The Patriot Post Digest 1-24-2014

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The Patriot Post Digest 1-24-2014
From The Federalist Patriot
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Daily Digest

Jan. 24, 2014

THE FOUNDATION

“If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?” –John Adams, the Novanglus, 1775

TOP 5 RIGHT HOOKS

The NSA’s Security Clearance

Last year, Barack Obama tasked the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board with reviewing the NSA’s mass surveillance programs for legality and effectiveness. Well, Thursday, the board said that the collection of all telephone records is illegal, useless and should be ended1. “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” said the report. Meanwhile, the Justice Department claims that USIS, the private contractor that conducts background checks for federal employees, including Edward Snowden, faked 665,000 checks – or 40% – since 2008. Maybe the NSA should narrow its focus to federal employees.

Insurance Downgrade

Moody’s Investor Service has downgraded the entire health insurance industry from stable to negative. Guess what’s to blame: ObamaCare. Moody’s says, “a new development and a key factor for the change in outlook is the unstable and evolving regulatory environment under which the sector is operating.” Unstable is putting it mildly given the waivers and unilateral changes made by the Obama administration. The ratings change was inevitable because ObamaCare was designed to yield the results it’s getting. And it’s just getting started.

Wanted: Special Prosecutor

The Obama Department of Justice has hired an Obama donor to investigate the Obama IRS over its political targeting of Obama’s political opponents. Notice a theme? So does Sen. Ted Cruz, who wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder this week demanding a special prosecutor to do the investigating. “Two hundred fifty-three days have passed since both you and President Obama professed outrage at the IRS’s wrongful conduct,” Cruz wrote. “To date, no one has been indicted. And it has been reported that the FBI plans not to file any criminal charges.” Cruz concluded, “This is a sad state of affairs. The widespread perception of partisan bias, of manifest conflict of interest, besmirches the reputation of the Department of Justice. And it undermines confidence in rule of law.” Well, that is the primary plank in the Democrat platform.

VA AG Is Law Unto Himself

Virginia Democrat Attorney General has decided he will no longer defend state marriage law against those who would rewrite it to allow same-sex “marriage.” “As attorney general,” he said, “I cannot and will not defend laws that violate Virginians' rights. … It’s about what the law requires here, and we have concluded, I have concluded, that the law here is unconstitutional, and I think the Supreme Court … would find the law unconstitutional.” He – the chief lawyer in Virginia – has concluded that he will not uphold the law. Democrats are so blind in their pursuit of the leftist agenda that Rule of Law is merely an obstacle.

Israel Foils Al-Qaida Attack

Israel announced Wednesday that it had thwarted an “advanced” al-Qaida attack plan against the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. Three Palestinian recruits tied to al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri were arrested for conspiring to perpetrate bombings, shootings and kidnappings, though the U.S. State Department has not verified Israel’s claim. No surprise there, of course, given that Barack Obama assured us that al-Qaida was “decimated” before the 2012 presidential election and we have nothing more to worry about from what he now calls the al-Qaida “jayvee” squad2. Move along.

For more, visit Right Hooks3.

RIGHT ANALYSIS
Message From the Left: If You Buy a Gun, You Will Kill Yourself

Leave it to our “friends” on the Left to draw exactly the wrong conclusions from a given set of facts. Take gun control, for example. In Leftspeak, “gun control” – harsh restrictions on gun ownership – makes the world safe by removing guns “from our streets.” However, notwithstanding the dirty little secret that the Entitlement Class currently controlling the levers of U.S. political power wants to disarm the public en route to its ultimate goal of statist tyranny, scholarly studies like those published in economist John Lott’s book “More Guns, Less Crime” have conclusively shown that implementation of gun control laws is directly correlated – and strongly, at that – with violent crime rates. Further – as the title of Lott’s book also suggests – per capita rates of gun ownership are inversely correlated, again strongly, with crime rates. As another data point: The NRA notes that gun ownership is at an all-time high at exactly the same time the nation’s murder rate is approaching an all-time low.

But never mind the facts. Leftists have never let those pesky things get in the way of a good yarn. Fortunately for them, the halls of Pollyanna-academia are filled with mush-heads who stand ready to “refute” these inconvenient truths. The latest effort4 was recently published in the otherwise-reputable Annals of Internal Medicine. Now why, one might ask, would a journal of internal medicine focus on a political issue like gun control? Great question; we can’t answer it. The gist of the study is the “conclusive” finding that having a gun inside one’s home makes one more likely to successfully attempt suicide.

Of course, the authors of this brilliant study ask us to check our brains at the Left-think door before we critically examine their findings. As Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine notes5, these researchers would like us to put aside the fact that someone contemplating suicide might actually have the malice aforethought to go out and buy a gun; or that “the same personality traits or circumstances that increase their risk of suicide also make gun ownership more attractive.” Sullum further asks, “In how many cases, if any, did an abusive husband disarm his wife and use the gun she bought for self-defense against her? Were the people who committed suicide determined enough that if a gun had not been available they would have killed themselves anyway?” Who knows? No one bothered to investigate these obvious questions.

The problem is that no analysis beyond a first-order glance at the data was made during the study. The pre-biased authors had a conclusion in search of research data to support it, as is often the case with such “studies.” Without knowing the details of each death, the study – though full of facts – is wholly worthless because so many other independent variables which bear directly on the results were not even considered, let alone evaluated. Not to worry, however: For the ideologically driven, facts that don’t support the forgone conclusion may be readily discarded.

However, in debunking the latest leftist gun-control tripe, let’s not forget to keep our eye on the ball: At issue here is not “how safe” we feel with or without guns. The real issue is whether we, as U.S. citizens, have the right to keep and bear arms, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment – period. The Constitution’s answer is, “Yes.” Setting aside the buffoonery that renders this study worthless, even if its claims were accurate, its findings would have no impact on our constitutional rights.