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Title: The Patriot Post Digest 10-7-2016 Post by: nChrist on October 09, 2016, 02:30:20 AM ________________________________________ The Patriot Post Digest 10-7-2016 From The Federalist Patriot Free Email Subscription (http://patriotpost.us/subscription/new) ________________________________________ Mid-Day Digest Oct. 7, 2016 IN TODAY’S EDITION As usual, the Left uses a hurricane to shout “climate change!” The FBI’s malfeasance in the Clinton email scandal gets worse. Hillary’s phony audience questioner is a child actor. Yahoo and the limits of what can be done in the name of national security. And more news, policy and opinion. THE FOUNDATION “We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?” —John Page (1776) TOP RIGHT HOOKS Hurricanes and Chicken Little Syndrome1 Seemingly with every major weather-related event the “man-made” climate change alarmists come rushing forward exclaiming that the event is yet more “evidence” supporting their “settled science” claims. Hurricanes, tornados, lots of rain, droughts, you name it. Like clockwork, the media jumped on Hurricane Matthew and pushed the climate alarmists narrative while marveling at how “timely” the Paris Climate Agreement2 is. As NBC News' Ron Allen reported, “[Barack Obama] has done something that unites the world around the goal of saving the planet.” We have seemingly entered a comic book universe with fitting titles such as, “Super Hero Obama Saves Earth From Villain Climate Change.” But the planet has a long history of major weather-related events. This reality has been confirmed time and again by sound scientific data, not questionable “scientific” models that have proven to be rather poor predictors of climate and weather. Back in 2005 when the U.S. experienced an increased number of hurricanes the climate alarmist predicted this to be the start of more frequent and intense storms. What followed was 11 years of low storm activity with no hurricanes hitting the U.S. mainland. With the Left everything is political, and therefore an excuse to seek greater control over private citizens' lives. The reality is that when people stop believing in God, then they look to some other source of power to solve their problems and protect them. The Left not only accepts this role, they gladly preach it, to the point where they make the ridiculous claim of even being able to control the weather. The FBI Allowed Clinton Aides to Do What?3 That Hillary Clinton remains in the running for president is the most concrete affirmation of our descent into lawlessness. Not only did the FBI grant immunity to certain key witnesses in the Clinton email scandal4; those same witnesses promptly returned the favor by asserting their Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress and, in one case, by utterly ignoring5 a congressional subpoena. In addition, the Bureau agreed6 to destroy the laptops of former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson. Just as revealing, the FBI agents limited their search to documents authored before January 2015, relinquishing “any opportunity to find evidence related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State,” stated a letter sent to Attorney General Loretta Lynch by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA). Amazingly, it gets worse. This side deal was made even though the laptops could have been obtained via a subpoena with no conditions attached. And when classified government documents are found on a computer, that computer legally becomes government property7. Furthermore, Mills — despite being the subject of a criminal investigation, and despite having been caught in a bald-faced lie about when she became aware of Clinton’s private email server — was allowed to participate as one of Clinton’s lawyers, with the concomitant assertion of attorney-client privilege, during Clinton’s unrecorded holiday weekend “interview” with the FBI. “This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law,” explains8 former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. In other news, Barack Obama’s White House coordinated with Clinton’s pre-campaign in early 2015 on how to handle her budding email scandal. We can only assume that “coordination” extended through undetectable channels to the Justice Department. And as The Wall Street Journal sums up9, “The FBI and Justice gave Mrs. Clinton and her entourage special political treatment. No grand jury that the public knows about. Immunity. Special side deals. No hard digging into contradictory testimony. An FBI interview only at the last minute. Public exoneration by the FBI director when that isn’t his job. FBI summaries released on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day. No wonder millions of Americans think the system is rigged.” Clinton’s Phony ‘Random Audience Member’10 We all know that presidential campaigns are scripted and staged to whatever extent a candidate can control it. Hillary Clinton is perhaps better at this than most. Heck, she got the questions in advance for an interview with daytime talk-show host Steve Harvey — not exactly a deep-digging journalist. But even when real journalists are asking the questions, they’re Clinton’s biggest enablers11, asking softball questions and applauding the candidate. In short, they serve as her biggest super PAC. The latest evidence of this scripting comes from a town hall in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Clinton staged a question from a “random” girl in the audience … who just happened to be a child actor. And whose father just happens to be a Democrat Pennsylvania state senator. Brennan Leach reads from a cue card (unlike other questioners) to ask about girls' body image and how Clinton would undo the damage done by Donald Trump’s habit of saying mean things about women. Clinton acts surprised and grateful, but she knows her daughter Chelsea, seated right next to her, will also want to address the question. She then used it as an excuse to re-highlight her debate attack regarding Trump and Miss Universe, which the Leftmedia gleefully trumpeted. We’re still waiting for the question from a young girl wondering why anyone would trust the Clintons after Bill’s history of sexual assault and their own general war on women12. BEST OF RIGHT OPINION Erick Erickson: The Leviathan’s Failure13 Charles Krauthammer: The Stillborn Legacy of Barack Obama14 Jonah Goldberg: Gore’s Support Not Exactly a Game-Changer for Hillary15 For more, visit Right Opinion16. TOP HEADLINES 156,000 Jobs Added in September, Unemployment Rises17 Obama Commutes Sentences of Another 102 Drug Offenders18 Facebook, White House Explore “Free” Internet19 For more, visit Patriot Headline Report20. Title: The Patriot Post Digest 10-7-2016 Post by: nChrist on October 09, 2016, 02:31:24 AM ________________________________________ The Patriot Post Digest 10-7-2016 From The Federalist Patriot Free Email Subscription (http://patriotpost.us/subscription/new) ________________________________________ FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS Yahoo and the Eyes on Your Email21 By Michael Swartz This week we learned that people with Yahoo email accounts had their messages subject to scrutiny at the behest of the federal government22 — all in the name of national security. The story, as told by “people familiar with the matter,” is that Yahoo complied with a classified government directive to search for specific information, termed in the Reuters story as a “set of characters” in any emails. This eavesdropping began in April 2015 and was facilitated once Yahoo engineers created a software program intended to flag emails with these strings of characters. The program was kept so secret within Yahoo that weeks after it went online, Yahoo security engineers, who had been excluded from the process, believed their servers had been hacked. Eventually, Yahoo’s Chief Information Security Officer, Alex Stamos, resigned over being left out of the loop on the decision by Chief Executive Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell. Given these allegations, Yahoo has been roundly criticized by privacy advocates23 who believe the company could have fought the directive — in fact, Yahoo called the original Reuters story “misleading” and denied the existence of the government-requested software program on its systems. However, Yahoo may have cooperated because they recalled the prospect of $250,000 per day fines24 threatened by the federal government back in 2008 when the PRISM program to spy on online communications was introduced. While Microsoft, Google, and other online providers refused to comply with this more recent government directive — with many of these companies now exhibiting a holier-than-thou attitude — it’s worth remembering that they all knuckled under to the PRISM program, so we know they can be bought, too. Some, though, may agree there’s a legitimate point25 to be made about the trifling and infrequent loss of privacy an average law-abiding citizen could reasonably expect from a program looking for specific indicators and character strings when compared to its usefulness to national security. We may want and still expect26 our conversations to be private, but we also have to ponder just how much privacy can be expected with email at all given the ease and frequency at which servers are hacked these days — including Yahoo’s27. And it may not just be email. Consider the fact that Yahoo’s Internet operations are being bought out by Verizon28, which adds millions of consumers to the mix. Yet there is the overarching civil liberty question to consider as well: When does the spying transcend national security and become a tool for harassment of certain groups? Recall that this administration has used the IRS to target certain political entities29, but looked the other way when a former secretary of state subjected herself to multiple security breaches30 by using her own email server. In short, we have a situation full of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld termed “known unknowns”: We’re certain that the federal government is keeping tabs on our electronic communications, but we’re generally clueless to the extent of that intrusion. We may or may not be affected directly, but indirectly we’re either benefiting from the additional security we receive against the risk of terrorism and/or we’re suffering from the loss of the expectation of privacy, a phenomenon that is doubly severe when the current climate of political intolerance is factored in. Perhaps the best way to proceed in these times is with the common sense to know that once something is on the Internet or in an email, it’s going to be there forever — so think before you write. You never know who might be reading it. MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST How to Address Iran31 — After Obama gave the store away, what now? Generosity Is Not Political32 — A new study finds that rich Democrats aren’t all that altruistic. OPINION IN BRIEF Mona Charen: “One out of 6 prime-working-age adult males in the United States is not temporarily unemployed, or ‘between jobs,’ or ‘looking for work.’ No, a huge cohort of men in America is now neither employed nor looking for work. They are just skating by on a combination of girlfriends, wives, mothers and government benefits. … Who are these new non-workers? Most are low-skilled, never married and native-born, and many are African-American. High school dropouts are the most likely group to be out of the labor force, but 40 percent of non-workers have some college under their belts, and one-sixth are college graduates. A significant number have felony convictions and/or prison time in their pasts. … The factors contributing to non-work are clearly complex, but the role of social mores is highly significant. When a man feels the traditional role of father and husband is no longer valued, he has less incentive to become the sort of person who can hold down a job. Our family roles give life meaning and purpose. Marriage is a far better predictor than race or ethnicity of whether a man will be employed, contributing to his community and caring for others. … Non-marriage and non-work are locked in a downward spiral.” SHORT CUTS Upright: “Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, aka Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.” —Charles Krauthammer Confessions: “I strongly supported [ObamaCare]. … But there are problems with it. And everybody knows it.” —Bill Clinton For the record: “Well, sometimes with the Clintons, even the truth happens. … Bill Clinton said what millions of Americans have known for years, and that is we need to repeal ObamaCare lock, stock, and barrel.” —Mike Pence Corruption exposed: “The FBI’s cover-up [of Clinton’s email], far from being a trifling favor paid to a political patron, turns out to be part of a much bigger cover-up of the numerous corrupt linkages between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. If so, this is criminality on a massive scale, dwarfing even Watergate.” —Investor’s Business Daily Non Compos Mentis: “It’s very interesting that this [Paris Climate Agreement news] is happening a day when there’s a hurricane bearing down on the United States and in the Caribbean because these severe storms, beach erosions, intense weather episodes that we’ve had is perhaps the most practical sample of what the president was talking about as the threat that the planet faces and this is what this whole climate agreement signed by 190 nations and now ratified by 60 or so is designed to stop.” —NBC’s Ron Allen Braying Jackass: “There’s already some interesting work — not definitive, but powerful — showing that droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war.” —Barack Obama And last… “Are you late for work? Did you forget someone’s birthday? Blame global warming! Everyone else is. Severe acne, bad beer, crumbling gingerbread houses — you name it! These are just some of the things scientists are pinning on what they claim is a man-made climate crisis. Only now, it isn’t just scientists. It’s the president too.” —Tony Perkins Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis! Managing Editor Nate Jackson Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families. |