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Patriot Headlines | Grassroots Commentary Daily Digest
August 24, 2015
THE FOUNDATION"The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one — a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants." —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Gideon Granger, 1800TOP RIGHT HOOKSAmericans Headed for Paris Save the Day
Comment | Share EPA Knew of 'Blowout' Danger Ahead of River AccidentEarlier this month, the EPA accidentally dumped three million gallons of toxic sludge into the Animas River in Colorado. EPA Chief Gina McCarthy apologized, saying, "[W]e’ve committed to a full review of exactly what happened to ensure it can never happen again.” Well, documents released Friday indicate the EPA not only knows exactly what happened but it knew in advance what could happen. Prior to the accident, according to an EPA report from June 2014, "This condition has likely caused impounding of water behind the collapse. In addition, other collapses within the workings may have occurred creating additional water impounding conditions. Conditions may exist that could result in a blowout of the blockages and cause a release of large volumes of contaminated mine waters and sediment from inside the mine, which contain concentrated heavy metals." Some of the reports, however, were redacted by EPA officials, which itself leads to other questions. First among them is why it took the EPA 24 hours to notify anyone of the accident, especially given they knew the danger ahead of time. Finally, McCarthy gave the good news Friday that the "river is restoring itself." But when was the last time the EPA said that about an accident caused by a private company?Comment | Share Due to China's Economy, U.S. Markets Start to SlideFor the last few years, the Chinese economy, the second largest in the world, was a cornerstone of the world market. This year, the Chinese government wanted to expand the economy by 7%. But its economy went sideways from their communistic plans, and the world markets — and American investments — are riding a greased slide. When the markets opened this morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average first plummeted 1,000 points, but then rebounded about half that by the time we went to press. The markets are volatile — as Bloomberg political reporter Phil Mattingly pointed out, the Down dropped 780 points when the House first rejected the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008. This downturn has the potential to affect the U.S. economy for months, if the only reason being that the Federal Reserve Bank may walk away from its plan to raise interest rates later this year. Like it or not, the economy run by communist China and ours are linked. Fraser Howie, who co-wrote a book about the Chinese economy, told The Wall Street Journal, "The world is starting to realize China is not nearly as competent as thought, especially in the economic sphere where everyone gave it good grades." While it's tempting to sell, to get out of the stock market licking some heavy losses, Ron Lieber, who writes the Your Money column for The New York Times, notes that those who invest in the stock market play a long-term game. Bailing out after a shaky weekend will most likely erase years of growth that could have been regained by simply riding the markets out.Comment | Share FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSISA Swift Kick in the Ashley MadisonBy Arnold Ahlert
Ashley Madison, a website for adulterers, markets itself with the slogan, "Life is short. Have an affair.” The site recently had its database breached last month by hackers calling themselves the Impact Team (IT). Avid Life Media, which owns the Toronto-based cheating site, was given a simple message: shut down your site or "[w]e will release all customer records, profiles with all customers' secret sexual fantasies, nude pictures, and conversations and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.” IT allegedly wanted the site shut down for two reasons. First, the group claimed Ashley Madison was keeping customer data on file even when clients paid a $19 fee to have it removed. Second, IT insisted the company was creating fake female profiles for its nearly 90% male database. Ashley Madison insisted those claims were inaccurate and refused to close. Last Tuesday, IT fired its first salvo, posting a 10-gigabyte file containing 28 million unique email addresses. A second dump occurred Thursday when 20 gigabytes were released, outing a list of cheaters that included Vatican workers, Big Apple bureaucrats, an English parliamentarian and at least one reality-TV star. Other users were from Harvard and Yale, the United States Postal Service, NASA, IBM, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Amazon and the White House (and we know there's never been cheating there before). Ashley Madison released an amusing statement, calling the hack "an act of criminality” and an "illegal action against the individual members of [the Ashley Madison website], as well as any freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities.” No doubt describing would-be adulterers as “freethinking people” is in perfect alignment with today’s cultural norms, where adding a shiny new coat of morally relative paint to formerly execrable behavior is now standard operating procedure. Yet one suspects the victims of such freethinking, as in spouses and children, might be inclined towards more traditional values. An equally amusing statement was released by Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who promised us that the military services will be looking into the more than 15,000 email addresses potentially hosted on government and military servers because, he insisted, "conduct is very important. We expect good conduct on the part of our people.” The military is only part of the government equation. According to the Associated Press, which traced the accounts exposed by the hackers back to federal workers, connections to the site emanated from "two dozen Obama administration agencies, including the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Energy, Treasury, Transportation and Homeland Security. Others came from House or Senate computer networks.” More specifically, two assistant U.S. attorneys, an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President, a trio of Justice Department employees, including a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney, and two DHS employees, including a government hacker and a U.S. counterterrorism response team member, were exposed. As for good conduct, such aspirations stand in stark contrast to reality. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a top-level employee caught watching pornography on his work computer — which contained 7,000 pornographic files — has yet to be terminated because the “administrative process” for such removal can take as long as two years. At the VA, only one person has been fired more than a year after it was discovered veterans were literally dying before they could get appointments, even as waiting lists for those appointments were being manipulated. Thousands of government employees signing up for adultery? Don’t hold your breath waiting for the restoration of good conduct. In fact, 38 million people looking for love in all the wrong places suggests society is in deeper trouble than we might imagine. While adultery is an age-old problem, one is hard-pressed to imagine it has always been as widespread (at least in America) as the numbers here suggest. Moreover, there is a new element in play: complete randomness. One is not having an affair with someone they already know or met face to face but shopping for a commodity much like any other online “purchase.” Perhaps technologically enabled convenience makes such randomness inevitable, but also adds to the cheapening of values that is accelerating at a sickening pace. It should be noted that while this story has captured the public’s attention the latest Planned Parenthood (PP) sting video — revealing the harvesting of an intact brain from a baby boy whose heart was still beating following his abortion — remains largely below the mainstream media radar. That’s because in the midst of these barbarous revelations, 16 journalists were thrilled to accept PP’s Maggie Awards for Media Excellence. “Maggie” is short for PP founder Margaret Sanger, the Hitler-supporting racist who stated in 1921 that eugenics is "the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.” In a society where values are cheap and cheating is rampant, it stands to reason that being “unfaithful" to one’s readers is at least as easy as being unfaithful to one’s spouse. A nation marinating itself in cheap values also goes a long way towards explaining why Hillary Clinton — a proud Margaret Sanger award recipient in her own right — remains a viable presidential candidate. The journey between living a lie and supporting a congenital liar for president is perilously short. In fact, the template for such support was established by Bill Clinton, characterized as “a president with a rare ability to compartmentalize his psyche,” when an equally bankrupt media sought to minimize his adulterous affair with Monica Lewinsky. This is one American with no sympathy at all, not just for cheaters, but for those monumentally stupid enough give any information to a website promoting adultery. If there is one additional revelation emerging from this scandal, aside from increasing levels of cultural degradation it represents, it is a lesson: The term “secure website" is rapidly becoming an oxymoron. In other words, if one is going to cheat, one may have to do it the old-fashioned way — or maybe not at all. Comment | Share
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OPINION IN BRIEFPeggy Noonan: "Mrs. Clinton often quotes Eleanor Roosevelt to the effect that a woman is like a tea bag — you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water. But it’s been noted here that Hillary is the only tea bag that brings the hot water with her. There is always an air of furtive corruption; she dodges the press and then trolls them. [Last] week’s classic moment came when Ed Henry of Fox News persisted in asking whether she had wiped her private email server: 'What, like with a cloth or something?' For all her experience, she still evades and stonewalls awkwardly."Comment | Share SHORT CUTSThe Gipper: "We must always ask: Is government working to liberate and empower the individual? ... Or does it seek to compel, command and coerce people into submission and dependence?"Great question: "Businesses must 'follow the law' and bake a cake but cities can ignore law and be 'sanctuaries' for those who enter illegally?" —Dana Loesch "I absolutely do believe that [the Center for Medical Progress has] violated laws in terms of how they secured these videos. But the fraud is also in how they have presented them and in the editing. ... I'm not a lawyer — but everything is on the table when you look at these videos and the fraud and the conspiracy behind it." —Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens We're all just one big happy family: "Islamic State’s goal isn’t primarily about money or sex, but about sending the message that they are creating an Islamic utopia, following the practices of the era of the Prophet Muhammad. ... Our horror at this self-conscious neo-medievalism should teach us a lesson about the evolution of our beliefs and what it means to be modern. Begin with the sober acknowledgment that we aren’t light years ahead of Islamic State — more like a century and a half." —Harvard University professor Noah Feldman Village Idiots: "[The Hillary Clinton email scandal] is, in fact, manufactured partly by a press that's bored and partly by the Republicans. Here's the deal. She did not break any rules, she did not break any policy. ... She can't be blamed for this. So I look at this as the usual press frenzy, the pack journalism, and I think it'll go away, because there's no sense to it." —Howard Dean Missing the point: "We pretend with the election of Barack Obama that we’re in some kind of post-racial society, and, of course, you know, we’re not! The Onion magazine got it right when he was inaugurated. It said ‘Black man given worst job in world.’" —documentary filmmaker Ken Burns Late-night humor: "According to a new survey, 17 percent of adult smartphone owners use auto-deleting apps like Snapchat and Wickr. 'Yeah, uh, that’s what happened!' said Hillary Clinton." —Seth Meyers Comment | Share 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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