Getting Harder To Be Catholic

Getting Harder To Be Catholic

             When challenged that this was the first step toward total confiscation, Swalwell insisted, “Wrong. Just assault weapons. Keep rifles, shotguns, pistols. Basically, the weapons that allow you to hunt, shoot for sport, and protect your house.” By the Left’s definition, “assault weapons” include many semiautomatic rifles. And as with nearly all Democrats these days, Swalwell reduces the Second Amendment to nothing more than hunting and home protection. Why the Founders went to such great lengths to codify a right to hunt alongside such essential liberties as free speech, religious liberty, and due process is never explained.
               One of his critics fired back, “So basically @RepSwalwell wants a war. Because that’s what you would get.” Swalwell responded, “And it would be a short war my friend. The government has nukes.”
               That’s right — Swalwell suggested that if you don’t comply with a “voluntary” gun buyback, the government will nuke you. “Trust the government. But also, we’ll nuke you if you resist.”
               Memo to Eric: The first shots of the first American Revolution were fired when the British government attempted to seize arms in Concord, Massachusetts. And that IS the reason the Second Amendment was written into our Constitution — to guarantee the citizens’ right to defend against government tyranny. Nevertheless, Swalwell insists, “You claiming you need a gun to protect yourself against the government is ludicrous.” Says the guy who threatened to nuke American citizens.
               For the record, Swalwell is assuming our military would wage a war against the American people at his bidding. Think again. The first hill they will take if so ordered will be Capitol Hill.  ~The Patriot Post  

Leftists Don't Want You to Believe Your Own Eyes

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by Media Editors:   Tucker Carlson discusses this with from former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright.  ~The Patriot Post  

 

VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQHN0sL5xvg

 

https://patriotpost.us/articles/59538?mailing_id=3880&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3880&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

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Seven Ways to Stop Democrats From Stealing Elections

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by Media Editors:   Can Republicans ever win enough votes to overcome the extra Democrat ballots that magically appear at the 11th hour … or 15th hour?  ~The Patriot Post  

 

VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPy0VU1EEH0

 

https://patriotpost.us/articles/59537?mailing_id=3880&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3880&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

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Endangered Syndrome

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by Media Editors:  The Daily Signal’s Kelsey Harkness writes:

             Get ready to watch one of the most heart-wrenching pro-life ad campaigns you’ve ever seen.
               It’s called “Endangered Syndrome,” and in it, children with Down syndrome dress up as endangered species—pandas, polar bears, and lions. Why?
               Because like endangered animals, in many parts of the world, children with Down syndrome are becoming critically endangered, if not extinct. The point is simple—if we care so much about endangered animals, shouldn’t we also care about endangered humans, too?
               In the U.S., at least 67 percent of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. In the U.K., that number is closer to 90 percent. In Denmark, it’s 98 percent.
               In Iceland, the prospect of people with Down syndrome becoming extinct is not hypothetical. From 2004 to 2013, fewer than four babies with the disorder were born each year, according to the campaign. The abortion rate there for babies with Down syndrome is effectively 100 percent.
               In 2017, CBS News infamously broadcasted a news report asking: “Is Iceland on track to eliminate Down syndrome?” The problem was, Iceland wasn’t eliminating Down syndrome; it was eliminating anyone who has it.  ~The Patriot Post  

VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIYPwP5Nec4

             As we said Friday, Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election have nothing on Democrat schemes to undermine election integrity.
               Clearly, Florida has some work to do to shore up election laws. But Georgia may be the more troublesome state. Abrams rose to prominence by running massive voter registration drives in order to flood Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office with perhaps fraudulent registrations, only to cry racism when Kemp, who also happened to be her gubernatorial opponent, worked to sort it out.
               That narrative is so key to her entire campaign that she isn’t going to let it go in defeat. She’s launching a political action committee called Fair Fight Georgia, which she will use to wage a legal battle. “Let’s be clear: This is not a speech of concession,” Abrams said. “In the coming days, we will be filing a major federal lawsuit against the state of Georgia for the gross mismanagement of this election and to protect future elections from unconstitutional actions.”
               In her speech announcing she wouldn’t actually concede but rather found “no further viable remedy,” Abrams also expounded her narrative: “Trust in our democracy relies on believing that there are good actors who are making this happen. And [Brian Kemp] was a horrible actor who benefited from his perfidy. That’s problematic. … Will I say this election was not tainted, was not a disinvestment and a disenfranchisement of thousands of voters? I will not say that.” Abrams admonished her supporters not to give up just because the process was “as rotten and rigged as you’ve always believed.”
               Furthermore, the abortion-supporting Abrams added, “Something being legal does not make it right.”
               Georgia voters best prepare for future election cycles to replay this manufactured grievance, as Democrats work to rally their urban Atlanta base with fairy tales of voter suppression in hopes of turning the Peach State blue.
               P.S. Remember when Democrats lambasted Donald Trump for musing that he might not accept the 2016 election results if scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton’s corruption and voter fraud won the day? Those same Democrats went on to create a two-year narrative of “Russian collusion” to undermine Trump’s victory. They’re using that playbook again in Georgia. “If [Abrams] had a fair election, she … would have won,”  scumbag/liar-Clinton declared. As usual, scumbag/liar-Clinton’s account of What Happened isn’t exactly reliable.  ~The Patriot Post  

             Not long ago, our nation gave serious consideration to such issues. Both Republicans and even some Democrats warned about a society in moral decay.
               Politico’s Tim Alberta writes, “From the 1960s through the turn of the century, pornography played a dominant role in the American political argument — its morality and legality, its restrictions and regulations, its implications and unintended consequences.”
               Yet despite these efforts, and after President Ronald Reagan assembled a Presidential Commission on Pornography in 1985 to warn that the pornography industry’s “days are numbered,” the movement seems to have lost its punch. Politicians and even religious leaders are now reluctant to open up the discussion.
               Certainly, the fight isn’t completely over. In 2015, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation hosted an anti-porn summit on Capitol Hill. The following year, Utah state senator Todd Weiler introduced a resolution calling pornography a “public health crisis,” and since that time, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, Florida, and Kansas have introduced similar measures. Moreover, the Republican Party added to its 2016 platform the statement that “pornography has become a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions.”
               Weiler, according to Alberta, “says American culture is past the point of no return when it comes to porn, and explains that he sponsored the measure for one reason — to start a conversation about protecting minors.” Weiler himself adds, “People sell all kinds of things on the Internet, but they don’t sell them to 15-year-olds because they would get in trouble — gun manufacturers, vaping companies, alcohol distributors. That’s not the case with porn websites.”
               On the other hand, pro-pornography libertarian Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes at Reason, “Plenty of porn-adjacent panics have sprung up since the 1990s as well, and plenty of political effort has gone into fighting them. So, yes, we might have fewer federal obscenity prosecutions, but we also have many more federal sex crimes on the books overall and no shortage of activity on their behalf. Since 2000, we’ve seen an ever-escalating federal war on prostitution, all sorts of panic (and prosecutions) over teen sexting, and dozens of bills introduced (in Congress and statehouses) to revenge porn and sextortion.”
               But the debate should be about more than merely stopping teens from sexting one another. American minds are inundated with pornography and experts in many fields of science and psychology know the damage that exposure can cause to our families and children. This includes increased stress on married couples that can lead to separation, divorce, or infidelity; a higher likelihood that a person may become addicted to porn; the degradation of women; the belief that emotion and commitment aren’t necessary in a relationship; an assumption that pornographic scenes are commonplace and acceptable; and a higher propensity to engage in casual sex that leads to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.
               In 1996, Judge Robert Bork wrote a New York Times bestseller titled Slouching Toward Gomorrah in which he cautioned about the moral decline of our civilization. He was harshly criticized for suggesting that censorship of violence and graphic sex might have to be considered in the future to prevent irreversible moral decline. Today, many of his fears have come to fruition.
               While censorship may not be the answer, we do need to rekindle a national discussion about morality. And we need to find ways to reverse the “anything goes” mentality and the moral relativism that has become the shameful norm in American society.  

~The Patriot Post

             It’s an issue where thoughtful conservatives have long favored necessary reforms, but one that our previous president addressed by, for example, using his pen and his phone to commute the prison terms of 46 drug offenders. Unfortunately, Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s proposals muddied the waters by pulling in unrelated issues such as pre-K schooling and the restoration of voting rights for felons.
               But thanks to a softening of public perception on crime, these reforms aren’t the “third rail” they once were. A simpler approach to prison reform, such as that advocated in a 2016 report by the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections, focuses more on rehabilitation and incentives to reduce a prison sentence through cooperative and contrite actions. But it must be combined with sentencing reform, lest the effects of good behavior be thwarted because a federal judge is forced to restore a draconian sentence, such as the Matthew Charles case we documented earlier this year.
               In a bitter irony, it was about the time Matthew Charles was re-sentenced that the House passed the First Step Act by a bipartisan 360-59 vote. But as Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella wrote at the time, the bill was only half a loaf: “Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Republican point man on criminal justice reform, [said] the bill is dead in the water unless it includes major reforms to federal sentencing law as well.”
               Fortunately, the Senate had a complementary sentencing reform bill already in the process, and over the interceding few months a deal was reached that includes these sentencing reforms in First Step. This revised proposal is a bill that President Donald Trump has already vowed to sign, and in the waning days of the 114th Congress he’s called on First Step to become a priority item. “So far, seven major police organizations, more than 2,700 faith and evangelical leaders, and hundreds of conservative organizations and leaders support this legislation,” said the White House in a press release.
               Not that he’ll get any credit for something that would help blacks. The Left, after all, has to maintain the narrative that he’s “racist.”
               But even with the support of the president and conservatives like Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee — the former assistant U.S. attorney recently pointed out abuses in the current systemas his reason for favoring the First Step proposal — the bill has some tough sledding ahead. “We don’t have a whole lot of time left,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “We need an actual proposal, then we would take a whip count, see where we stand, and then weigh it at that point against the other things that absolutely have to be accomplished.”
               Despite the addition of sentencing reform to the original bill, it will be hard to convince politicians who prefer to keep the present system as a political cudgel while stoking the fires of race and class envy.
               “Let’s just start with the hard truth about our criminal justice system,” complained probable 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth dinky-Warren back in August. “It’s racist. It is. And when I say our system, I mean all the way. I mean front to back.” (In her case, criminal justice reform takes a back seat to “LGBTQ equality.”) Fellow far-left progressive senators (and potential 2020 candidates) lowlife-Kamala Harris and scumbag-Cory Booker also came out against reform, co-signing a letter from Sen. scumbag-Dick Durbin back in October calling First Step “a step backwards,” and warning that “the recidivism reduction plan that is the core of the bill could actually worsen the situation in our federal prisons by creating discriminatory non-evidence-based policies.” However, scumbag-Booker has since read the tea leaves and yesterday announced his support of the compromise bill.
               With this Congress closing out its two-year run, and with Democrats poised to take control, this may be the last best opportunity for some sorely needed reform.  ~The Patriot Post

             Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, was not pleased with the proposition, pointing out the inherently uneven nature of the tax. He wrote, “We’re happy to pay our taxes. We just want to be treated fairly with respect to our peer companies, many of who are 2-10 [times] larger than us. Otherwise we don’t know how to practically grow in the city. That’s heartbreaking for us as we love [San Francisco] and want to continue to help build it.”
               Even Mayor London Breed came out against Prop C, which would be the largest tax hike in San Francisco’s history, though her concern stems more from questions regarding the law’s legality. Breed wrote, “If it passes, Proposition C will likely immediately become part of an ongoing lawsuit to invalidate it. … The City could be left balancing its budget with a $300 million unknown baked in.”
              According to California law, “special taxes” — taxes that fund a specific government program — must garner at least two-thirds of the vote in order to be legally instituted. Clearly, 60% of the vote is a sizable majority but it’s not two-thirds; thus, lawsuits are bound to be raised should the city go forward with the tax.
               But the economic impact may be more damaging to the city in the long run. City economists estimate that Prop C would cost San Fran $200 to $240 million in GDP annually and 14,700 to 17,500 jobs over the next two decades. How exactly will that make the city any more able to deal with the problem of vagrants on the streets? How about ending government-financed welfare programs and encouraging private individuals, churches, and nonprofits to engage the problem instead? True generosity can never be achieved through confiscated and redistributed wealth.  

~The Patriot Post

             However, mathematician Nic Lewis discovered a discrepancy shortly after the study went public. Lewis wrote that “a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.” He went on to reveal, “Just a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information, was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.”
               The authors, it turns out, acknowledged Lewis’s complaint. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography’s Ralph Keeling, a study partaker, responded, “When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there. We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly.” He also stated, “Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean. We really muffed the error margins.”
               While the acknowledgment is refreshing, Lewis remains circumspect. In an email to Reason magazine, he cautions:
               In general terms, if [Keeling] is only saying that they acknowledge that their study underestimated the uncertainty in their ocean heat uptake estimate, that is not enough. They should also acknowledge that another consequence of their mishandling of the treatment of uncertainty was that their central estimate of ocean heat uptake was overstated by approximately 30%. … I would hope that Nature will have any changes made by the authors to their assumptions examined carefully by peer reviewers who are experts in the same field as [the authors] as well as by statistically expert peer reviewers. However, the failure of the original peer review and editorial process to pick up the fairly obvious statistical problems in the original paper do not engender confidence in Nature’s approach.
               This is an important point. National Center for Atmospheric Research climatologist Gerald Meehl says, “This is how the process works. Every paper that comes out is not bulletproof or infallible. If it doesn’t stand up under scrutiny, you review the findings.” Fair enough. However, Lewis was able to discern the problem in “a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information.” This should create general alarm over other studies whose shaky underpinnings could be recklessly unseen or ignored. Indeed, few agenda-driven researchers are as deferential as Keeling. Either that, or the flaw was hidden in such plain sight that he had no choice but to accept correction.  ~The Patriot Post

             According to Investor’s Business Daily, “The International Energy Agency forecasts that the U.S. will account for 75% of the growth in global oil production through 2025.” This growth is coming on the heels of already impressive gains. “Crude oil production in the U.S. has climbed more than 67% in just the past six years,” Investor’s reports, adding that “the Department of Energy expects it will climb an additional 11% next year.” Keep in mind that U.S. oil production is already second to none. Our current daily yield of 11 million barrels is higher than both Saudi Arabia and Russia.
               The chief catalyst? Fracking. Yet as Investor’s notes, “It was never supposed to happen.” Recall back in 2008 when scumbag/liar-nObama asserted, “If we opened up and drilled on every single square inch of our land and our shores, we would still find only 3% of the world’s oil reserves — 3% for a country that uses 25% of the world’s oil.” This claim — which was regurgitated in slightly different forms all through scumbag/liar-nObama’s tenure — was obviously fabricated. Investor’s says that true U.S. oil reserves are sixty fold higher than scumbag/liar-nObama’s estimate.
               “Not all of that was recoverable at current prices,” Investor’s acknowledges. “But ‘recoverable’ is a highly flexible term. It’s based on oil prices and the cost of getting it out of the ground. The fracking revolution dramatically redefined the term recoverable because it made vast oil supplies accessible that once were once economically off-limits. So why would  scumbag/liar-nObama mislead the country throughout his presidency? Because he was determined to force the country to dump billions of taxpayer subsidies on ‘renewable’ energy, and needed a reason to justify it.”
               The issue here is not that renewable energy as a primary resource isn’t an admirable goal; it’s that scumbag/liar-nObama’s idea of how to properly nurture it was terribly misplaced. And his lying about the facts as a means to an end only added insult to injury. The solar company Solyndra alone squandered half a billion taxpayer dollars. Not only has oil always been far more abundant than naysayers claim, but taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to prop up whatever industry a president decides should be cultivated using powerful government levers.
               Similar to how oil extraction evolved into fracking, the private sector will eventually find its game-changing renewable energy breakthrough. In the meantime, more oil production means more government revenue. Shouldn’t Democrats, who want to roll out a plethora of very expensive, government-paid-for initiatives, be for that?  ~The Patriot Post