The Patriot Post® · Thursday Short Cuts

For the Record

“What do automobiles, guns, and home-schooling all have in common that makes the liberals hate them? All these things reduce individual dependence on the government and on the grandiose schemes for other people’s lives created by liberals and imposed by government.” —Thomas Sowell

“We have a problem here known popularly as the chicken and the egg. Do we need to pump a lot of tax money into higher education so students can afford to deal with runaway tuition costs? Or do we have runaway tuition costs because we’re pumping billions of taxpayer funds into higher education? … From January 2000 to June 2022 the overall rate of price increases — the average of all goods and services — was 74.4%. But over the same period, the increase in the costs of college tuition and fees was 178%, and the increase in prices of college textbooks was 162%. More than twice the average rate of inflation. … Universities are free to bloat their bureaucracies and offer programs that are of little practical use, such as various ethnic studies programs and other programs structured to appeal to politically correct themes that are popular with youth. They do it because they know that government programs and supports will bear the costs. Of course, universities should be free to do what they want. But not on my dime. What is being called loan forgiveness is not loan forgiveness. It is debt transfer.” —Star Parker

“[The ‘semi-fascist’] smear is particularly galling coming from Biden the same week in which he announced, without any constitutional authority whatsoever, that he was erasing some $500 billion in student loan debts — the single largest executive action in American history. Biden justified that action on the basis of a nonexistent COVID-19 emergency. He has justified similar usurpations on similar grounds: He illegally tasked his Occupational Safety and Health Administration with forcing vaccines on some 80 million people on the basis of a ‘public health emergency’; he used his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to try to propagate an eviction moratorium on the same basis; he bragged in July that he will reshape the American economy on his own if Congress doesn’t act in order to forestall a supposed ‘climate change emergency.’ If we’re talking about semi-fascism, this stuff qualifies. The history of fascism, after all, does not begin with a dictator simply marching into a nation’s capital and seizing total power. It more frequently begins with the destruction of the legislative branch at the hands of centralization of executive power. … Fascism, in other words, is a gradual process. And that process starts with executive branch actors accreting authority they were never given.” —Ben Shapiro

Belly Laugh of the Week

“The extreme MAGA Republicans have made their choice: to go backwards, full of anger, violence, hate, and division. We’ve chosen a different path: forward, the future, unity, hope, and optimism. We choose to build a better America.” —Joe Biden (“Not even a week ago you declared you didn’t ‘respect’ Americans who support America First policies and said the movement is similar to ‘semi-fascism.’ Is that what unity looks like to you?” —Congressman Andy Biggs)

Non Compos Mentis Award

“The fact that [restricting abortion] is such an assault on women of color and women [in] lower income families is just sinful. It’s sinful. It’s wrong that they would be able to say to women what they think women should be doing with their lives and their bodies. But it’s sinful, the injustice of it all.” —House Speaker Nancy “Good Catholic” Pelosi

Letting the Cat Out of the Bag

“The Inflation Reduction Act — that might be the name, but it’s a huge environmental bill.” —Congresswoman Elaine Luria

And Last…

“Biden says the second amendment is obsolete because you need F-15s, meanwhile he claims an insurrection can be carried out with water bottles, flag poles, and bike racks. Neither is true!” —Congressman Thomas Massie

“That California, a state that will ban the sale of new gas cars by 2035, is urging residents to not charge their electric cars because of grid issues is poetic.” —Jay Caruso