles by trying to repeal it.

Musicians Sing One Song, Play Another3

Outrage is good for business, at least when it comes to North Carolina and Mississippi passing culturally conservative laws — a bathroom bill4 and religious liberty law5, respectively. How else to explain the hypocritical boycotts singers Jimmy Buffett and Bryan Adams mustered in response to the recent laws?

Big businesses already have been bullying these and other states6. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed7 his state’s religious liberty bill because of pressure from big businesses like Disney, Apple and the NFL. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory issued an executive order8 Tuesday he hoped would appease the corporate critics of his state’s newly minted bathroom law — critics like PayPal — by bolstering the protections of homosexual and transgendered state employees against termination.

But singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett announced that performing any shows in North Carolina “would definitely depend on whether that stupid law is repealed.” Meanwhile, fellow entertainer Bryan Adams said he was going to stay out of Mississippi. Canceling a show scheduled for this Thursday in the state, Adams wrote on his website: “I cannot in good conscience perform in a state where certain people are being denied their civil rights due to their sexual orientation.”

Naturally, hypocrisy abounds. Buffett’s restaurant chain, Margaritaville, has the same bathroom policies as North Carolina. When a half-dozen of the franchise’s locations were asked9 if they allow men to use women’s restrooms, they all said no.

Before canceling his Mississippi performance, Adams had just wrapped up a tour10 through Egypt, which, along with the rest of the Muslim world, is notorious for punishment of (even alleged) homosexuals. But Margaritaville restaurants and Egyptian tours make money. So does canceling shows in Mississippi and North Carolina.

Ryan: You’re Stuck With Trump or Cruz11

“Let me be clear: I do not want, nor will I accept the [presidential] nomination for our party,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday. So what? He said the same thing about running for speaker. Such denials are perhaps the most normal thing in politics. Why is it news that someone isn’t running for president at this late stage? Because neither Donald Trump nor Ted Cruz is likely to reach Cleveland with a majority of delegates. Trump is almost certain to lose at the convention if he doesn’t reach a majority before then, but given that Cruz has primarily built his reputation by fighting Republicans, many in the party aren’t keen on rewarding him with the nomination on a later convention ballot. The establishment — the real establishment12, not the phony definition that includes anyone but Trump — doesn’t want either Trump or Cruz.

Thus, there have been growing rumblings from the Beltway about an alternative GOP presidential nominee at a contested convention13. Among the names floated are Mitt Romney (seriously), retired Marine Gen. James Mattis and Ryan.

“Count me out,” Ryan said emphatically. “I simply believe that if you want to be the nominee for our party to be the president, you should actually run for it. I chose not to do this, therefore I should not be considered. Period. End of story.”

That eliminates not just Ryan, but anyone except the 17 candidates who ran. If the party follows his advice, it has three remaining realistic choices: Trump, Cruz or John Kasich. If Trump ends up with the nomination, the Senate will likely be lost14 and Ryan’s services may be needed just to hang on to a Republican majority in the House. Unfortunately, the hostile divisions in the party are making it harder for any nominee to win in November, even against a historically bad Democrat nominee in Hillary Clinton.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

    Thomas Sowell: Campaign Lies15
    Walter Williams: Attacking Our Nation’s Founders16
    Tony Perkins: Failure to Raunch17

For more, visit Right Opinion18.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Study Finds Unemployed Support Legalized Theft19

By Louis DeBroux

A “startling” new study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a deeper look into how employment status impacts people’s views on wealth redistribution. Shockingly (okay, we kid), it finds that people who work for a living prefer to keep more of the money that they’ve earned. In related articles, the science journal discovers other “startling” facts, such as water is wet, and fire is hot.

The only thing startling about these findings is that anyone would be startled by these findings. Human nature, despite the often absurd claims of the intellectual class, has not changed since Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden.

In the study, participants were invited to play anonymously in a “redistributive justice” game in which each player is allocated a different sum of money, and each player knows how much the other players have received. Prior to the start of the game, players had to engage in a specific task for which they were rewarded, with the best outcomes producing the higher rewards. Reason’s Ronald Bailey outlines the rules as follows20:

    Once the play was over, each participant was given a tray divided into four sections. One section belongs to him or her and the other three sections belong to fellow participants. In     two-thirds of the cases how the money is divided up in the trays is related to how much work each participant did and in the remaining cases the amounts are allocated more or less randomly. Each participant can decide how to divvy up the money between himself or herself and the other three players. Once all of the participants have made their allocation decisions, the decisions of one, randomly selected, determine the final payoffs.

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The Patriot Post Digest 4-13-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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    The goal of the experiment was to see how the employment status of participants affect how they would choose to divvy up the funds.

What were the results? Players tended to be less likely to redistribute the money if they knew that the money had been earned by those possessing it, but more likely to redistribute the wealth if they thought the wealth had been acquired by luck.

More interesting, and enlightening, were the results when the same players were invited back to play again a year later. Of the 151 European young adults in the control group, 85 were employed and 66 were full-time students during the first “game.” A year later, 59 were still employed, 26 unemployed, 51 were still full-time students, and 15 were former students who were now unemployed. The question now: What impact, if any, did the employment status have on their redistributionist tendencies?

According to researcher Luis Miller, generally speaking, participants who were employed or full-time students tended to believe that people should be able to keep more of what they earn (and that higher productivity should be rewarded with greater earnings). “When people become unemployed, our study indicates that they let go of this belief,” Miller said. “They put a higher value on the redistribution of money, which, in social terms, would mean higher taxes on those earning more in order to fund increased public spending.”

In other words, people who work tend to believe they have a right keep the money they earned, while the unemployed are less likely to agree. Those who live off the work of others not only are significantly more likely to support forced income redistribution, but over time they come to feel entitled to the earnings of others, and to believe that they have a “right” to be supported by the state.

In his book “Economic Sophisms,” French economist Frederic Bastiat explained nearly two centuries ago the underlying truths this study has confirmed. Wrote Bastiat, “Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain — and since labor is pain in itself — it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it.”

On a larger scale, then, maybe it should be no surprise that the American political party most associated with business and hard work, the Republican Party, advocates policies that allow the worker to keep more of his or her earnings. Nor should it be surprising that the Democrat Party, which advocates ever-growing spending on social welfare programs, and which blames income inequality on a corrupt system rather than on disparities in outcome driven by disparities in educational achievement, work ethic and entrepreneurialism, supports ever greater levels of income redistribution.

Think about these things the next time you hear a politician complaining about “giving” money to the “rich” in the form of tax cuts — an idea that can only be true if one believes the fruit of a man’s labor belongs to government. If this is true, then men are slaves, and government the master. That’s certainly not Liberty; it’s tyranny.

MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE

    ANALYSIS: Can Obama Appoint Garland Without Senate?21
    Equal Pay Day Is a Misleading Feminist Statistic22
    When Refugees Come to Kill23
    CIA Would Disobey Trump’s Order to Torture Prisoners24
    Hastert Finally Faces Justice25
    Being Married Lowers Risk of Death by Cancer26

TOP HEADLINES

    Illegal Alien Released After Killing Woman, Now on the Run27
    U.S. Readies ‘Plan B’ for Syrian Rebels28
    Trump on GOP Primary: ‘This Is Not Democracy’29

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report30

OPINION IN BRIEF

Thomas Sowell: “The latest, and perhaps biggest, lie — thus far — is that Donald Trump was cheated out of delegates in Colorado because the voters did not select the delegates. Two very different questions have gotten confused with each other. One question is whether this is the best way to choose delegates. Most of us would say ‘No,’ but most of us don’t live in Colorado, and each state is allowed great leeway in how it chooses to pick its delegates. The more fundamental question is whether this was some trick cooked up to deprive Donald Trump of the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination. That is of course how Donald Trump and his followers automatically depict anything that doesn’t work out to his advantage. But the Colorado rules were written and known to all before anybody cast a single vote in the primary elections, anywhere in the country. If the people who ran the Trump campaign were not aware of what the rules in Colorado were, and Ted Cruz’s people were, that is what happens when you hire people who are not up to the challenges of their job. The fact that one of those people has been fired and replaced has gotten much less media attention than Trump’s loudly repeated charges that he was robbed.”

SHORT CUTS

Upright: “Take the Exxon prosecution, promoted by the attorneys general of New York and California and a host of their Democratic brethren. Though the case is never meant to be adjudicated in a courtroom, suppose it were and suppose a jury somehow found for the plaintiffs. How would Exxon pay a securities-fraud judgment? By selling oil and gas. Attacking Exxon is not climate policy making; it’s a distraction. Its purpose is to foster an atmosphere conducive to the Gore-Obama green pork-barrel strategy.” —WSJ’s Holman Jenkins

The BIG lie: “Our Republican system is absolutely rigged. It’s a phony deal. … These are dirty tricksters. This is a dirty trick. And I’ll tell you what: The RNC … should be ashamed of themselves [sic] for allowing this kind of crap to happen.” —Donald Trump (“The rules were set last year. Nothing mysterious — nothing new. The rules have not changed.” —Reince Priebus)

We’re not a democracy: “I think we’re doing very well but despite that it’s a rigged system, it’s a very unfair system and it’s not democracy. … When you get the votes you should win.” —Donald Trump (A democracy still requires a majority.)

Values voter: “I read about this thing they did in Mississippi where apparently you can deny somebody service because they’re gay. What the hell are we doing in this country? … We had a Supreme Court ruling, and you know what, let’s move on.” —John “I’m the Prince of Light” Kasich

Non Compos Mentis: “It’s puzzling that so many Americans are choosing to arm themselves at a time when the FBI tells us violent crime and property crime have been falling dramatically for two decades."—NPR’s John Burnett (Maybe, just maybe, crime is dropping because more Americans are arming themselves.)

Braying Jenny: "Republicans governors and legislatures are waging a relentless assault on workers' rights. Ted Cruz and other Republicans are pushing a national right to work law that would gut unions, drive down wages and benefits, and concentrate even more power in the hands of corporations and their allies. Right to work is wrong for workers and wrong for America.” —Hillary Clinton

Late-night humor: “A car owned by Hillary Clinton is up for sale. Like Hillary, the car has been hit from all sides and lately has been starting to stall.” —Conan O'Brien

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.