THE FOUNDATION
"[T]he government must be a weak one indeed, if it should forget that the good of the whole can only be promoted by advancing the good of each of the parts or members which compose the whole." —John Jay, Federalist No. 64, 1788TOP RIGHT HOOKS
Democrats Exploit Train Wreck to Derail Republicans
Regarding the Philadelphia train crash, the blood of the seven dead was not dry on the tracks before Democrats attempted to convert this tragedy into political capital. Congress was deliberating Amtrak funding and, in keeping with Rahm Emmanuel's maxim to "never let a good crisis go to waste," Democrats immediately asserted that the crash was related to an "infrastructure failure." Obama's White House mouthpiece Josh Earnest got in on the act, saying, "The president has been a leading advocate ... for investing in our infrastructure." He added, "Unfortunately, we have seen a concerted effort by Republicans for partisan reasons to step in front of those kinds of advancements." According to investigators, the train was traveling over 100 mph, or twice the posted track speed. Notably, this was very similar to the crash in Spain last year, when another train was traveling into a leftward turn at twice the posted track speed. Fortunately, Republicans have not (yet) bowed to Demo tactics, and Amtrak, which is as inefficient and bankrupt as the Post Office, has not yet received even more taxpayer funds. Isn't $1 billion a year enough?Comment | Share
Congress Takes NSA Hot Potato
The NSA's mass metadata collection efforts have come to a head. Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the program violated the Patriot Act, despite the NSA claiming Section 215 authorized it. Indeed, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), primary author of the original Patriot Act, said, “That program is illegal and based on a blatant misinterpretation of the law." But the law is up for renewal by June 1, so Congress has to act. The House on Wednesday voted 338-88 to pass the USA Freedom Act, which specifically ends bulk data collection. That sets up a fight with the Senate, where Republicans are more eager to actually authorize the NSA's phone metadata program. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned the House bill would put undue limits on intelligence collection and said the Senate won't vote on it. House Speaker John Boehner promised not to let the Patriot Act expire because it's "critically important to keep Americans safe." But the fundamental debate is how much power the government needs to do that. How much Liberty do we give up for security?Comment | Share
UVA Dean Sues Rolling Stone Over Rape Story
It's devilishly hard for someone in America to successfully sue a publication for libel. Not only does the plaintiff have to convince the court that what was published was false and caused harm, but the plaintiff also has to prove that the publication acted with malicious intent. In response to Rolling Stone's grossly irresponsible false report on a supposed rape on the University of Virginia campus, the college's Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo filed a $7.5 million suit against the magazine and the author of the story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Based on the complaint, it appears Eramo has a case. She alleges Erdely never attempted to get documents that would have disproven "Jackie's" story. And the reporter hid her work by using pseudonyms to describe people in the story she didn't talk to and dismissed concerns by a Rolling Stone copy editor who wondered why Erdely didn't talk to the accused. The complaint alleges even Jackie was uncomfortable with how the magazine portrayed Eramo. But Erdely was trying to fit this story into a template, the one she used in the past when writing about rape — a template that produced several factually challenged stories. As Jonah Goldberg wrote last month, journalistic ethics are "all based on a very simple rule: Tell the truth." More...Comment | Share
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FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
The Left's Twisted Concern for Premature Black (Voter) Deaths
By Nate Jackson
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Writing in the Post, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Professor Dean Robinson takes a look at the research of Javier Rodriguez, Arline Geronimus, John Bound and Danny Dorling, four university professors who attempt to calculate how different election outcomes might have been if the voting-age blacks who died between 1970 and 2004 had lived and voted (Democrat).
According to Robinson, "Rodriguez and colleagues estimate that excess deaths among blacks totaled 2.7 million between 1970 and 2004, that 1.74 million would have been of voting age, and that 1 million would have voted in the 2004 election. Combining excess mortality with the consequences of felon disenfranchisement, they find that about 1 in 7 blacks (15 percent) did not have the opportunity to vote in 2004 for one of these two reasons."
While the study authors conclude the 2004 presidential election would not have turned out different, they assert the "[o]utcomes of 7 senate and 11 gubernatorial races could have been reversed."
Then Robinson lays out the familiar narrative about racial inequality. "Research has shown that blacks are not dying in excess because of differences in genetic endowment or health behavior," he says. "Instead, health disparities reflect racial and class inequality and an accumulation of stressors, including segregation, discrimination, exposure to pollution and unequal access to health-care resources, to name a few."
He didn't get into the disparity in incarceration rates, but that's been a bugaboo of the Left for years, too. Never mind that blacks commit crime at a rate far higher than other races, and that the overwhelming majority of crime is intra-racial, not interracial.
We certainly would not argue that there hasn't been any racial inequality. Slavery was a horrific thing, and, ever since its end, the nation has endured 150 years of racial discrimination and bitterness.
But blacks have been a monolithic voting bloc for Democrats — the party of slavery and Jim Crow, by the way — for half a century. Particularly in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson, to pick three at random, Democrats have been running the show for at least that long. And blacks in those cities remain mired in failing schools, poor housing and low-wage jobs.
Might there be not just correlation but causation?
Yet according to Political Research Quarterly, "Historical legacies provide deeply rooted ties between blacks and the Democratic Party. These ties may simply render it impossible for Republicans — black or otherwise — to move public opinion or mobilize among blacks." Translation: Blacks aren't going to vote GOP any time soon, no matter what.
Robinson concludes, "The tragic deaths of unarmed black men have again generated conversations about racial inequality in the United States."
He neglects, of course, the thousands of tragic deaths of armed black men at the hands of other armed black men through gang violence in inner cities. This social breakdown and family collapse is largely the result of subsidizing fatherlessness through the Democrats' "Great Society," which left blacks enslaved on urban poverty plantations.
Nor did Robinson mention that 37% of aborted babies are black. If blacks, at 12% of the population, accounted for a similar percentage of all abortions since Roe v. Wade in 1973 — not even as far back as the researchers go — that's roughly 21 million people who never had a chance at life, never mind voting. Yet abortion is a sacred plank of the Democrat platform.
Do black lives matter only when taken by police officers?
The ugly truth is that Democrats need blacks to win elections, and this demographic decline is worrisome to leftist politicos. Perhaps that's why they seek to flood the country with immigrants.
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TODAY AT PATRIOTPOST.US
- ANALYSIS: About That Decline in Christianity...
- Obama Puts America on Trial at the UN
- In Time for SCOTUS Ruling, ObamaCare Reforms Introduced
- EPA Looks to Hammer Nail Salons
- Commencement Lineup Illustrates Problem With Today's Academia
- Voters Should Be More Concerned About Hillary's Lies
BEST OF RIGHT OPINION
- Tony Perkins: On Poverty, President Shows Poor Judgment
- Rebecca Hagelin & Kristin Carey: The Ascension
- Larry Elder: State Sen. Obama Had an Urban Agenda, and It Failed
- Victor Davis Hanson: The Forgotten Realities of World War II
- George Will: In Childhood, Risk Is Inherent
OPINION IN BRIEF
Tony Perkins: "This President is accusing the church — the most effective social outreach program in the history of America — of ignoring the poor to fight a war on social issues that, oh by the way, he started? That’s not only ignorant of the church’s activities — it’s insulting. The religious community hasn’t ignored the poor. On the contrary, there’s no more generous segment of society than Christian conservatives and the ministries that their giving makes possible. ... If the President cares more about poverty than his social agenda, why did he sacrifice a program for thousands of sex trafficking victims on the altar of his radical abortion policy? Or make allegiance to same-sex 'marriage' a condition of nonprofits' tax exemption? In the hostile environment created by this administration, Christians are spending precious time defending their faith, when they could be putting it in practice. Frankly, we’d love to focus on strengthening families and ending poverty — but the President won’t lay down his weapons of sexual radicalism long enough for us to try."Comment | Share
SHORT CUTS
On this date in history: The State of Israel is formally recognized in 1948.Upright: "If all whites tomorrow were to move to Canada and Europe, tell me how it would affect the black on black crime rate, how would it affect the out-of-wedlock births, how would it affect the spread of AIDS. How would it affect those issues? What I'm saying to Black America [is that] we must stop victimization. We must stop complaining about what white folks have done to us in the past. ... There's nothing more lethal than a good excuse for failure — institutional racism, whatever that means." —Center for Neighborhood Enterprise President Robert Woodson
Dezinformatsia: "The shock and tragedy of what happened in Philadelphia made a long-standing battle over Amtrak funding more raw and emotional. ... Democrats had asked for $2.5 billion, Republicans actually approved a cut to $1.1 billion." —NBC's Kelly O'Donnell ("Maybe if the train had been weighed down with big piles of taxpayer money, it wouldn't have been able to go so fast…" —National Review's Jim Geraghty)
Non Compos Mentis: "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me — roads, airports, bridges. I know how to build, pols only know how to talk! ... TRAIN WRECK just the beginning. Our roads, airports, tunnels, bridges, electric grid — all falling apart. I can fix for 20% of pols, & better." —Donald Trump on Twitter
Race bait: "If police were being killed with any type of routine sanction by the system or, worse off, being killed by the system, asking why people aren’t protesting their deaths would be an entirely fair and morally urgent question. But, of course, they’re not."—Adam Johnson in a Salon article titled, "Dear Facebook 'friends': No, we shouldn’t protest when police are killed"
And last... "Obama's solution for the Baltimore rioters: 'making investments so they can get the training they need to find jobs.' Yes. For example, training them not to loot the businesses where the jobs are." —Fred Thompson
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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.
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