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« on: September 21, 2015, 09:16:10 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Digest 9-18-2015
From The Federalist Patriot
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Daily Digest
Sep. 18, 2015
THE FOUNDATION
“Let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate — look to his character.” —Noah Webster, Letters to a Young Gentleman Commencing His Education, 1789
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
Nobel Committee Had Second Thoughts on Obama Prize1
Remember when Barack Obama “won” the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009? He hadn’t even broken in his Oval Office chair when the integrity-deficient Nobel Committee — tasked with awarding the prize based on the recipient’s accomplishments — decided to recognize him with one of humanity’s supposedly elite awards. Everyone knew it was politically motivated, and at least one former committee member now acknowledges this. The Washington Times writes, “Geir Lundestad, director at the institute for 25 years, said in his just-published memoir that he and the committee had unanimously decided to grant the award to Mr. Obama just after his election in 2009 more in hopes of aiding the American president to achieve his goals on nuclear disarmament, rather than in recognition of what Mr. Obama had already accomplished.” In the memoir Lundestad says, “Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake. In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.” He further explained to the Associated Press, “[We] thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect.” Six years later, however, Obama’s cascading foreign policy failures surely have much to do with Mr. Lundestad’s regrets — even if he won’t admit it publicly. Yet just this week Obama claimed, “America is winning right now. America is great right now.” Ours is without a doubt still the greatest nation on earth. But when even the Nobel Institute questions its decision to award Obama, it’s hard to argue that we’re “winning.” As for the Nobel Committee, its only accomplishment was to demonstrate firsthand how worthless it really is. Dare we even mention the Pulitzer?
Federal Reserve Keeps Nation at Zero2
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee decided3 not to raise interest rates, just like it has for the last nine years. The nation has had seven years of 0% interest, despite the fact that, in the words of the Fed, “economic activity is expanding at a moderate pace.” The Obama administration keeps insisting the economy is doing swell. Yet the Federal Reserve just can’t bring itself to agree and raise rates. Part of the reason, the Fed noted in its announcement, is that countries like China and Greece recently added volatility to the global market. But this is not just a short-term hesitation, as the Fed sees at least three more years of Obama-induced economic stagnation. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board4 wrote, “The Fed predicts a stronger economy and rising inflation next year, but somehow they never arrive. And sure enough, the Fed’s governors and bank presidents on Thursday again downgraded their median economic projections for real GDP growth in 2016 (2.3%), 2017 (2.2%) and even 2018 (2%).” Furthermore, as Investor’s Business Daily notes5, the government has an interest in keeping rates low because of the national debt. Increase rates, and the amount of money it pays servicing the monster also grows. In the meantime, the Journal notes, the Fed’s zero interest policies are hampering the ability of middle class Americans to save.
No National Stats on Illegal Immigration and Crime6
This is what happens when the government has an interest in not studying a problem: We can’t accurately measure the relationship between crime and illegal immigration because the federal government downplays the information. Statistics on illegal immigrant arrests exist at the state and county levels, but the federal government doesn’t compile or track this. According to J. Christian Adams, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, some states do track the relationship between crime and illegal immigration, but they do it in secret because of the policies set by the Obama administration. (We should also note that the DOJ stopped releasing its data on interracial violent crime in 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected.) “There are a lot of reasons states don’t make this information readily available and there is no clearinghouse of data at high levels,” Adams said. “These numbers would expose how serious the problem is and make the government look bad.” According to a Fox News estimate7, illegal immigrants commit 13.6% of the crimes in the United States, a number disproportionately large to the size of the demographic. This can be seen at a local level. For example, since San Francisco instituted its “sanctuary city” policies, the rate8 of rapes and murder in the city has spiked. But like its approach to the Syrian Civil war, the Obama administration places ideology before9 objective observation.
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
The Incredible Shrinking Military10
By Michael Swartz
It’s been the victim of both the leftists' wish for a so-called “peace dividend” and the fiscal conservatives' desire for addressing persistent deficit spending, but, at Wednesday night’s debate11, two Republicans in particular made a strong case for rebuilding a military that’s in the throes of a nearly decade-long decline.
Noting “the most important obligation that the federal government has is to keep this nation safe,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio made it clear that our Armed Forces are overdue for investment. “We are eviscerating our military,” said Rubio. “We have a world that grows increasingly dangerous, and we are eviscerating our military spending and signing deals with Iran.”
His solution: “Rebuild our military so that we don’t deploy people over and over again without the necessary equipment to keep them safe, to send a signal to the world that we’re serious. If we’re going to lead the world, then we need to have the strongest military possible.”
Carly Fiorina lent more specifics in her call for the “strongest military on the face of the planet.” She rattled off her wish list: “We need about 50 Army brigades, we need about 36 Marine battalions, we need somewhere between 300 and 350 naval ships, [and] we need to upgrade every leg of the nuclear triad.” She added that a bolstered Sixth Fleet, along with “rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland,” could do the talking to Vladimir Putin12 for her.
Naturally, there are doubting Thomases13 who think the idea of more naval ships is overblown. Yet the Navy’s fleet size is at its smallest in a century, and the concern is that lengthy deployments and an aging fleet risk our longtime dominance of the seas as China and Russia build up their forces.
There’s also the issue of trust, for which Rubio called out Barack Obama’s foreign policy strategies. “The United States military was not built to conduct pinprick attacks,” Rubio argued. “If the United States military is going to be engaged by a commander in chief, it should only be engaged in an endeavor to win. And we’re not going to authorize use of force if you’re not put in a position where they can win. And quite frankly, people don’t trust this president as commander in chief because of that.”
While peace through superior firepower is the objective, the military shouldn’t get a blank check. In the latest of an ongoing investigative series14, Arizona Sen. John McCain made an example of the spendthrift Permanent Change of Station moving program, which pays for the relocation of military personnel and their families and costs taxpayers over $4 billion a year. Exact savings can’t be determined, writes McCain, because the Pentagon “can’t track basic cost data and reliably compare it across the services.”
McCain isn’t the only Republican speaking out about reforming military spending. Reworking the procurement system is one key15 for Gov. Bobby Jindal, who advocates spending at least 4% of GDP on defense. Fellow hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham has called Obama’s sequestration cuts “insane”16. This is all a necessary part of the long-term debate. |
