The Patriot Post Digest 6-7-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 6-7-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Jun. 7, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” —James Madison (1829)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

IRS Enemies List Revealed1

Barack Obama’s IRS enemies list included a total of at least 466 organizations, the IRS has admitted after three years of legal wrangling. It only took a federal appeals court order. The total is a far cry from the 298 organizations the Treasury Department’s inspector general said had been targeted when the scandal first broke in May 2013. And the number also comes with a caveat: Though the vast majority were conservative groups, some number of leftist groups were on the list, but attorneys for the plaintiffs believe the IRS cast its net wider once the scandal was discovered so as to blunt the charges of an ideological bent to its targeting.

According to The Washington Times, “Sixty of the groups on the list released last month have the word ‘tea’ in their name, 33 have ‘patriot,’ eight refer to the Constitution, and 13 have ‘912’ in their name — which is the moniker of a movement started by conservatives. Another 26 group names refer to ‘liberty,’ though that list does include some groups that are not discernibly conservative in orientation.” The IRS redacted the names of 40 organizations that opted out of legal action. As Mark Alexander recounted2, “A legal and tax advisor to The Patriot Post informed us that the Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, our education fund advocating Liberty and constitutional integrity, clearly ‘met the criterion for the corrupt IRS inquisition,’ but for a couple of reasons (which we can’t disclose publicly) we were passed over for review.”

The whole scheme was clearly an effort to derail conservative opposition to Obama’s re-election bid. Many of these groups were essentially unable to participate in the campaign, and we’ll never be able to quantify exactly how much that helped Obama. Yet Lois Lerner, one of the chief IRS officials at the center of the scandal, was able to retire in peace, and no other accountability has been forthcoming. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, confirmed in 2013 on promises to reform the agency, has stonewalled all efforts to do so.

And because Obama successfully avoided any kind of paper trail, we may never know the extent of his involvement. As Alexander wrote previously, the administration was “smart enough to use ‘cutouts’ between their office and the bureaucrats committing the offense. Cutouts are bureaucratic managers who act as surrogates to do the political bidding of elected officials. They are blamed and sacrificed for the ‘good of the cause,’ in order to protect (read: ‘provide plausible deniability for’) elected officials who feign outrage and indignation at the violation of law in support of their political agenda. When the president of the United States is the elected official behind a culture of corruption and abuse of power, the layers of cutouts make it nearly impossible to find impeachable evidence of executive collusion.”

On a final note, the Leftmedia has done nothing but circle the wagons. According to NewsBusters, “It’s been 587 days since any network reported on the IRS scandal, when CBS This Morning made a mention of it on October 28, 2014. NBC last noted the targeting scandal 614 days ago and it’s been over two-years — a whopping 760 days — since ABC last mentioned it on the May 8, 2014 Good Morning America.” Hear no evil, see no evil, report no evil.

Leftmedia Declare Clinton the Winner3

The Democrat machine must have gotten tired of waiting. On Monday evening, the Associated Press reported4 that superdelegates pledging their support over the weekend brought Hillary Clinton’s delegate count to 2,383 — enough to clinch the nomination at the convention in July. Clinton is pivoting from her race against socialist candidate Bernie Sanders and has been attacking Donald Trump, including in a phony foreign policy speech last week5. Barack Obama started rumblings that he was (finally) going to endorse his former secretary of state after California, New Jersey and four other states held their primaries. The endorsement could come as early as Wednesday, when Obama is scheduled to speak at a Democrat fundraiser in New York and tape an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

An Obama endorsement may be all it takes to ensure Clinton doesn’t lose the FBI primary.

Party elites essentially rigged the primary process. Party of democracy, eh? For Clinton supporters, the candidate doesn’t need their help. For Sanders supporters, what’s the use heading to the polls? As we’re writing this a few hours after the polls opened, the Sanders campaign is still struggling against the inevitable. Sanders failed to take his message of covetous socialism beyond white millennials and disgruntled hippies. Minorities instead supported Clinton. But Sanders still got enough traction to push Clinton and the Party’s platform further left.

While the mainstream media is celebrating the fact that Clinton has become the first woman presidential candidate in a major party, commentator Mollie Hemingway has a different take6: This is the “First time the presumptive nominee of a major party is the spouse of an impeached, disbarred president.” Clinton’s also the subject of a federal investigation, likewise a first for a presidential nominee. Warm fuzzies all around.

Relief at the Pump7

Got summer travel plans? Good news — summer gas prices are as low as they’ve been in a decade. The price per barrel of oil is up $20 since January, but it’s still down about $10 from this time last year. And heading into Memorial Day weekend, the average price per gallon of gas was $2.30, which was 47 cents lower than last year.

Supply problems in Canada (due to wild fires), Nigeria (due to terrorism) and Venezuela (due to socialism) have caused some of the recent price spike, and the oil market is always somewhat volatile. Another factor is that oil exploration and expansion in the U.S. has been quiet because low prices make that production not cost-effective. But as oil has settled around $50 a barrel, American production has picked up again. All factors considered, analysts expect oil to remain at or below $50 a barrel for the rest of 2016, which is welcome news in most sectors.

Consumers have it pretty good right now when it comes to oil and gas, as the cost of living is lower when energy prices are down. Congress even lifted the 40-year ban on U.S. oil exports in December, and exports are growing at a healthy clip. But the good news is certainly no thanks to Barack Obama’s energy policies. Nearly all of the additional exploration and drilling has occurred on private land as Obama has shut down access in federally controlled areas. Not that he hasn’t taken credit for low prices…

In any case, summer travelers can enjoy some relief at the pump that seems likely to continue throughout the season.

Don’t Miss Patriot Humor

Check out Choices8.

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BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

    Thomas Sowell: Is Personal Responsibility Obsolete?10
    Michael Barone: Neither Candidate Is Getting the Immigration Issue Right11
    Cal Thomas: Hillary and the ‘What if’ Scenarios12

For more, visit Right Opinion13.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
The Sovereign States14

By James Shott

When the Founders of our young nation realized that the original governing document, the Articles of Confederation15, was insufficient, they began the task of creating a better one. Ultimately, during the process of drafting and ratifying the United States Constitution16 strong sentiment existed for specific rights to be guaranteed to Americans, and the Bill of Rights17 was created, consisting of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.

As time passed, the strength of most of those first 10 amendments has been weakened, and some — notably the Second — are under constant attack. As our once-limited national government has grown, the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have diminished.

The Bill of Rights guarantees such things as freedom of speech and religion, the keeping and bearing of arms, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and other protections from the natural bent of government toward tyranny.

The several states, which represented the interests and will of their citizens, created the national government, and the Tenth Amendment emphasized that the states had protection from the acquisition of powers by the national government outside the limits set forth in the Constitution.

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The Patriot Post Digest 6-7-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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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.”

To advocate the new Constitution and its structure known as “federalism,” James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay pseudonymously penned a series of essays known as The Federalist Papers18. They stressed that under the Constitution’s governmental structure, the principle of popular sovereignty would continue, with constitutional protections against the national government trampling on the rights reserved for the states.

As James Madison explained in Federalist No. 4519, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

More than 230 years later, however, who can argue that the Tenth Amendment’s proscription against a power grab by the federal government has actually been respected?

Arguably, the Environmental Protection Agency is the greatest offender of Tenth Amendment protections, as it writes regulations and rules governing state actions with the force of law that have not been made into law by the Congress.

Or maybe it is the grossly misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare — that is a law made by Congress, but shoves Uncle Sam over the edge of the big government cliff. Imagine Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the rest of the Founders agreeing that the national government was allowed someday to impose a health care system on the people of the several states, even if it worked as advertised.

The idea that the federal government has the authority to change the operations of hundreds or thousands of individual insurers and health care providers in 50 different states, each serving its own separate customer base, into a single system controlled by Washington is as anti-Constitution as it gets.

Other areas of Tenth Amendment abuse are same-sex marriage and abortion, both of which originally were state issues, until the Supreme Court found some way to finagle a national interest in them. Until the Roe v. Wade case of 1973, abortion had been a state issue, but the judicial despots on the High Court ruled that bans on abortion were unconstitutional because they discovered a “right to privacy” in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Constitution also protected state sovereignty by the way Congress was organized. The House of Representatives, frequently referred to as “the people’s house,” consisted of representatives directly elected by the citizens of the congressional districts. Members of the Senate, on the other hand, were to be elected by the state legislatures, and therefore senators' loyalty was to the government of the state more than to its citizens.

This protection vanished, however, when the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, and now the citizens of the states also elect senators, in addition to representatives. Members of the Senate no longer have any special reason to protect the interests of the sovereignty of the state they represent, and that shifts the governing balance between the states and the federal government toward the federal government.

The result often is that federal mandates, about which the states themselves have little recourse, not only can and do intrude on state sovereignty, but force states to pay for their implementation, as well.

Some people think these changes are just fine, such as those who have bought into the scare tactics of the climate change catastrophe gang, those who support abortion on demand and same-sex marriage, and those who generally like big government and have never stopped to think how miserable they may be in the future if this big-government mania isn’t stopped.

There is some good news: States are fighting back against federal overreach. Twenty-four states filed a lawsuit20 asking a federal court to strike down the EPA’s new source performance standards that effectively prohibit the construction of new coal-fired power plants. And 11 states are fighting21 the Obama administration’s transgender mandates.

If the courts do not support restoration of state sovereignty in these and other issues, the states will have no other choice but to refuse to follow intrusive federal measures. Given the money at play, however, that’s not likely to happen as often as it should.

Thomas Jefferson once explained the critical importance of this issue: “I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition.”

Unfortunately, his warning is now reality.

MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE

    Secrecy Shrouds ICE Policies Around Criminal Aliens22
    Gary Johnson: The Authoritarian Libertarian?23
    Your Tax Dollars at Work: $136 Billion in Improper Payments24
    Killing the Vote25

TOP HEADLINES

    Clinton-Era TPP Emails Blocked Until After the Election26
    FBI Seeks Warrantless Internet Data Access27
    Not Just Health Care: ​Car Insurance Rates Set to Soar28

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report29

OPINION IN BRIEF

Thomas Sowell: “Before there can be a welfare state in a democratic country, there must first be a welfare state vision that becomes sufficiently pervasive to allow a welfare state to be created. That vision, in which people are ‘entitled’ to what others have produced, is at the heart of the social degeneration that can be traced back to the 1960s. Teenage pregnancies, venereal diseases, dependency on government and murder rates were all going down during the much disdained 1950s. All reversed and shot up as the welfare state, and the social vision behind the welfare state, took over in the 1960s. That vision featured non-judgmental rewards and non-judgmental leniency toward counterproductive behavior, whether crime or irresponsible sex and its consequences. But relieving people from the responsibilities and challenges of life is doing them no favor. Nor is it a favor to society at large. American society has become more polarized under the welfare state vision. Nor is it hard to see why. If we are all ‘entitled’ to benefits, just by being present, why are some entitled to so little while others have so much?”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “By virtue of exchange, one man’s prosperity is beneficial to all others.” —Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

For the record: “This isn’t some gaffe or accident. [Trump] had ample opportunity over the weekend to retract, to soften, to move away [attacking U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel]. Instead, he doubled down. … [His supporters] have to ask themselves, morally, is this the man you want to be the leader of your party? That’s what’s at stake here. That’s why it’s a bigger issue.” —Charles Krauthammer

Non Compos Mentis: “I saw [Obama’s amnesty diktat] as a reasonable use, challenging Congress to action.” —Gary Johnson

The BIG lie: “Let me just state in the affirmative, which is that the administration has made a forceful and fact-based, accurate, truthful case about how the American people and the international community benefit from an international agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” —Josh Earnest

Secretary of Delusion: “We were able to be successful with Iran. We’ve set the model. We can be successful ultimately with North Korea.” —John Kerry

Braying Jackass: “We lose money doing this. We don’t have to do this, and we won’t stop doing this. … We want to accelerate lifesaving research. That’s what it’s all about. … I want to be able to focus on saving people’s lives, and instead I have to deal with death threats.” —StemExpress chief executive Cate Dyer on fetal harvesting, for which the company marked up the price by 400%-600%30

And last… “This summer, President Obama wants to vacation in a place he hasn’t yet seen. I suggested his desk in the Oval Office.” —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.