Above the Fold

WHISTLEBLOWER ARRANGEMENTS: “House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced Sunday that the whistleblower who filed a complaint regarding President Donald Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president has agreed to testify before the committee, adding that it will likely happen ‘very soon,’” The Daily Caller reports. News of the arrangement came two days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was subpoenaed. Meanwhile, President Trump on Sunday fumed: “Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called ‘Whistleblower,’ represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way.” In the same vein as fraud, The Federalist’s Sean Davis reveals, “Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.” No wonder Joe Biden’s campaign is trying to coerce the Leftmedia into silencing Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, which sounds suspiciously like … collusion.

CLINTON PROBE: “The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email. … Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post. In virtually all of the cases, potentially sensitive information, now recategorized as ‘classified,’ was sent to Clinton’s unsecure inbox.” (The Washington Post)

Government & Politics

JUDICIAL OBSTRUCTION & ACTIVISM: “A federal judge in California ruled Friday against the Trump administration’s plan to detain illegal immigrant families longer than 20 days, undercutting the president’s attempt to close the chief ‘loophole’ that caused this year’s border surge. Judge Dolly M. Gee, an Obama appointee, has long been a stumbling block for Homeland Security and its immigration plans, and the ruling was expected. The administration is likely to quickly appeal.” (The Washington Times)

A ‘MEDICARE FOR ALL’ HARBINGER: “Federal authorities on Friday charged more than 30 individuals in connection with an alleged Medicare-fraud scheme that took as much as $2 billion out of the pockets of taxpayers before it was detected. The scheme revolved around tricking seniors into getting their cheeks swabbed for unnecessary DNA tests that would supposedly tell them whether they were genetically predisposed to serious diseases, including cancer. The defendants would then charge Medicare for the swabs. In total, they are alleged to have collected $2 billion in reimbursements, with the typical bill running between $7,000 and $12,000.” (National Review)

NORTH CAROLINA GERRYMANDERING: “Democrats are headed back to court to challenge the validity of North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts, just weeks after the state’s highest court ruled that the Republican-controlled legislature unconstitutionally gerrymandered state-level maps. A new lawsuit filed Friday on behalf of 14 North Carolina voters challenges Republican-drawn maps that first went into effect ahead of the 2016 elections, after a court threw out a previous set of maps that were drawn after the 2010 census.” (The Hill)

Culture & Heartland

FAKE RELIGIOUS NEWS: Writing in Psychology Today, Tyler J. VanderWeele says: “In 2015, a paper by Jean Decety and co-authors reported that children who were brought up religiously were less generous. The paper received a great deal of attention… As it turned out, however, the paper by Decety was wrong. … Upon re-analysis, [social psychologist Azim] Shariff discovered that the results were due to a coding error.” In the Washington Examiner, Madeline Fry responds: “It was clear all along that something was not right with the paper. … Some news outlets, though, still haven’t changed their reporting. The science journal made the (very belated) right call to formally retract the article, but it’s also important that those who disseminated it correct the widely shared and false findings. The outlets that published the results of the paper ought to update their articles, even if that’s painful for their confirmation bias.”

UPSTAGING HEALTH WITH IDEOLOGY: “Here’s a horror show of a story that you’re probably not going to see on CNN anytime soon. A report emerged on Thursday indicating that the puberty-blocking drug Leuprolide Acetate (Lupron) has resulted in tens of thousands of serious ‘adverse reactions’ in patients, including more than six thousand deaths. That’s bad enough, but it’s even more significant when you consider that this is one of the drugs being administered by doctors to so-called ‘transgender children’ to unnaturally prevent their normal sexual development. And the testing done on the drug by the FDA for such applications appears to be thin at best.” (Hot Air)

SPEECH CONTROL: “The craziness in New York City continues unabated. In the municipal government’s endless war against the insufficiently woke, a new weapon has been added to the social justice warriors’ arsenal. The City Hall Commission on Human Rights has now issued an edict saying that it will henceforth be illegal to use the phrase ‘illegal alien’ if it’s directed at someone in a way that is ‘motivated by hate.’ You will also be in violation of the law if you threaten to call immigration enforcement on an illegal alien.” (Hot Air)

A TALE OF TWO SEASONS “One week after summer’s end, a ‘winter’ storm began blasting parts of the West with up to 3 feet of snow, smashing records with low temperatures, heavy snow, strong winds and blizzard conditions forecast into Monday,” USA Today reports. On the other hand, “Temperatures will soar to 10 to 25 degrees above average through much of this week across the Deep South and into the Ohio Valley, mid-Atlantic and Northeast,” according to The Weather Channel. For those wondering about the implications of global warming, keep in mind that extreme weather — both of the hot and cold variety — has been and always will be Mother Nature’s way of finding equilibrium.

Closing Arguments

POLICY: The media business shouldn’t be protected from antitrust (American Enterprise Institute)

POLICY: Depression-era trade policy is way out of style (Washington Examiner)

HUMOR: Local man nominated for Nobel Prize after constantly complaining about the heat (Genesius Times)

For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit In Our Sights.

The Patriot Post is a certified ad-free news service, unlike third-party commercial news sites linked on this page, which may also require a paid subscription.