THE FOUNDATION

“[T]he executive and legislative branches of the national government depend upon, and emanate from the states. Every where the state sovereignties are represented; and the national sovereignty, as such, has no representation.” —Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

ARMED FORCES DAY

Tomorrow is Armed Forces Day. We remain the land of the free because these Patriots — American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coastguardsmen — have stood bravely in harm’s way and remain on post today. For this, we, the American people, offer our heartfelt thanks and prayers for you and your families.

The Patriot Post is proud to be one of the nation’s leading advocates for our Armed Forces and their mission. We do this by providing countless Americans with the right perspective on that mission and the demanding tasks our military personnel have carried out with unfailing courage and professionalism. In addition, we support our warriors through efforts such as Operation Shield of Strength — from which we have now distributed more than one million dog tags — ourSupport and Defend pages, and The Patriot Post Shop, which carries an extensive collection of products bearing official military insignia, the proceeds of which support our mission of service to our Armed Forces.

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Obama’s Nuke Deal Gets Loads of Skepticism

Once Barack Obama signs his deal with Iran, that’s it. Re-imposing sanctions or striking down the nuclear deal will become very hard — even if Iran does weaponize its nuclear program. On Thursday, Congress passed its resolution watering down its role in treaty negotiation by requiring a 30-day review of Obama’s treaty before voting on it. Essentially, Obama’s deal can be struck down only by veto-proof majorities in Congress. Meanwhile, Russia announced it will not allow an automatic snapback of sanctions if Iran is found stuffing fissile material into missiles, and it can use its position as one of the veto votes on the UN Security Council to prevent such a diplomatic move. By doing so, Russia is currying favor with Iran.

Finally, Obama hosted leaders of countries in the Persian Gulf at Camp David Thursday, trying to assure them that this nuclear deal is in their best interest. But after reading the joint statement released after the meeting, Charles Krauthammer said, “That was a prepared statement for a summit that is meant to assure the Gulf Arabs that we’re not selling them out. That was a sellout announcement. … They should be terrified.” Another win for Obama.

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The DOJ Is on a Mission to Stop Racist Pollution

Under the current administration, we’ve come to expect an ideologically activist Department of Justice that seeks out instances of pollution and racism and acts accordingly. But when the DOJ looks for instances where pollution itself is racist, the department veers into injustice. National Review’s Roger Clegg pointed out a DOJ publication that touted this approach in its spring edition. According to a memorandum issued by Bill Clinton during his administration: “In accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, each Federal agency shall ensure that all programs or activities receiving Federal financial assistance that affect human health or the environment do not directly, or through contractual or other arrangements, use criteria, methods, or practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin.” That means if an organization receiving federal funds — like a city government — needs to somehow affect the environment, it needs to justify that it’s not racist to boot. Justice thus assumes that creating a landfill or creating a facility that deals with harmful chemicals in a certain location may have racist intent when in fact the intent may be purely economic. Furthermore, labeling neighborhoods “black” or “white” fails to take into account their evolution, as when they undergo white flight or gentrification. But never mind all this when social justice – rather than colorblind justice – is the DOJ’s ultimate goal. More…

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No, Antarctica Is Not Experiencing Rapid Ice Melt

Antarctic sea ice is so expansive that researchers are exploring ways to avoid moreembarrassing mishaps. Writing in The Daily Caller, Michael Bastasch says, “50 scientists have gathered in Tasmania to discuss more accurate ways to predict Antarctic sea ice levels so researchers don’t get stuck in ice pack when traveling southward.” So it was richly ironic when CBS News reported this week that “Antarctica is melting from above and below.” The article, which documents a new alarming study on how global warming is supposedly eating away at the giant ice cap, begins with an outrageous claim — “It’s no secret that ice shelves in Antarctica are thinning” — and warns that “warming air temperatures and warmer ocean currents together could explain why the Antarctic Peninsula’s floating ice shelves are losing volume and becoming more vulnerable to collapse.” The truth? As of Wednesday, sea ice extent was breaking the previous record high set just last year, according to data from the National Snow & Ice Data Center, and the trend for decades now has been a steady increase in areal ice coverage. In fairness, the exception is the western portion of the continent, where ice is lagging behind the 1981-2010 average. But averages are based on the whole, not cherry-picked portions of the data. This is nothing more than selective outrage.

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FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS

The Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda Approach to Foreign Policy

By Michael Swartz

As a leading GOP presidential candidate and brother of the former president, Jeb Bush had to know he was going to be asked about Iraq sometime during the campaign. That “sometime” came this week as Megyn Kelly of Fox News asked him whether, “knowing what we know now,” he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq. Jeb used the answer to both speculate that Hillary Clinton would have done (in fact, did) the same thing and declare that, “if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.”

The blowback was predictable, and he quickly walked back his answer, insisting he’d misheard the question. He did seem to answer the “knowing what we knew then” version. Now he says flatly, “I would not have gone into Iraq.”

Needless to say, there’s been a lot of debate about the fitness of the younger Bush’s initial answer. Conservatives ponder whether he needed a better one, made “a rookie mistake,” or was exactly right. There are also those who thought the question itself was “completely stupid.”

Stupid or not, the question was bound to come up as a result of the ongoing mess we’re dealing with in the Middle East, and we now have over a decade of hindsight at our disposal. There weren’t the quantities of weapons of mass destruction everyone — even those who quickly pretended otherwise — originally believed were in Iraq. Intelligence estimates at the time were all George W. Bush had to go on, not “what we know now.” There was also Saddam Hussein’s established record of atrocities, belligerence and threats to U.S. interests. So, we eliminated a bloody dictator, the byproduct of which convinced Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi that he should abandon his own efforts at a WMD program.

Obviously, the “knowing what we know now” question is valid only as a hypothetical, since we cannot turn back the hands of time. But if we’re playing the hindsight game, we should also consider what the consequences of inaction might have been. Might Saddam Hussein now be a nuclear-powered menace? And might the region have already experienced its first nuclear calamity? We can only deal with the here and now, and the window of opportunity for taking action isn’t generally unlimited.

Indeed, as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger observed, “The analyst can allot whatever time is necessary to come to a clear conclusion; the overwhelming challenge to the statesman is the pressure of time. The analyst runs no risk. If his conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise. The statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable. The analyst has available to him all the facts; he will be judged on his intellectual power. The statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time that he is making them; he will be judged by history on the basis of how wisely he managed the inevitable change and, above all, by how well he preserves the peace.”

Surely the U.S. made irretrievable mistakes during the Bush years — primarily not fighting hard enough to win decisively quickly. The surge was all well and good, but it came years too late. And it likely will be many more years before any solution benefiting U.S. interests will take hold in the cradle of civilization. We didn’t call this the “Long War” for naught.

One thing that’s painfully evident from the last six years, however, is that Barack Obama is continuing to make irretrievable mistakes in Iraq. He squandered American blood and treasurewith his foolish pullout, and then tried to revise the story by blaming George W. Bush. History will be the judge of his results, and so far the progress has been lacking to the point where we are nearly back at square one — albeit with different tyrants in charge. Would ISIL have arisen from al-Qaida’s ashes if Obama hadn’t abandoned Iraq?

That brings us to another “what if” question that begs to be asked of the American people: If we knew in 2008 what we know now, would we have elected such a woefully inept and inexperienced commander in chief?

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TODAY AT PATRIOTPOST.US

• ANALYSIS: An Impoverished Discussion About Poverty
• Vatican Recognizes ‘State of Palestine’ to Protect Christians
• John Bolton Is Not Running for President
• Stephanopoulos Just as Secretive as the Clinton Foundation
• House Passes Bill Banning Abortion After 20 Weeks

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

• Charles Krauthammer: Save Obama (on Trade)
• Tony Perkins: Left in Agony on Pain Ban
• Linda Chavez: Pope Francis' Recognition of a Palestinian State Is Puzzling
• Mona Charen: Third-Class Temperament
• Jonah Goldberg: Democrats Get a Taste of Obama’s Arrogance
• Michelle Malkin: ObamaCare Exchanges on Life Support

For more, visit Right Opinion.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Charles Krauthammer: “Fast-track authority allows an administration to negotiate the details of a trade agreement and then come to Congress for a non-amendable up-or-down vote. In various forms, that has been granted to every president since Franklin Roosevelt. … Obama wants a deal. But he has utterly failed to bring his party along. It’s not just because for six years he’s treated all of Congress with disdain and prefers insult to argument when confronted with opposition, this time from Democrats like Elizabeth Warren. It’s also because he’s expended practically no political capital on the issue. … This is the Republicans' chance to demonstrate that they can think large by advancing an important strategic objective — giving substance to Obama’s as yet stillborn ‘pivot to Asia.’ I wouldn’t mind seeing Obama sunk by his own arrogance in intraparty fratricide over trade. But the issue is bigger than Obama. In 20 months, he will be gone. Asia will not. And it will get away from us if Republicans don’t step up and step in where Obama and the Democrats have failed.”

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SHORT CUTS

Insight: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” —Author Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Non Compos Mentis: “If Freddie Gray’s killers walk you will see cops being killed in broad daylight. Many are being killed now. In self defense blacks must kill. If you can find the snake that bit you in the garden, any old snake in blue will do! Kill in self defense the one in blue who’s killing you!” —Dr. Mauricelm-Lei, a Black Panther and Ferguson organizer who describes himself as a “psychotherapist”

The annals of the absurd: “[I]f you look at the red-letter version of the Bible, Jesus was probably to the left of the Democratic Party.” —Howard Dean (Wrong. Jesus was not a socialist.)

Dezinformatsia: “I made charitable donations to the [Clinton] Foundation in support of the work they’re doing on global AIDS prevention and deforestation, causes I care about deeply. I thought that my contributions were a matter of public record. However, in hindsight, I should have taken the extra step of personally disclosing my donations to my employer and to the viewers on air during the recent news stories about the Foundation. I apologize.” —ABC’s George Stephanopoulos

Village Idiots: “We have to have jobs for young people. I probably shouldn’t say this in a room like this, but occasionally when I go home I’ll sit down with some of the gang leaders back home in Chicago, and I ask them … ‘What’s the biggest impediment to getting your guys off the streets?’ It’s jobs. So we need to think about what we do at scale to create those kind of opportunities for young people who just have to make some money, want to do it in a positive way, but in too many places they don’t exist.” —Education Secretary Arne Duncan

Late-night humor: “Even the White House is weighing in on the deflate-gate scandal. [This week] they encouraged Tom Brady to ‘be mindful of the way he serves as a role model.’ And then President Obama stuffed out his cigarette and went golfing at noon on a weekday. … They would’ve said more, but there was a drunken Secret Service agent streaking across the Rose Garden.” —Jimmy Fallon

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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.

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, 1788

TOP 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?

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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?

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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…

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FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS

The Left’s Twisted Concern for Premature Black (Voter) Deaths

By Nate Jackson

“Blacks die sooner than whites. How many votes has this cost Democrats?” So headlined The Washington Post over the weekend. It’s not so much that black lives matter, you see, as blackvotes matter to Democrat politicians.

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

For more, visit Right Opinion.

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.”

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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.