The Patriot Post Digest 7-13-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 7-13-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Jul. 13, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate — look to his character.” —Noah Webster (1789)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Another Coffin-Top Lecture1

It started off well enough. Barack Obama’s speech2 at the memorial for the five slain Dallas police officers began with appropriate solemnity and sorrow, complete with Scripture references and gratitude for the work law enforcement officers do all over the country. He told personal stories about each of the five officers.

But then, as he always does, he got to himself (45 first-person mentions) and his political agenda. After proclaiming “we are not as divided as we seem,” he proceeded to divide everyone by their tribal grievances. He again accused police departments of racism. And he ticked off a few of his agenda items:

“As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools.” Actually, we spend more on education per capita than any other nation. But spending does not automatically equal success.

“We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment.” Those are the cities run for decades by leftist policies that we call Democrat urban poverty plantations3.

“We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.” What foolish nonsense. But at the same time, Obama said nothing about the thousands of people shot this year — mostly blacks by other blacks — on the aforementioned poverty planation in Chicago.

In any case, this was an inappropriate venue for a stump speech. As Charles C.W. Cooke observed4, “This, remember, was a funeral — a funeral for one of the police officers who was murdered last Thursday. It wasn’t a rally. It wasn’t a White House press conference. It wasn’t a public statement, hastily arranged on the airport tarmac. It was a funeral.” Unfortunately, Obama has a repugnant habit of standing on coffins to give his moralizing lectures.

U.S. Military Combat Readiness Crisis5

China has been steadily developing and expanding its military capabilities. Its coast guard fleet is now bigger than those of Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines combined, and it has continued to expand, having increasing by over 25% since 2012. China’s focus is not merely on protecting its own territorial waters, but on expanding the capacity of its navy to meet strategic objectives on a global scale. If China’s aggressive naval expansion isn’t concerning enough, its building of man-made islands in an attempt to claim exclusive territorial rights across much of the South China Sea should be. On Tuesday, an international court ruled that Chinese actions were in violation of established international maritime law; China’s response? It considered the ruling “null and void” with no “binding force.”

With the NATO summit6 this past week, one of the primary concerns being discussed was continued Russian aggression. Not since the end of the Cold War have European nations become this alarmed at the steadily growing threat Russia. It has been two years since Russia annexed Crimea and backed the separatist revolt in eastern Ukraine, with little done to counter Russia’s actions.

At this time of growing threats from two of the world’s most developed and potent militaries, the U.S. finds its own military combat readiness in a state of crisis — largely thanks to Barack Obama. Recently, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry stated that this lack of combat readiness is primarily the result of “budget cuts coupled with deployment, at a pace and a number that have not really declined very much.” Thornberry mentioned several disconcerting statistics regarding the lack of combat readiness and one in particular that helped to puts this crisis into perspective. He stated, “Less than half of the Air Force combat forces are ready to face a peer competitor such as China and Russia.” The other branches don’t fare much better. Each one faces severe budget, personnel and equipment challenges7 to overall readiness. But at least the transgendered few can serve openly8.

Coal on the Fast Track to Elimination9

The Obama administration’s end goal is the complete elimination of coal. And if new data is to be believed, the administration is well ahead of schedule. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration calculations10, “Coal-fired generating capacity in the United States dropped from 299 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2014 to 276 GW as of April 2016.” Moreover, “Coal-fired generation’s share of total electricity generation fell from 39% in 2014 to 28% in the first four months of 2016.”

That’s a steep decline. And it’s nowhere near what the EPA unrealistically projected in its December 2011 “Regulatory Impact Analysis for the Final Mercury and Air Toxics Standards11.” In that report, the agency estimated, “A small amount of coal-fired capacity, about 4.7 GW (less than 2 percent of all coal-fired capacity in 2015), is projected to be come uneconomic to maintain by 2015 [emphasis added].”

Coal, by design, is on the fast track to elimination. And if it’s phased out quicker than expected? Well, tough luck. What’s bad news for the coal industry and the overall economy is good news for the EPA and its Democrat operatives. The Democratic Platform Committee just endorsed12 a provision “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.” Too bad the committee won’t endorse an investigation into the fraudulent projections government officials cling to whenever they seek to implement devious and onerous regulations.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

    Star Parker: Black Lives Matter and Lawlessness13
    Jonah Goldberg: Week of Tragedy Reveals Our Ideological Blind Spots14
    Michelle Malkin: Congressional Black Corruption15

For more, visit Right Opinion16.

TOP HEADLINES

    Plot to Kill Baton Rouge Cops Foiled17
    New Black Panthers Heading to Cleveland With Guns18
    Obama Admin Sent Taxpayer Money to Anti-Netanyahu Campaign19

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report20.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Ginsburg Crosses the Line21

By Louis DeBroux

We suppose we can finally abandon any pretense that the judiciary is still a neutral body rendering opinions based on an impartial interpretation of the Constitution as written. Rather, the judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, has become a supra-legislative oligarchy of nine (or eight, for the time being) that imposes its own version of morality and “social justice” upon the roughly 315 million Americans who are expected to abide by its diktats.

One particular recent example tells us all we need to know in this regard — the recent political-stump utterance of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. This isn’t entirely new ground for Ginsburg, though. She is known affectionately to her legions of leftist lemmings as “the Notorious RBG” (a take-off on the moniker of slain rapper The Notorious BIG), for her unrestrained tendency to speak openly about her personal feelings regarding matters involving the Court.

But this time, she has exceeded all previous boundaries of decorum and propriety.

Speaking in an interview with the New York Times22, the official daily newspaper of the Democrat Party, Ginsberg, asked about the possibility of a Trump presidency, said, “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.” She then chuckled at the thought of what her late husband would have said: “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand.”

[nChrist]

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 7-13-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

Questioned about this later, she went back to the well. “At first I thought it was funny,” she said of Trump’s candidacy. “To think that there’s a possibility that he could be president…” she trailed off.

Such remarks are well beyond inappropriate for a sitting justice. Edward Whelan III, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called her comments indefensible, stating, “I think this exceeds the others in terms of her indiscretions. … I am not aware of any justice ever expressing views on the merits or demerits of a presidential candidate in the midst of the campaign. … The soundness or unsoundness of her concerns about Donald Trump has no bearing on whether it was proper for her to say what she said.”

According to Stetson University law professor Louis J. Virelli, there could be serious consequences for such outbursts. “Public comments like the ones that Justice Ginsburg made could be seen as grounds for her to recuse herself from cases involving a future Trump administration,” Virelli mused. “I don’t necessarily think she would be required to do that, and I certainly don’t believe that she would in every instance, but it could invite challenges to her impartiality based on her public comments.”

Not that Ginsburg or the other members of the Court’s leftist bloc would have the decency to recuse themselves in such cases. Both Justice Ginsburg (a former lawyer for the ACLU) and Justice Elena Kagan refused to recuse themselves in the same-sex “marriage” cases that came before the Court in the last few years, despite having already performed multiple same-sex wedding ceremonies when such were still a violation of federal law. In fact, Ginsburg was so arrogant and shameless that she performed one of these ceremonies in the chambers of the Supreme Court itself23.

There is a major double-standard when it comes to such statements by members of the Court. During Obama’s 2010 State of the Union Address, cameras caught Justice Samuel Alito mouthing the words “not true” in response to Obama’s unseemly and unprecedented attacks on the Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. Liberals called Alito “nasty” and “churlish” for this supposed breach of decorum, but these same liberals are positively giddy when leftist justices offer up far more blatant political commentary, as has Ginsburg.

These realities again underscore the urgency of denying another leftist Democrat the opportunity to shape the direction of the Court for the next 30 years or more. With the death of stalwart originalist Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most brilliant, effective and honorable justices in the history of the Supreme Court, the next president will be able to name his successor (if the GOP Senate holds the line against Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland). Add to that the fact that Justice Ginsburg (83), Justice Kennedy (79), Justice Breyer (77) and Justice Thomas (68.) are closer to the end of their tenure than their beginning, and the next president may be able to appoint as many as five new justices to the Court.

Such an opportunity could strengthen the Court’s conservative/originalist wing, or permanently cement the leftist vision of a malleable, “living” constitution, with constitutional protections of individual liberty, and the tempering effect of a separation of powers between the branches, forever lost.

No pressure … right?

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

    Lynch’s Smug Testimony24
    Cracks Form in Germany’s Open Door Policy25

OPINION IN BRIEF

Star Parker: “Capriciously applied law has always been a disturbance for blacks. The civil rights movement was supposed to be about the country recognizing and remedying that, in a nation under God, there were citizens not receiving equal treatment under the law. Unfortunately, the civil rights movement came in the midst of the liberal wave of the 1960s. So instead of focusing on equal application of existing laws of tradition, we turned law over to men to make up new rules that were supposedly going to fix everything. But man-made law produces what we have just seen in a politically motivated FBI director rationalizing that a secretary of state … somehow couldn’t figure out that she was breaking the law and compromising our national security. When we don’t take law seriously at the highest levels of power in the nation, the message reverberates throughout the land.”

SHORT CUTS

For the record: “President Obama, ever since he first appeared on the national political scene in 2008, has systematically adopted a rhetoric and an agenda that is predicated on dividing up the country according to tribal grievances, in hopes of recalibrating various factions into a majority grievance culture. In large part, he has succeeded politically. But in doing so he has nearly torn the country apart.” —Victor Davis Hanson

Upright: “Black people have the capacity to run the criminals out of their neighborhoods. Let me put the issue another way. Suppose it were the Ku Klux Klan riding through black neighborhoods murdering 7,000 blacks year after year. How many black people would be willing to wait for the Klansmen to behave themselves or accept political promises and wait for a government program?” —Walter Williams

Observations: “The Dallas shootings have liberals requesting more national conversations about race. But these calls are mostly disingenuous. What liberals have in mind is more of a lecture, where they do the talking and everyone else nods in agreement.” —Jason Riley

Because eight years wasn’t long enough? “I’m your best hope.” —Barack Obama to law enforcement officials

Braying Jenny: “I can’t help but feeling like the [Dallas] shooter was a martyr. … I am so torn up in my heart about seeing these men, these black men being gunned down in our community. I wasn’t surprised by what the shooter did to those cops, and I think a lot of us feel the same way.” —former Miss Alabama Kalyn Chapman James

The BIG lie: “The Internet and gun shows — you can get whatever gun you want as long as you can pay the price that they are asking, no questions asked, and you can end up doing whatever you want to do with that gun and we’ll come back in Congress and offer a moment of silence for the victims.” —Rep. Hank Johnson

Late-night humor: “According to Forbes magazine, in the past year Taylor Swift has earned $170 million. When she heard that, Hillary Clinton said, ‘I didn’t know she gave speeches.’” —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.