The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

Insight: “A democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive.” —Thomas Sowell

Upright: “The ballot box is one of the mightiest platforms we have. Use it or lose it.” —Michelle Malkin

Lamentations of a squish: “Not a chance today. … This is the president’s party much to my consternation.” —Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) asked if he could win reelection

Non Compos Mentis: “Let’s be clear also about what’s going on here. The theme here is ‘I’m Donald Trump and I’ll protect you from the scary black people.’ Antifa is widely perceived as an African-American organization and this is just part of the same story of LeBron James and Don Lemon and Maxine Waters and the NFL players and the UCLA basketball players.” —CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, who apparently thinks that because antifa members dress in black that they are black

Alpha Jackass: “The pope has a bigger agenda. He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on [sexual abuse].” —Cardinal Blaise Cupich

Wrong: “At the very least, just common sense would tell you we ought a have a law that is a comprehensive universal background check in the acquisition or purchase of a gun. That would have caught [the Pulse Nightclub assailant]. A comprehensive background check may have caught some of the mental health problems of the killer in the high school in Parkland because he had not been adjudicated mentally incompetent.” —Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) (Both perpetrators passed background checks.)

And last… “Lanny Davis says he was a source in an unsourced CNN story which lied by saying Lanny refused to comment for the story, but which Lanny later apologized for lying about on TV, but trust us with all the facts with Dan Rather up next on CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources.’” —Twitter satirist @hale_razor