Tuesday, September 1, 2015

THE PATRIOT POST 09/01/2015

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September 1, 2015   Print

THE FOUNDATION

"It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government." —Mercy Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Alaska Is More Than a Photo Op

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The Coast Guard Cutter HEALY (WAGB - 20). Photo courtesy USCG
Barack Obama has no long-term, consistent strategy for Alaska. Well, other than his climate agenda. He's visiting The Last Frontier this week to plug for an even more aggressive approach to "man-made" global warming, as he spoke before an international conference in Anchorage Monday. As The Washington Post pointed out, Obama simply used the wilderness as a visual aid for his arguments. Ahead of the conference, titled GLACIER, NASA said sea levels are rising faster than expected, and Obama matched that level of alarm. "We're not moving fast enough," Obama warned. "None of the nations represented here are moving fast enough." Obama's comments quickly descended into adolescent sniping, as he completely belittled skeptics to his regulation-heavy, Big Government "solutions" to climate change. "The time to heed the critics and the cynics and the deniers is past," he continued. "The time to plead ignorance is surely past. Those who want to ignore the science, they are increasingly alone. They're on their own shrinking island."
If Obama wants to talk about shrinking islands, he should reconsider the threat Russia poses in Arctic waters. Just like the situation in Ukraine, Russia is pushing boundaries in the Arctic, trying to grab the natural resources that lie under the ice. Currently, Russia operates 40 icebreakers and is making 11 more. The U.S.? It has only two and Obama proposes the U.S. buy one more. But Obama ignores the long-term significance of Alaska and its waters for our nation's security and energy policies to yammer about the temperature and to take a hike with reality TV star Bear Grylls.
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About That Rad New Psych Study You Heard Of...

Apparently, the psych science is not settled. The Guardian reports, "Of 100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication test." There are many reasons why an experiment might fail to replicate, but more than this the study has highlighted some issues with academic publishing and modern science. University of Virginia psychology professor Brian A. Nosek, who led the effort to reproduce the experiments, told the Guardian, "The key caution that an average reader should take away is any one study is not going to be the last word. Science is a process of uncertainty reduction, and no one study is almost ever a definitive result on its own." And while the media might want to breathlessly report on a study that displays some kind of psychological quirk, the real scientific process is much more involved than one study. Climate alarmists take note...
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Think Canada Is a Model? Think Again.

Some presidential candidates have pointed to Canada as a model for things like single-payer health care. (That would be Donald Trump, for those keeping score.) Of course, to keep a single-payer system running costs a lot of money, and that money has to come from somewhere. Or nearly everywhere, as it turns out. Reuters reports, "Canadians spend more on taxes than on food, clothing and shelter combined, according to a report released on Thursday, as increases in an average family's tax bill have outpaced the cost of basic necessities in the last five decades." The Frasier Institute report says the average Canadian family brings in about $60,000 (in U.S. dollars), of which 36% goes to cover basic needs and 42% is confiscated by the government. Fifty years ago, those numbers were 56% and 33%, respectively. Oh, and by the way, Canada is now arguably in recession. Call us old fashioned, but the new model doesn't sound like the one best for America.
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FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS

Lives Matter

By Nate Jackson
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Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth
Deputy Darren Goforth was gunned down at a Harris County, Texas, gas station Friday evening when he stopped to fill up his squad car. He was 47. The execution appeared unprovoked, though there is an unmistakable angle of racism and anti-cop hatred.
Security footage shows the murderer, who is black, come up behind and shoot 15 rounds into Goforth, who is white. Law enforcement has a theory to why the killer did it. In a press conference, an obviously emotional Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman pinned the blame for this murder on the angry rhetoric surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests. “This rhetoric has gotten out of control,” Hickman said. “We’ve heard ‘black lives matter,’ ‘all lives matter.’ Well, cops' lives matter, too. So why don’t we just drop the qualifier and just say ‘lives matter’?”
To be sure, blacks aren't the only ones killing law enforcement personnel. A deranged white man in Louisiana brutally murdered a state patrol officer last weekend. Fourteen officers were killed in August by perpetrators of different races.
Barack Obama condemned the "completely unacceptable" targeting of police officers as "an affront to civilized society," and he promised to "continue to highlight the uncommon bravery that police officers show in our communities every single day." Yet he has also driven some of the anti-police sentiment with his irresponsible rhetoric.
Late last year, after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Obama and then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched the 21st Century Policing Task Force, which Mark Alexander labeled "a $265 million charade based on the underlying assumption that cops generally have racial biases."
They claimed their goal is an “honest conversation” about disparate treatment of blacks by law enforcement. "When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that is a problem," Obama said then. "And it’s my job as president to help solve it."
After reading the Justice Department's report on Ferguson, it's hard to conclude there isn't a real problem in at least that police department, and likely many others. Police are human, after all. But, as Alexander also noted, "This 'problem' of 'not being treated equally' is Obamaspeak for 'cops are racists.'" It's far too broad a brush.
To further illustrate those assumptions, Obama said, "A combination of bad training [and] departments that really are not trying to root out biases, or tolerate sloppy police work; a combination in some cases of folks just not knowing any better, and, in a lot of cases, subconscious fear of folks who look different — all of this contributes to a national problem that’s going to require a national solution.”
So while it's appropriate and welcome for Obama to express outrage at Goforth's murder, it's a stark contrast to his previous rhetoric.
Indeed, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke blasted Obama, saying, "I'm disgusted there's been no sense of urgency by the president of the United States over these cop killings. Look, he breathed life into this anti-cop sentiment, this cop hatred, and he stands by as it goes on. He went out and visited a federal prison, for heaven's sake — federal prisoners and he pardoned 46 of them."
That said, it goes too far to lay the blame for these murders squarely on Obama's shoulders. Each cop killer is responsible for his own actions. To argue differently falls into the same line of thinking that causes leftists to blame Sarah Palin's Facebook page for the killer in Phoenix who wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords, or the race-baiting hoards that blamed a flag for the Charleston murders.
But there's an unmistakable thread of racial hate being fomented among blacks by the nation's first black president — a man whose election was supposed to herald a new age of racial harmony. Instead, our cities are suffering race riots reminiscent of the 1960s and tension between blacks and law enforcement is at a boiling point. A deranged and angry black homosexual just murdered two white journalists on live TV last week because he followed through on hateful racist sentiment.
For some blacks in the "Black Lives Matter" movement, this is about revenge — revenge for real oppression like slavery and Jim Crow but also every perceived slight or different outcome.
Just two weeks before Goforth was murdered, armed Black Panthers shouted, "We will start creeping up on you in the darkness" — exactly what Goforth's killer did. Another Black Lives Matter rally featured protesters chanting, "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon." An LA "life coach" tweeted after Goforth's murder "this is what justice looks like." We can only hope such abhorrent ideas are held by a tiny minority.
What justice looks like is proper punishment for crimes. What justice looks like is cooperation between law enforcement and the general population. What justice looks like is no longer aborting more black babies than are born alive. An astounding 16 million preborn black lives have been snuffed out since 1973. Do those black lives matter?
The bottom line is, as Sheriff Hickman put it, lives matter. But in a culture of death, that's a more difficult message to get through than it should be.
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MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

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TOP HEADLINES

OPINION IN BRIEF

Stephen Moore: "Famously in the 1920s, the U.S. Department of Interior projected less than a few decades' worth of recoverable oil in the United States. Jimmy Carter declared in 1980 that by 2000 we’d be nearly out of oil — running on empty. Last month, the Department of Energy reported that the U.S. hit a new energy milestone: We produced 9.52 million barrels a day. That was very close to the highest output level in recorded history. So much for running out. Something else has happened in recent weeks that almost no one — least of all President Obama — would have predicted. The price of oil fell below $40 a barrel. Adjusted for inflation, that makes oil cheaper today than at almost anytime in history. Adjusted for wages, we work less to buy gasoline and oil today than nearly ever before. ... The reason we never run out of 'finite' resources is that human ingenuity runs forward at a far faster pace than the rate we use up oil, gas or food. ... Then why do we listen to the same crowd of doomsayers who still say we are running out of oil or that the earth is going to heat up into a fireball? Their credibility and their 'scientific consensus' have rarely been right. They are like the boy who cries wolf over and over. ... Paul Ehrlich once said that one thing the world will never run out of 'is idiots.' Alas, he was right for once."
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SHORT CUTS

Insight: "To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything." —Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)
Upright: "Only weeks after a hack exposed the names and other confidential information about Ashley Madison’s mostly male clientele, it’s hard to see how the company can recover. By contrast, Hillary Clinton remains the Democratic Party’s likely 2016 nominee for president, even though ... she conducted State Department business over her private email. ... Seems the market for adulterers has more exacting standards than the market for a Democratic presidential nominee." —William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal
Observations: "Hillary Clinton actually presents two distinct but mutually reinforcing problems for the Democrats: 1) She’s a lousy politician and 2) she represents a Washington establishment and corrupt status quo that is under siege by populists on the left and the right. Subbing-in Biden might fix some of the first problem but it would do little to fix the second. Any way you slice it, the fact that Biden is the best the Democrats can come up with is a perfect illustration of the damage Obama has done to his party." —Jonah Goldberg in National Review
Fratricidal infighting: “This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before. ... We are the Democratic Party, not the undemocratic party!” —Martin O’Malley complaining about the lack of debates
Gun grabbers: “I do not accept the fact that I have been weak on this issue. In fact, I have been strong on this issue. And in fact, coming from a rural state which has almost no gun control, I think I can get beyond the noise and all of these arguments and people shouting at each other, and come up with real, constructive gun control legislation which most significantly gets guns out of the hands of people who should not have them.” —Bernie Sanders
The wrong question: "Is anything — anything — likely to happen when it comes to guns given the power of the NRA in the country?" —Fox News host Megyn Kelly
And last... "Right now we have a president who just flew 4,200 miles from Washington, D.C., to Alaska to rename a mountain, who sits down for interviews with internet stars famous for bathing in cereal, and prances all over the White House with a selfie stick. Is a Kanye [West] presidency really that much of a step down for us and our culture?" —IJReview's Stephen Miller
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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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