The Patriot Post Digest 6-30-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 6-30-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Jun. 30, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.” —Thomas Jefferson (1785)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Clinton Corruption Continued1

So Bill Clinton met Attorney General Loretta Lynch privately Tuesday when the pair spent 30 minutes aboard her government airplane on the tarmac in Phoenix. Why does that matter?

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democrat nominee, is still under investigation by the FBI over her private email server2. She almost certainly broke federal law regarding the handling of classified material. The FBI is under the direction of the Justice Department, which is headed by Lynch, who was chosen by Barack Obama. Lynch will ultimately decide whether any FBI recommendation of indictment against Clinton actually go anywhere.

Oh, that’s why it matters.

Will FBI Director James Comey conclude Clinton broke the law and recommend an indictment? Will Lynch take that recommendation and actually press charges? Will Clinton step or be pushed aside in favor of Joe Biden3? We suppose the answers to those questions depend in some measure on how well Bill schmoozed Loretta aboard that plane.

Lynch says the meeting was “primarily social” and topics included his grandchildren, travel and golf, not the investigation or any other government business. Give us a break. The attorney general just happened to have an unscheduled private meeting with the spouse of an FBI suspect who wants to succeed the AG’s boss and we’re supposed to believe that never came up.

Such corruption is par for the course with the Clintons. Newly uncovered emails reveal that Clinton’s campaign communicated with her buddy and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe on his plan to grant voting rights to 200,000 felons4 in time to turn Virginia blue this November. He was working with other leftist groups, too, not state election officials. But we’re sure that’s all just as much a coincidence as Bill’s chance meeting with Lynch.

Obama Chases an Unclean Energy Legacy5

The North America Leaders' Summit — or what the Investor’s Business Daily editorial board aptly calls6 the “‘Three Amigos’ summit” — began Wednesday in Ottawa, Canada, and it involves that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau along with Barack Obama and Mexico’s Pena Nieto. According to the White House website7, the trio is unveiling “a historic goal to achieve 50% clean power across North America by 2025.”

“The administration calls it ‘ambitious,’” says Investor’s. “We call it ‘ludicrous.’” Here’s why:

“Since the U.S. accounts for three-quarters of the total energy produced by these three countries, the responsibility of living up to any such agreement would fall most heavily on the U.S. … According to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, ‘clean energy’ — nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, biomass, etc. — makes up less than one-fifth of U.S. energy production. … So the only way to get there would be to dramatically increase one or all of these sources in nine years.”

And even then, IBD elucidates, the problem becomes fourfold: 1. Ecofascists are opposed to an energy infrastructure that relies heavily on hydroelectric and nuclear power. 2. Even if America did decide to broaden its reliance on nuclear energy — and there are no plans to do so — the process for developing the infrastructure would take far longer than the White House’s timeframe. 3. On the remaining options — wind, solar and biomass — “production levels from these sources would have to increase something like 470% in nine years for clean energy to account for half of the nation’s energy production.” Even the optimists would agree that’s an unrealistic expectation. 4. A pledge may look great on paper, but will Canada and Mexico follow through? That’s the trillion-dollar question.

“For a guy who is desperately fishing around for something to claim as a legacy,” IBD concludes, “President Obama’s running around making promises that he knows will never be kept is an odd way to go about things.” In other words, when it comes to Obama fulfilling his pledges, don’t hold your breath. On second thought, maybe you should. You might just save the world — and his legacy.

Puerto Rico Deal: A Lifeline by Any Other Name…8

A congressional stalemate over how to handle Puerto Rico9’s budget crisis threatened an economic “D-Day” for the island’s inhabitants. However, the increasingly nervous markets were relieved at yesterday’s news that 68 senators voted to enact the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act to which Barack Obama will assign his signature.

The Washington Post says10 the deal “pens a path for an orderly restructuring of the island’s $72 billion in bond debt while creating a new federally appointed fiscal oversight board.”

The issue revolved around a $2 billion debt payment that comes due Friday. Writing in National Review, Austin Rose explains11 what a default could have looked like: “In a worst-case scenario, the island would have defaulted on its debt. Swarms of bond holders and creditors could then have filed lawsuits to win back their money, and win. Puerto Rico, still cash-strapped, would have been legally obligated to dip into the seed corn of vital services to pay up.”

Rose says the measure “can help avoid a worst case scenario through negotiation, giving the beleaguered debtor extra time before lawsuits come crashing down and more agency about how and what programs to cut.”

Which brings us to the biggest problem that so often goes unresolved — long-term viability. As noted by the Post, “Over the longer term, the island faces bigger questions about how it can reverse its economic decline and whether to revisit its status as a U.S. territory.”

The measure represents a short-term reprieve, but, like all perpetual issues Congress refuses to address, a lack of tough love means there are no fundamental changes, which ensures that we’ll be talking about this issue again soon. William Shakespeare once wrote, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” An unscrupulous and short-sighted lifeline by any other name would smell just as rotten.

Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column

Read The Declaration of Dependence12, on how Obama and Clinton want to rewrite the history of American Liberty, omitting the “Liberty” part.

If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email, update your subscription here13.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Victor Davis Hanson: Dr. Frankenstein Elites Created Populist Monsters14
Caroline Camden Lewis: Brexit = Yes on Sovereignty15
George Will: The Hinge of the Great War16

For more, visit Right Opinion17.

TOP HEADLINES

Fast & Furious Connection in Paris?18
Democrat AG Drops Exxon Subpoena19
New Documents Suggest IRS’s Lerner Broke the Law20

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report21

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Democrats Adopt a Fascist Party Plank22

By Arnold Ahlert

The Democrat Party’s totalitarian impulses have been formalized. In the final draft of this year’s party platform, the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee unanimously adopted a provision23 “calling on the Department of Justice to investigate alleged corporate fraud on the part of fossil fuel companies who have reportedly misled shareholders and the public on the scientific reality of climate change.” In short, the attempt to criminalize dissent24 is now an official party plank.

The committee was led by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). “As Democrats, we believe that our country’s greatest strength is its people, and we’re committed to the values of inclusion and opportunity for all,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement.

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The Patriot Post Digest 6-30-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Apparently Wasserman Schultz is oblivious to her own hypocrisy. There is nothing remotely inclusive about such a “my way or the prosecutorial highway” take on science that is far from settled, despite all the orchestrated hysteria by Democrats and their media enablers. Yet if Democrats wish to prosecute fraud, perhaps they should start at the top of the so-called food chain, as in government entities, not corporate ones, who have pushed an agenda in lieu of scientific fact.

Take the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, for example. German Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert, a retired geologist and data computation expert, undertook a detailed study of NASA-GISS’s temperature data series, going all the way back to 1881 and involving 1,153 stations. He discovered25 NASA-GISS had tampered with raw temperature data to literally invent global warming. Between 2010 and 2012 NASA-GISS altered its own data sets to show a post-WWII warming that never existed. Moreover, apart from the continent of Australia, the planet has been on a cooling trend.

The agency is not an outlier. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has also cooked the books26 on more than one occasion, including on ocean temperatures27 to make the nearly two decade warming “hiatus” disappear.

Earlier this year, at a “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA presented a graph ostensibly showing a 58-year long temperature record compiled by “radiosondes,” which are mini weather stations with radio transmitters attached to helium or hydrogen-filled balloons that lift them to altitudes exceeding 115,000 feet. Yet NOAA’s graph showed28 only the last 37 of those 58 years. The omitted data? It revealed as much pre-1979 global cooling as post-1979 warming.

It also revealed NOAA’s willingness to defraud the public in pursuit of the leftist agenda.

And that’s when leftists bother pursuing data at all. Speaking to the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee, climatologist Michael Mann de-emphasized the need for climate science because global warming has become too obvious to ignore. “What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues,” he lamented, “is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle.”

Unfortunately for Democrats, the sun itself is not cooperating29. On June 23, for the second time in just this month, the sun went completely spotless. The blank sun is a sign the next solar minimum is on its way, leading to an increasing number of spotless days, then weeks, then months reaching a solar minimum phase around 2019 or 2020. The last time30 the sun entered a long phase with no sun spots was between 1645 and 1715. The so-called “Maunder Minimum” coincided with the Little Ice Age that produced a series of extraordinarily cold winters in Earth’s northern hemisphere. Some scientists believe we will experience31 a similar scenario in the next few years.

Are they correct? More to the point, what gives them any less credibility than fascist-minded Democrats and their government collaborators at NASA and the NOAA, or the odious coalition of 16 Democrat attorneys general who are threatening legal action and huge fines against those who refuse to abide their version of so-called Settled Science™?

In a rare show of backbone, Republicans are fighting back. “If it is possible to minimize the risks of climate change, then the same goes for exaggeration,” Republican AGs wrote in a letter32 to their Democrat counterparts. “If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud.”

Yet such fraud pales in comparison to a Democrat Party willing to formally embrace the prosecution of Americans' First Amendment protections. A Democrat Party that is clearly green on the outside, but red on the inside. “The draft platform we have produced in an open and transparent manner reflects our priorities as Democrats and demonstrates our vision for this nation,” states Platform Drafting Committee Chair Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). Those would be the priorities of suppression and/or prosecution, and the vision of an authoritarian state. Democrats? Fascists is more like it.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

Pollaganda: 2016 Edition33
Brexit: What Now?34
California’s High-Speed Derail35

OPINION IN BRIEF

Victor Davis Hanson: “Elites ignored the likely causes of the Orlando shooting: the appeal of ISIS-generated hatred to some young, second-generation radical Muslim men living in Western societies, and the politically correct inability of Western authorities to short-circuit that clear-cut connection. Instead, the establishment all but blamed Middle America for supposedly being anti-gay and pro-gun. In both the U.S. and Britain, such politically correct hypocrisy is superimposed on highly regulated, highly taxed and highly governmentalized economies that are becoming ossified and stagnant. The tax-paying middle classes, who lack the romance of the poor and the connections of the elite, have become convenient whipping boys of both in order to leverage more government social programs and to assuage the guilt of the elites who have no desire to live out their utopian theories in the flesh. America’s version of the British antidote to elite hypocrisy is the buffoonish populist Donald Trump. Like the architects of Brexit, he arose not from what he was for, but what he said he was against.”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “A newspaper has three things to do. One is to amuse, another is to entertain and the rest is to mislead.” —Ernest Bevin (1881-1951)

Observations: “I suspect it is hard to exploit this latest attack [in Turkey] to make the cause for gun control since the jihadists used bombs. But I do recall Attorney General Loretta Lynch saying after the Orlando carnage that ‘our most effective response to terror … is … love.’ I can’t imagine why they [won’t] repeat that pearl of wisdom today. … Crushing the ideology of Muslim supremacism and ridding the world of these death worshippers would be the greatest act of love we could do for the entire planet — especially those in the Muslim world who do desire peace.” —Gary Bauer

Alpha Jackass: “I feel that Marco Rubio should be sued to pay back all the money that the federal government paid him. He was never here [during the primary], and the state of Florida was missing a senator during that time.” —Harry Reid (And yet, even though his presence was intermittent, Rubio still managed to accomplish more than Reid ever has.)

Defiant: “Let’s assume hypothetically that the state Supreme Court knocks … down [my executive action that reinstates voting rights to ex-convicts4]. The next day I will sit at my desk — probably with the assistance of my autopen — and I will sign 206,000 orders.” —Gov. Terry McAuliffe (Translation: Rule of Law be damned.)

Village Idiots: “Look, we have challenges with Iran, as everybody knows, and we’re working on those challenges. But I can tell you that Iran in Iraq has been, in certain ways, helpful, and they clearly are focused on ISIL-Daesh, and so we have a common interest, actually.” —John Kerry (They may have a common interest, but for entirely malicious reasons.)

Science! “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson

And last… “People can be horrible when they’re sure religion proves them right, but wait until you have those who are sure ‘science’ proves them right.” —Frank Fleming

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.