The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

Insight: “It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.” —Henry George (1839-1897)

Help wanted: “I sent [Vladimir Putin] a message Thursday and asked him if he wanted a copy of our map so he could bomb accurately in Syria, and then on Friday, the Russian embassy … in Washington called down and told me they would like very much to have the map. So in the future, if Russia doesn’t bomb the right places, you’ll know it’s not Putin’s fault but it’s my fault.” —Jimmy Carter (Obama administration policy is to not help the Russians.)

Not exactly: “Now listen, we got an awful lot of things done. If you look at the four and a half years or almost five years that I’ve been speaker, we protected 99 percent of the American people from an increase in our taxes. … There’s a lot that we can point to.” —John Boehner

Alpha Jackass: “Trey Gowdy is a creation of the Koch Brothers and the whole climate denial industry. This [Benghazi] committee was nothing but a creation of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers.” —James Carville

Village Idiots: “The core of the NRA’s support comes from white, rural and relatively less educated voters. This demographic is currently influential in politics but clearly on the wane. … [W]hites, who comprise 63 percent of the population today, won’t be in the majority for long. Racial minorities are soon to be a majority, and they are the nation’s strongest supporters of strict gun laws.” —UCLA professor Adam Winkler in a Washington Post piece titled, “The NRA will fall. It’s inevitable.”

The BIG Lie: “[I]f you look at the history of school shootings … it’s an overwhelmingly American phenomenon. To the extent that anything like this happens anywhere else in the world, it appears to happen as a reflection of something going on [in the U.S.]; it appears to have spread from America.” —author Malcolm Gladwell

And last… “Bernie Sanders spent most of the day at the grocery store in a rant over the unfairness of stocking 1% milk.” —Twitter satirist @weknowwhatsbest