Right Analysis | Right Hooks | Right Opinion
Patriot Headlines | Grassroots Commentary

Daily Digest

November 23, 2015

THE FOUNDATION

"Measures which serve to abridge the free competition of foreign articles, have a tendency to occasion an enhancement of prices." —Alexander Hamilton, 1791

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Britain's Climate Change: Slashing Wind, Solar Subsidies

Subsidies are gone with the wind

Next Monday, many of the world's nations will meet in Paris to begin discussing ways to hamstring their economies to fight global warming. To sanitize Joe Biden, the summit is a big deal. For the most part, governments want to cut back emissions severely, and the best way to do that is by making energy more expensive so people use less of it. Remember, Barack Obama promised his policies would cause electricity rates to "necessarily skyrocket." But leftists also primarily target particular sources of electricity — namely coal and any other fossil fuel. Wind and solar are all the rage among ecofascists. So it's a somewhat humorous coincidence that just before the festivities kick off in Paris, leaders in London are slashing subsidies for wind and solar, favoring instead a push toward natural gas. The Washington Post is apoplectic: "[T]he decision to cut hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of support for renewable energy at home, with a planned 87 percent reduction in subsidies for solar power, threatens to undermine Britain’s international authority, while showing just how difficult it can be for a developed nation to break a centuries-long addiction to fossil fuels." Or perhaps it could be simple economics. We support an all-of-the-above approach to energy production so long as it's the free market doing it. If the economics of wind and solar require massive subsidies to even hope to compete with traditional energy sources — and they currently do — then basic economics is going to eventually rule the day.
As a final note, it's worth mentioning that Britain's wind farms often do more damage than good. Just saying.
Comment | Share

Louisiana Goes Blue. Or Does It?

Most reports suggest Louisiana Republicans suffered another blow this weekend. Not only did Governor Bobby Jindal recently end his presidential campaign, meaning his political talents won't be brought to the White House, but a conservative won't be filling his vacated seat. On Saturday, Republican Sen. David Vitter dropped the gubernatorial election to John Bel Edwards, a state Democrat lawmaker, by a 12-point margin — 56% to 44%. The sting hurts even more considering Vitter was long believed to be a shoo-in. Ultimately, however, a prostitution scandal from 2007 and a well-resonating message from Edwards derailed Vitter's chances.
Which brings us to a few critical points. This wasn't, as some newspapers surmise, a "Republican loss" so much as it was a reflection on values. As Hot Air notes, "If you dropped [Edwards] anywhere else in the country he'd be a Republican." Indeed, The New York Times describes Edwards as "a Catholic social conservative from a family of rural law enforcement officers who graduated from West Point and served eight years of active duty in the Army." The Wall Street Journal similarly writes, "Mr. Edwards, a former Army Ranger, neutralized the usual GOP cultural advantages by opposing abortion and defending gun rights."
We can think of a few worse candidates — like Senator Vitter. Commentator Erick Erickson points out, "Vitter was a terrible, terrible candidate. ... Republican primary voters want an actual conservative and at this point would rather go down fighting than sell out to candidates posing as Democrat-lite. Conservatives can win, but not with guys like Sen. David Vitter as their standard bearer." Most importantly, he adds, "[R]unning against Barack Obama with nothing to offer has to be done with good candidates, not men accused of paying for prostitutes' abortions."
That's not to say Edwards is a bona fide conservative leader. The Journal notes that Edwards "was a favorite of teachers unions and the plaintiffs bar, and we'll see if he now does their bidding to roll back school choice and block much-needed tort reform." That said, Republicans demonstrated their frustration with establishment incumbents and voters chose someone they believe to be the most qualified leader, regardless of that candidate's party affiliation.
Comment | Share

Princeton Ousts Woodrow Wilson

Yet another student protest, yet another racist thrown under the bus. Except this one actually was racist — he just also happened to be a Democrat president and a father of the "progressive" movement. "The Black Justice League at Princeton had demanded that the president acknowledge the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson and remove his name from buildings on campus, mandate 'cultural competency' courses for all faculty and staff, and provide cultural space for black students on campus," The Washington Post reports. "President Christopher Eisgruber immediately agreed to the idea of a cultural space Wednesday night, but declined to sign the demands and promised to continue talking with students about the other ideas."
Wilson believed in a malleable Constitution and a virtually all-powerful executive. In fact, he was in many ways the originator of the elite administrative state in which know-it-all bureaucrats make thousands of decisions that ~~solve problems in~~ wreak havoc on our lives. He was also quite a racist. But as David Harsanyi writes, "Like most progressives of his era, Wilson wasn't merely a common racist, he embraced the pseudo-scientific eugenics that would haunt millions. After his election, he didn't only say terrible things — 'There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro's place in the corn field' — he institutionalized racism in the federal government, segregating the civil service in 1913. He personally fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors appointed to federal jobs, while his postmaster general and Treasury secretary segregated their departments. He's the only president that I know of who's ever celebrated the Ku Klux Klan in the White House."
But you know something? We'll bet these same student protesters are big fans of Planned Parenthood, which was founded by a eugenicist by the name of Margaret Sanger. Heck, Planned Parenthood still gives out media awards with her name on them. She and Wilson were peas in a pod on the issue, but you won't hear that at Princeton.
Comment | Share

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS

Attacking a Message as Corrupt as Its Messengers

By Arnold Ahlert

In just over a week, the world endured three major Islamic terrorist attacks in Beirut, Paris and Mali. Be it the Islamic State or an al-Qaida offshoot, the current reality reveals that Barack Obama’s 2012 oft-stated campaign assertion that jihadis were “on the run” was as fraudulent as the commander in chief himself. In fact, there is only one thing more fraudulent than Obama, his equally feckless administration and the Democrat Party’s leading presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. That would be the progressive ideology that animates all of them. And it's about time every GOP candidate for president made that reality crystal clear.
Make no mistake: Progressivism has metastasized to the point where it is no longer tethered to common sense and common decency. Thus we have "safe-space revolutionaries” attempting to turn college campuses into speech-suppressing gulags where progressive orthodoxy must not be challenged. We have a Democrat Party totally embracing the rampant lawlessness associated with illegal aliens. And we have the insidious arrogance of a chief executive who insists that the Islamic State is “contained,” even as its increasing lethality becomes undeniable.
Attacking Obama or Clinton personally may be somewhat effective. Absent the larger ideological context, however, it is far too easy for progressives, with an ample assist from their media apparatchiks, to dismiss those attacks as bigoted, xenophobic, Islamophobic or a host of other epithets designed to end the conversation. Republicans must illuminate the unmistakable nexus between unfettered immigration, open borders, sanctuary cities, the inability to call Islamic terror by its proper name, the desire to import improperly vetted “refugees” from terror hotspots, and the indoctrination occurring on college campuses. All of them are pieces of the same progressive jigsaw puzzle that must be put together so Americans can clearly see how determined the American Left is to fundamentally transform the nation.
In that context, it is no accident the Obama administration not only countenanced a two-year “surge” at our Southern border, but the deliberate dispersal of illegals throughout the entire country. Like the Syrians progressives would currently like to bring to America, they too were characterized as “refugees” fleeing crime and poverty in places like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, despite the reality that crime and poverty have been endemic in those nations for decades. When those illegals gained entry, the CDC waived the disease-screening process required for legal immigrants, and the media dismissed as “coincidental” an outbreak of the EV-D68 virus that killed and crippled American children — an outbreak 300 times larger than the infection rate seen in the 33-year period from 1970 to 2003.
This time we're being assured that Syrians — who will also be dispersed to 180 different communities — have endured a serious vetting process, despite statements to the contrary by FBI Director James Comey, FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach and USCIS Associate Director for the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate Matthew Emrich. Yet just like it was with the illegals, anyone who dissents from admitting people who can’t be checked is not only a bigot, etc., but lacks “compassion.”
Compassion? How about compassion for Americans and their legitimate concerns? And how about credibility? Do the words, “If you like your doctor, etc.” or “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video” ring a bell?
Even more to the point, how about taking responsibility for one’s policies? Does anyone seriously believe progressives would countenance putting illegal aliens and refugees in camps while they were processed and vetted? They know 48% of illegals skip their deportation hearings, and they know that terrorists might be embedded with refugees, because more than 100,000 Somali refugees have been allowed to emigrate to this nation — and more of them have left to fight with al-Shabaab and Islamic State terrorists than any other ethnic group. Yet is there the slightest doubt progressives would characterize such effective control of both groups as “inhumane?"
Perhaps they might have an ounce of credibility if every “compassionate” politician willing to accept Syrian refugees would pledge to resign immediately if even one of those refugees engages in terrorist activity.
But they won’t, any more than the phalanx of progressive politicians and law enforcement officials who should be fired or impeached for supporting the 340 sanctuary cities that operate with their blessings in open defiance of federal immigration law. Sanctuary cities that, in less than a year, released 9,295 alien offenders Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was seeking to deport. That group included 62% with “significant prior criminal histories or other public safety concerns,” and 58% with prior felony charges or convictions. Moreover, 2,320 were rearrested for new crimes within nine months.
The Obama administration doubled down on that insanity. In 2013 and 2014 ICE released more than 66,000 criminal aliens, with convictions including 414 kidnappings, more than 11,000 rapes or other sexual assaults and 395 homicides.
Tellingly, the same progressives who refuse to label the Islamic State and other terrorist groups “Islamic” also get indignant when the term "illegal aliens" is used. So much so that leftist media organizations like ABC and the Associated Press have actually banned the term completely. This puts them in perfect alignment with their speech-suppressing allies on college campuses and the 40% of Millennials overall who would support censoring speech that offends minorities.
In short, progressives are determined to control the narrative, even if it means undermining Rule of Law, endangering the nation and gutting the Constitution. Thus it becomes incumbent on Republicans to fight back with a narrative of their own in a manner just as hard-balled as their “by any means necessary” adversaries.
A bankrupt ideology with adherents more willing to preserve multiculturalism and political correctness than the lives of their fellow Americans is perched at the edge of the abyss. Push it over, Republicans. The fate of the nation may very well depend on it.
Comment | Share

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Rich Lowry: The President's Sanctimony on Syrian Refugees
Peggy Noonan: Uncertain Leadership in Perilous Times
Ed Feulner: Caving in to Crybullies

For more, visit Right Opinion.

TOP HEADLINES

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report

OPINION IN BRIEF

Rich Lowry: "It’s remarkable that the president feels justified in lecturing anyone on humanitarianism. He has stood by while Syria has descended into a hellish chaos, and hasn’t betrayed any guilty conscience. There are roughly 10 million Syrians who are refugees (4.2 million) or internally displaced (6.5 million). At 10,000 over the next year, we are offering to take .1 percent of them. One wonders when Obama begin caring so much about Syrians. If you put those 10,000 Syrian refugees back in their native country and let them get gassed, barrel-bombed, shelled or shot, would he bat an eye, or would they just be part of the ever-growing casualty count? The Syrian refugees are most useful to the president as a symbol of his alleged cosmopolitanism and of the supposed backwardness of his opposition. ... According to immigration expert Jessica Vaughan, since 2009 we have accepted 70 percent of all resettled United Nations-designated refugees worldwide. ... Of course, that we are discussing a Syrian refugee crisis at all is another symptom of the president’s abject failure in the Middle East. So, please, Mr. President, spare us your sanctimony and condescension.”
Comment | Share

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: "Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions."
Upright: "The public is appropriately alarmed about exactly who we might be letting in. It would be easy, and commonsensical, to follow their prompting and pause the refugee program, figure out how to screen those seeking entrance more carefully, and let in only the peaceable. If that takes time, it takes time. If Mr. Obama had wisdom as opposed to pride and a desire to smack around the GOP ... he would recognize the refugee issue as a distraction from the most urgent priorities." —Peggy Noonan
Braying Jackass: "A divided court of appeals has upheld an unprecedented nationwide injunction against implementing a federal immigration enforcement policy of great national importance, and has done so in violation of established limits on the judicial power.” —Solicitor General Donald Verrilli on Obama's appeal of his immigration order to the Supreme Court (Verrilli is trying to defend unconstitutional executive overreach.)
Alpha Jackass: “[The GOP] is a party that rejects science and refuses to understand that climate change is real. I understand if you stand up to the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry that you’ll lose your campaign contributions. [Climate change] is already causing devastating problems all over this world. To hell with the fossil fuel industry. Worry more about your children and your grandchildren than your campaign contributions.” —Bernie Sanders
Non Compos Mentis: "Republicans care more about kowtowing to the NRA than preventing terrorists from legally buying assault rifles and explosives like the ones used in the Paris attacks here in America." —Harry Reid
Demo-gogues: “Right now, our political system does not work as well as it should. And what I would say to young leaders, what sort of pitfalls should you avoid, I would say, number one, it is very important to avoid any political system where money overwhelms ideas.” —Barack Obama (Says the guy whose last campaign topped $1 billion in donations.)
Late-night humor: "In his recent interview with GQ, President Obama said that he'd like to own an NBA team after he leaves the White House. You'll know it's Obama's team when it takes the players five years to pass something." —Jimmy Fallon
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.

Monday, November 23, 2015

THE PATRIOT POST 11/23/2015