The Patriot Post® · Monday Top Headline Summary
CNBC reports, “The United States is planning to delay a menu of additional Chinese tariffs that were scheduled to begin on March 1 … as both sides hash out a definitive end to a wide ranging trade dispute. In a series of posts on Twitter, Trump cited ‘substantial progress’ in bilateral talks between the U.S. and China.”
Making the economy great again: “The Dow posted its ninth consecutive week of advances, its longest weekly winning streak in nearly 24 years, as investors continued to digest commentary surrounding progress toward a U.S.-China trade deal. The Dow closed at 26,031.81 points … by the end of Friday’s session. This was the first time the index crossed 26,000 points since November 9, and its nine straight weeks gains marked the longest streak since a 10-week run between March and May 1995.” (Yahoo Finance)
“Venezuelan troops on Friday killed two indigenous villagers attempting to block their convoy from reaching the Venezuela–Brazil border, where, the villagers believed, the troops planned to prevent humanitarian aid from entering the country,” National Review reports. Meanwhile, “Vice President Mike Pence will be traveling to Colombia [this] week as the White House continues to rally international support for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido,” the Washington Examiner says.
“The Pentagon will increase the number of troops along the U.S.-Mexico border to about 6,000 by the start of next month as the Trump administration turns its attention to securing remote areas between official ports of entry… About 1,000 additional personnel will be deployed with orders to string more concertina wire and install detection systems.” (The Washington Post)
“A federal judge in Texas has declared that an all-male military draft is unconstitutional, ruling that ‘the time has passed’ for a debate on whether women belong in the military,” USA Today reports. The Federalist’s Sean Davis responds, “It’s hard to imagine those who drafted this nation’s foundational legal document declaring a God-given right of the federal government to forcibly conscript young women into the service of a standing federal army, yet that’s what a court just ruled.”
“President Trump is nominating Kelly Knight Craft as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. If confirmed by the Senate, Craft, currently U.S. ambassador to Canada, will succeed Nikki Haley, who announced her departure last fall. The 56-year-old Craft has been ambassador to Canada since October 2017. She previously served as an alternate delegate to the U.N. during the George W. Bush administration. During her time in Ottawa, she raised eyebrows when she said that she believes in ‘both sides of the science’ when it comes to climate change.” (NPR)
Via The Daily Wire: “On Friday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) shut down a far-left activist group [the Sunrise Movement] after they used children to create a scene in her office in an attempt to push alarmist climate change policies.” A seething Feinstein said, “You come in here, and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don’t respond to that.” The White House, meanwhile, is tackling climate alarmism by assembling “an ad hoc group of select federal scientists to reassess the government’s analysis of climate science and counter conclusions that the continued burning of fossil fuels is harming the planet,” The Washington Post reports.
“Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed a sentencing memo for President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort,” Axios reveals. “Mueller does not take a position on how much time in prison Manafort should serve, but accuses him of ‘repeatedly and brazenly’ breaking the law for over a decade, even after he was indicted.” The memo is more than 800 pages long.
In the Washington Examiner, Rob Wasinger writes, “The ski resort meeting between Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and the founder of Fusion GPS shows that the House Intelligence Committee chairman is the wrong person to trust with leading a serious, unbiased inquiry.” In other words, “Adam Schiff has collusion problems of his own.”
According to Kentucky State University professor Wilfred Reilly, “Hate crime hoaxes, like Jussie Smollett’s alleged attack, are more common than you think.” He adds, “Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax, I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf. To put these numbers in context, a little over 7,000 hate crimes were reported by the FBI in 2017 and perhaps 8-10% of these are widely reported enough to catch the eye of a national researcher.” (USA Today)
“The Motion Picture Association of America officially gave the upcoming abortion film ‘Unplanned’ an ‘R’ rating Friday for ‘some disturbing/bloody images’ of aborted babies,” The Daily Caller reveals. “Movies are rated R for profanity, nudity, sex, or violence. ‘Unplanned’ contains no profanity, nudity, or sex. ‘Ironically, the MPAA seems to be indirectly endorsing the pro-life position: namely that abortion is an act of violence,’ writers and directors Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman told Movieguide.”
“An Idaho couple claims Planned Parenthood ‘deceived’ them after a failed abortion — and is asking the agency to cough up the unforeseen cost of raising ‘an additional unplanned child,’” according to Fox News. “Biana Coons … traveled 700 miles with her partner, Cristobal Ruiz, to a Planned Parenthood in Albuquerque, New Mexico in February 2016 to avoid the mandatory waiting period in her home state. The couple, which already had two children, didn’t want another one. But the drug-induced abortion, known as the abortion pill, ultimately failed to end the pre-born child’s life and the couple, in ‘extreme poverty,’ could not afford a follow-up procedure.”
Rule of Law vs. rule of men: “A US federal judge has received permission to climb the Statue of Liberty before sentencing [a] protester who illegally scrambled up the iconic monument last year. US Judge Gabriel Gorenstein is handling the case of Therese Patricia Okoumou, who was found guilty in December of misdemeanor charges for climbing up to the base of the iconic statue to protest US immigration policies on July 4 — US independence day — 2018. … Judge Gorenstein said he wanted to visit the statue ‘to better appreciate the risks or hazards created by the defendant’s conduct.’” (France 24)
Humor: Man denied life insurance policy after revealing he wears MAGA hat in public (The Babylon Bee)
Policy: A universal basic income is on the Left’s policy-prescription list, but Gonzalo Schwarz explains that “implementing UBI as a public policy solution has significant shortcomings that should be discussed.” Read more at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Policy: “Current federal policy insufficiently protects babies who are born alive following an attempted abortion,” says The Heritage Foundation’s Melanie Israel. Here’s why “the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act would remedy this problem.”
For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit In Our Sights.