The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

Insight: “Congress will ever exercise their powers to levy as much money as the people can pay. They will not be restrained from direct taxes by the consideration that necessity does not require them.” —Melancton Smith (1744-1798)

For the record: “[Yesterday’s] 4-4 tie [in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association] shows that the Supreme Court stakes are especially acute for protecting First Amendment rights, on which Justice Scalia was a giant. Union leaders certainly understand, judging by their enthusiastic support for President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.” —Wall Street Journal

Upright: “Tweeting about, or repeating a Tweet about Mrs. Cruz is just utterly stupid. It has frankly, weakened everything that Trump ought to be strengthening. It sent a signal to women that is negative, at a time when his numbers with women are already bad.” —Newt Gingrich

Pretty much what we’ve been warning for months: “Our candidate is mental. Do you realize our candidate is mental? It’s like constantly having to bail out your 16 year-old son from prison.” —Ann Coulter

Cat out of the bag: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” —Ottmar Edenhofer, who formerly co-chaired the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change

Dezinformatsia: “[T]he Republican Party was, for many years, the Reagan party. And for some years in the 1980s, that was fine. But the ideology became increasingly obsolete. And what Trump has done is he’s destroyed the remnants of it. … Trump has exposed it for being a shell of what it formally was. His only virtue is that he’s destroyed a dying husk, but something creative and something new and maybe something exciting will come in its stead.” —David Brooks (Neither Trump nor Brooks understand the Reagan legacy.)

And last… “Our nation’s number one problem is whining. We’re an absurdly rich country with unimaginable opportunities and we whine about everything.” —Frank Fleming