The Patriot Post Digest 3-2-2017

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The Patriot Post Digest 3-2-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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Mid-Day Digest

Mar. 2, 2017

IN TODAY’S EDITION

The Left has a very specific agenda with its new round of “Russia!” attacks on Sessions.
The sun could be driving temperatures higher. Who knew?
Memo to Princeton bioethicist: Even babies with Down Syndrome have value.
Daily Features: Top Headlines, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.

THE FOUNDATION

“If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it, whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.” —Benjamin Franklin (1789)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

The MSM Russian Obsession1

Mainstream media outlets across the nation this morning essentially ran the same headline — Attorney General Sessions Lied About Not Meeting With Russians. Democrats couldn’t cue up fast enough to offer their best renditions of Joseph McCarthy in calling for Sessions' immediate resignation. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who had been an especially vocal critic of Sessions during his confirmation hearings, bloviated, “We need a special prosecutor totally independent of the AG. We need Attorney General Jeff Sessions — who should have never been confirmed in the first place — to resign. We need it now.”

So what’s the story here? Did Sessions lie? The short answer is no, because context is crucial. It was revealed Wednesday that Sessions had met twice with the Russian ambassador before the election. One meeting was in an official capacity in his role as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the second was a public meeting at the Heritage Foundation directly after a speech Sessions gave. Neither meeting had anything to do with Donald Trump’s campaign. At his confirmation hearings, Sessions was asked if he had communications with the Russians regarding the Trump campaign. Sessions responded, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in [Trump’s] campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.” In a questionnaire, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asked whether Sessions “had been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day.” Sessions' replied, “No.”

In reality, there are two components to this story, the Leftmedia’s fiscal bottom line and the Democrats' resistance agenda. The mainstream media is trolling a molehill of a story, seeking to play it up to scandal proportions as a means to gain attention and sell advertising. There is almost nothing to this story, but because of the juicy Russian component the MSM can feature it for great click bait. For the Democrats, the story serves as yet another vehicle to further their “Trump is an illegitimate president” mantra and the narrative of the Russian election-meddling conspiracy. We’re sure it’s pure coincidence that this story broke just after Trump’s hugely successful speech2.

So, stay tuned, as one can expect more of these types of non-scandal scandalous stories from the Leftmedia far into the foreseeable future.

Shining the Light on Climate Science3

On Monday, Bill Nye, sitting alongside fellow climate alarmist Bernie Sanders, chided “extreme skeptics”4, lecturing them “to think about what is called cognitive dissonance.” He asserted, “Instead of accepting that the climate is changing, deniers are denying the evidence and dismissing the authorities.”

The problem, as elucidated in an Investor’s Business Daily editorial5, is “we’re often told by advocates of climate change that the ‘science is settled.’ But in fact, ‘science’ itself is in a deep crisis over making claims it can’t back up, especially about climate.” For example, the article continues, an analysis by University of Virginia’s Center for Open Science “estimates that roughly 70% of all studies can’t be reproduced. And this includes the field of climate change.” The fact that “99% of scientists” — a bogus but nevertheless often repeated statistic — blame man-made emissions for global warming despite often being unable to replicate studies is highly alarming.

Meanwhile, a new study of planetary orbits flies in the face of the conventional climate change theory. As reported in a news release6, the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports newfound “evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.” The report explains how “small but regular ticks in a planet’s orbit can exert big changes on the location and orientation of a planet on its axis relative to the sun and, accordingly, change the amount of solar radiation a planet receives over a given area. Where and how much solar radiation a planet gets is a key driver of climate.”

Now consider this: The globe soaks up roughly 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) of solar energy annually. To better comprehend this number, De Anza College’s Ridha Hamidi, Ph.D., says7, “More energy from sunlight strikes the earth in one hour than all of the energy currently consumed on the planet in one year. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth’s non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined.” Read the last sentence twice if you have to.

In an email to The Patriot Post, meteorologist Joe Bastardi responds: “I have not read enough of the study to comment on aspects I have not researched. But given my stated position that the sun is the conductor of the climatic orchestra of the oceans, stochastic events and the very design of the system, it would make sense that the sun should be considered as the source of climatic variations rather than the increase of one molecule of CO2 out of every 10 thousand molecules of air over a 100-year period.” The lesson here is that man’s footprint isn’t just relatively small, it’s minuscule. Perhaps it’s not the skeptics who are, as Nye says, “denying the evidence,” but rather those who want to silence the discussion.

Top Headlines8

Senate confirms Carson to lead HUD. (The Hill9)

White House eyes plan to cut EPA staff by one-fifth, eliminating key programs. (The Washington Post10)

Cornyn introduces national concealed carry reciprocity bill to Senate. (Washington Free Beacon11)

House Democrats fire Muslim IT staffers under investigation12 by Capitol Hill police. (Hot Air13)

Nearly 40 leaks of classified information reported in 2016. (Washington Free Beacon14)

Thousands of non-citizens lurking on Virginia’s voter rolls. (The Washington Times15)

The Congressional Black Caucus PAC (CBC PAC) spends lavishly on upscale resorts and hotels, catering at exclusive restaurants, and on fundraising. (Washington Free Beacon16)

Harvard Law administrators accused of stealing money meant for students with disabilities. (CBS Boston17)

Trump administration has found only $20 million in existing funds for the border wall. (Reuters18.)

NY Teamsters' pension fund goes belly up. (Washington Free Beacon19)

Al-Qaida deputy Abu al-Khayr al-Masri killed in CIA drone strike. (CBS News20)

All in the family — Biden widow breaks up brother’s marriage. (Fox News21)

Amazon cloud sputters for hours, and a boatload of websites go offline. (ArsTechnica22)

Policy: Trump’s 5 health care principles, explained. (The Daily Signal23)

Policy: To unleash prosperity, Dodd-Frank must go. (The Heritage Foundation24)

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report25.
Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column

Read Trump’s Triumph Is Demos' Disaster26. The shell-shocked expressions on Democrat faces were priceless.

If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email, update your subscription here27.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
No, Peter Singer — All People Have Inherent Worth28

By Allyne Caan

Even as Hollywood turned Sunday’s Oscars into a political pulpit to denounce supposed “inhumane” immigration policies, a real inhumanity went unchallenged.

It’s the inhumanity that sees some humans as worse than pigs and advocates brutally killing them by the most torturous methods, including chemically burning them alive, tearing them limb from limb, and even decapitating them.

If you think this refers to the barbarism of the Islamic State, think again — although the resemblance is strong. But no, this barbarism comes from Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer.

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The Patriot Post Digest 3-2-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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In recent statements29 published in the Journal of Practical Ethics, Singer suggested individuals with Down Syndrome are intellectually inferior to dogs or pigs and, therefore, their lives are worth less than “normal” human beings. “Most people think that the life of a dog or a pig is of less value than the life of a normal human being,” he says, “On what basis, then, could they hold that the life of a profoundly intellectually disabled human being with intellectual capacities inferior to those of a dog or a pig is of equal value to the life of a normal human being?”

Singer’s statements came in response to the question of why he and his wife would give their baby up for adoption if that baby had Down syndrome. He writes: “For me, the knowledge that my child would not be likely to develop into a person whom I could treat as an equal, in every sense of the word … would greatly reduce my joy in raising my child and watching him or her develop.”

Did you catch that? “Develop into a person whom I could treat as an equal.” To Singer, the concept of innate equality is non-existent. We “earn” (or fail to “earn”) equality based on factors such as intelligence or our ability to contribute to society (said contributions being judged by Singer, of course). The whole “all men are created equal” thing means nothing to this supposed Ivy League ethicist.

While Singer’s answer may have been framed against a question of adoption, this is the same Peter Singer who openly endorsed so-called “after-birth abortion” — or, put more honestly, infanticide. As The Washington Times reported in 201530, Singer argued on his faculty page: “Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents.” Singer went on to say that if parents want to kill their newborn due to a disability, they should be able to do so “not only by withholding or withdrawing life support … but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.”

His irony in using the word “humanely” should not escape us. Well-documented are the cases of babies born alive during abortions and then summarily killed by, for example, snapping their spines, stabbing their skulls31 or suffocating them32.

Such atrocities are not confined to Islamic State videos.

Of course, abortion itself is the jihad of the West. Every day, preborn babies are torn limb from limb33 because they are viewed as second-class humans — if even that much. Some babies are even literally burned alive34 by chemical solution inside the uterus.

In Singer’s world of ethics, infants born naturally yet unwanted by their parents due to a supposed “disability” would no doubt meet similarly brutal fates.

Contrast this view with the experience of a mother of a child with Down syndrome, who wrote of Singer35, “Just as there are people who lack the capacity to appreciate any music (Milton Friedman, for instance, was one of them), there are people with the far more serious lack of capacity to appreciate the worth of other human beings. The music of humanity that most of us hear is just noise to them. So it is with Singer.”

For years, Singer has attempted to twist the world of ethics to present the brutal slaughter of pre-born — and even post-born — infants as acceptable and even “humane.” But his arguments lack logic and his conclusions are void of truth. Humaneness of any kind is absent in abortion. Indeed, abortion is the antithesis of humane36.

In 2015, Singer penned a piece37 on countering Islamic extremism in which he wrote, “There is a vast moral difference between those who oppose the taking of innocent human life and those who kill people because of their nationality, or what they say, or because they are ‘apostates.’”

What, then, Mr. Singer, is the difference between killing people because they are “apostates” and killing them simply because they don’t meet your arbitrary standard of value?

The answer: There is none.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

A Phony Tale of Globalist Woe38 — Activists worry immigration reform will kill the H-1B visa program.
Even the Leftmedia Praised Trump’s Speech39 — “I thought it was a winner politically.”
Future Outlook for Democrats Is Bleak40 — Theory of changing demographics leading to a permanent Democrat majority is flawed.
Team Trump Subdues EPA’s Iron Fist41 — Our neglected Constitution is getting a much-needed refill of checks and balances.
The Bureaucrats' Other Addiction42 — Hundreds of “egregious” examples of porn-viewing while working for taxpayers.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Victor Davis Hanson: Is the American Elite Really Elite?43
Veronique de Rugy: Trump Should Expand Audits of Programs That Waste Taxpayers' Funds44
Cal Thomas: The President Reinvents Himself45

For more, visit Right Opinion46.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Victor Davis Hanson: “The idea that brilliance can be manifested in trade skills or retail sales, or courage expressed by dealing with the hardship of factory work, or character found on an Indiana farm, is foreign to the Washington Beltway, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Instead, 21st century repute is accrued from the false gods of the right zip code, high income, proper social circles and media exposure rather from a demonstrable record of moral or intellectual excellence. In 1828, the wild and unruly Andrew Jackson was elected president because the rapidly expanding country had tired of the pretenses of an exhausted elite of tidewater and New England mediocrities. … What got the brash Trump elected was a similar popular outrage that the self-described best and brightest of our time are has-beens, having enjoyed influence without real merit or visible achievement. If Donald Trump did not exist, something like him would have had to be invented.”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.” —Earl Warren (1891-1974)

The truth hurts: “This will be a very well-received speech for Donald Trump.” —MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow

Winning: “I think this line of economic nationalism works. I think — left, right and center — I think people have a sense of righteous indignation… I thought [the speech] was a winner politically. I think it’s probably the reason he was elected in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio. It is winning the ticket. Economic nationalism.” —MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

Belly laugh of the week: “I was very proud of the dignity with which our members listened to his speech. It was clearly a bait-and-switch speech.” —Nancy Pelosi

Alpha Jackass, part I: “I wish [Carryn Owens] hadn’t allowed herself to be used as his prop like that. And I don’t see any great courage here. Where is the courage?” —Bill Maher

Alpha Jackass, part II: “That’s why she’s there as a sort of a f-you for the people who are criticizing [the Yemen mission in which Navy SEAL Ryan Owens was killed]. And the poor woman, this widow who just lost her husband — she is in desperate grief right now. … And to use that to put another notch on his belt, and what is he thinking about? ‘My ratings.’” —Michael Moore

Brace yourselves: “It’s coming. He’s coming. And he’s ready to roll.” —former Attorney General Eric Holder on Barack Obama’s political resurrection

And last… “Instead of lecturing us all night on how to run the country, Hollywood should focus on how to run a simple awards show.” —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.