The Patriot Post Digest 2-8-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 2-8-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Daily Digest

Feb. 8, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will now and then peek out and show itself.” —Benjamin Franklin, 1771

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Obama Ignores the Jobs Number That Really Matters1

Perhaps the economy has been good as Barack Obama claims, but is it resilient? On Friday, the chief executive used the Bureau of Labor Statistics' January Jobs Report2 to boast about his prowess of managing the U.S. economy. America has “the strongest, most durable economy in the world,” Obama said. As proof, he pointed to the jobs report, which said the unemployment rate dipped to 4.9% — the lowest it has ever been in eight years — and the fact that the hourly wage increased 12 cents. Obama also pointed to more people buying health insurance and cheap oil prices as evidence that his economy was working. First, Obama cannot force people to buy health insurance then say it’s a sign that his economy works. And as for cheap oil, Obama used his weekly address3 the next day to rail against “dirty fuels” and to push for greater government investment into green fuels — funded by a $10-a-barrel tax4 on the struggling oil industry. Meanwhile, the U-6 unemployment rate — a better measure of labor underutilization — skims along at 9.9%, and the labor force participation rate stands at a near-record low of 62.7%. Economists are now saying the economy is due for another recession, and we doubt the Obama administration’s boast of eight years of job growth will prepare the nation for a downturn.

Doritos Super Bowl Ad Humanized the Unborn5

It’s a free country. If a person or group doesn’t like something, they can air their grievances, no matter how morally thin or ignorant they are. Without question, the Super Bowl is a cultural event, where a few diehard sports fans cheer on the game while the rest of us perk up from the seven-layer dip to watch the commercials. For example, NARAL Pro-Chose America took to Twitter to criticize Super Bowl ads that didn’t conform to their leftist agenda. While the Willem Dafoe Snickers commercial earned chuckles, curmudgeonly NARAL decried6 the 30-second spot as “transphobic.” But NARAL’s Twitter-spew became disturbing when it leveled criticism against Doritos' advertisement7 featuring a couple seeing their unborn baby via ultrasound. The ad showed the baby in utero trying to reach for a Doritos chip held by his or her father, and NARAL saw it as pure propaganda. In response, the group wrote8, “#NotBuyingIt — that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses & sexist tropes of dads as clueless & moms as uptight.” The tweet illustrates the lengths to which the pro-abortion crowd has to go to deny unborn children’s personhood in order to justify killing them. To imply that the child has likes, a will and an interest in Doritos undermines the whole pro-abortion argument. What America saw as a clever, humous ad, NARAL saw as a threat to its twisted worldview.

$150,000 Is Chump Change for Hillary Clinton9

Hillary Clinton’s acceptance of shady donations has lost her the environmental activist vote. Climate change activist group 350 Action published a video10 from a Clinton campaign event last week where 350 activists asked Clinton about the $150,000 her campaign accepted from the oil industry — an industry that has drawn particular ire from liberals. “Yeah, I don’t even know what you’re referring to,” Clinton replied, “but Big Oil knows I’m not their friend, so I can’t imagine. They must have put it in the wrong envelope. I’ve been very clear about that, and I want to take away all their subsidies.” As 350 Action asked, Clinton doesn’t know who funds her? Greenpeace also criticized11 Clinton’s oil money. The ecofascist group pointed out another video where 350 Action followed up with Clinton, questioning her commitment to the “progressive” dream policy of campaign finance reform because of the donation. Clinton responded, “When you raise a $120 million, $150,000 isn’t very much. Let’s be honest.”

Not very much? For the vast majority of Americans, $150K is a lot of money. If her family really was as “dead broke” as she claimed it was upon leaving the White House, she’d know the value of $150,000 — or the $675,000 she was paid for speaking12 to Goldman Sachs. Instead, it shows she accepts money from anyone who waves a check, and her claim that she’s a principled politician is both ridiculous and demonstrably false13. If the oil industry wanted to change her campaign platform, it should have tripled its donation.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Cultivating Ignorance and Arrogance14

By Arnold Ahlert

“No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity,” wrote Thomas Jefferson.

Millions of Americans remain puzzled by the legions of fellow citizens who would trade capitalism and exceptionalism for the siren song of “free” stuff proposed to varying degrees by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and, to some extent, Donald Trump. They shouldn’t be. A pernicious combination of civic illiteracy, coupled with a growing sense of entitlement, especially among Millennials, is rapidly approaching critical mass.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has released a sobering report regarding civic illiteracy. “The Crisis in Civic Education15” reveals that numerous surveys show “recent college graduates are alarmingly ignorant of America’s history and heritage,” the report’s summary states. “They cannot identify the term lengths of members of Congress, the substance of the First Amendment, [or] the origin of the separation of powers. They do not know the Father of the Constitution, and nearly 10% say that Judith Sheindlin — ‘Judge Judy’ — is on the Supreme Court16.”

This is no accident. ACTA surveyed more than 1,100 colleges and universities, and discovered that only 18% of them have course requirements in government or civics. High schools are equally deficient. A 2014 civics test administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)17 revealed that only 23% of high school seniors had “proficient” or better level of knowledge in civics, and a dismal 18% are at the same level with regard to history. Both percentages represented “no significant change” since 2010.

Moreover, as the Washington Examiner’s Eric Bledsoe explains18, attempts to address civic deficiencies “conflate rhetoric with results. The Department of Education’s ‘A Crucible Moment’ and the Lumina Foundation’s ‘Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP)’ emphasize ‘civic engagement,’” amounting to “little beyond verbose abstraction.”

Yet perhaps the most devastating illustration of what is really occurring was revealed by Glen Fairman in a 2012 American Thinker column19. Fairman recounts his time as a graduate student working as a substitute teacher at Puente High School in Southern California. One day he was assigned to cover a social studies class while the regular teacher was on a field trip. During that assignment he discovered a “set of thirty-year-old textbooks from the mid-1960s” whose contents “burned themselves into my brain.”

“As I flipped through the pages, I was astonished to find what I would now consider an upper-level college textbook under color of what in the high schools used to be termed ‘civics,’” he reveals. “This text contained a very detailed understanding of political theory, constitutional law, macroeconomics, American history, and comparative political systems. I spent the rest of the day in slack-jawed amazement, perusing what a student in a working-class town was expected to know before the mavens of education began tinkering with the curricula of our schools.”

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The Patriot Post Digest 2-8-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
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That would be the overwhelmingly “progressive” mavens of education.

When he asked the returning instructor why those books were no longer in use, the instructor explained they were no longer comprehensible by the vast majority of students. When he asked other older teachers regarding whether education had been “dumbed-down,” he discovered “this question unleashed volatile diatribes on how dull children had become since the responders had begun as idealistic young men and women in the field.”

In short, what former President George W. Bush once referred to as the “soft bigotry of low expectations” has been institutionalized.

And not just at the high-school level. Fairman adds, “Campus speech codes and filtered curricula have denuded the classical goal of the acquisition of a free and analytic mind.”

Unfortunately, that is somewhat of an understatement. College campuses are now citadels of safe spaces, micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, and speech and sexual conduct codes, all designed with the purpose of teaching students what to think, not how to think. As historian Victor Davis Hanson so deftly explains20, “Today’s campuses mimic ideological boot camps” replete with tenured professors who “seek to indoctrinate young people in certain preconceived progressive political agendas,” and grade-conscious and indebted students willing to make the “necessary ideological adjustments” that ensure their survival. Those adjustments include embracing “the glories of larger government, income redistribution, greater entitlements, radical environmentalism, abortion, multiculturalism, suspicion of traditional religion, and antipathy to the international role of the United States in the past and present.”

In other words, every agenda you would find being championed at any Clinton campaign stop or “feel the Bern” rally.

Couple the “blame America” attitude to an audacious sense of self-entitlement, civic and historical illiteracy, and ideological insulation that embraces censorship of competing ideas. Is it any wonder why the siren song of big government, and living off the “unjustly” acquired wealth of others — promoted as “free” — resonates?

“An honest and comprehensive study of (America’s) history and constitution is the only guarantee of the cultivation of an informed electorate,” Bledsoe warns.

No doubt, but Bledsoe may be laboring under a false assumption. An informed electorate, and by extension a nation of people willing to both think and do largely for themselves, is utterly anathema to the big-government and collectivist ambitions of the American Left. Ambitions that require the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America” to be realized.

MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE

    ANALYSIS: The Great Granite State Debate21
    Rubio and Christie Duke It Out on Leadership22
    The Long, Dark Winter of the American Economy2
    Rice and Powell Also Sent Secrets Via Private Email23
    Which Is Worse? F-Bomb or Murder Joke?24

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

    Peggy Noonan: Don’t Take New Hampshire for Granite25
    John Goodman: Relief of Poverty: Four Centuries of Futility26
    James Wanliss: Ignoring Truth at Our Peril: Lessons From NASA27

For more, visit Right Opinion28.

TOP HEADLINES

    North Korea Defies Warnings, Launches Long-Range Rocket29
    Pentagon Orders Military to Prioritize Climate Change30
    Pressure on Lynch to Step Aside in Clinton Email Probe31

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report32

OPINION IN BRIEF

Peggy Noonan: “On a recent trip I watched candidates in town halls and forums in middle-school gyms, community clubhouses, hotel ballrooms. I keep thinking of the young woman, black, about 20, I saw departing a Sanders event with a friendly young Asian man the same age. Are you for Bernie? I asked. ‘Have you seen my T-shirt?’ she replied, and opened her jacket: ‘Carson 2016.’ I laughed and asked if she was trolling. She was startled. ‘No, we just go see all the candidates.’ This of course is a great New Hampshire cliché — they won’t vote for you unless they’ve met you three times. Yet when you see it, something stops you. Every adult in New Hampshire seems to go hear every candidate at least once. They listen and take their measure; they give it the most precious thing they have, time. They take their duty seriously not because they’re jerky and self-important but because they have self-respect. They believe they are the winnowers. Their function is to get the Reasonable Possibles, put down a marker on their favorite, and then throw it to the South. At the meetings they don’t ask meek, deferential questions. I saw them lecture candidates, mildly upbraid them, inform them. … They have complete democratic confidence. They’re not shy. They’re doing due diligence.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “This cold war between great sovereign nations isn’t really a new struggle at all. It is the oldest struggle of human kind, as old as man himself. … Some of us came toe to toe with this enemy this evil force in our own community in Hollywood, and make no mistake about it, this is an evil force. Don’t be deceived because you are not hearing the sound of gunfire, because even so you are fighting for your lives.”

For the record: “It’s an old rejoinder, but a true one, that if you think money buys elections, ask President H. Ross Perot, or President Steve Forbes. Romney built his fortune; John Kerry and John McCain married into theirs, and none of their presidential bids succeeded. Michael Huffington — once Arianna’s husband — spent $28 million in a Senate bid in 1994, the most money ever spent on a non-presidential campaign at that point. He lost. Tom Golisano spent $93 million on three independent gubernatorial campaigns in New York; he never won.” —Jim Geraghty

Braying Jenny: “Service is the rent we pay for living in this great country.” —Hillary Clinton (Freedom isn’t free, but her idea of our nation isn’t freedom33.)

Non Compos Mentis: “I am impressed by the quality of his foreign policy.” —Bernie Sanders on Barack Obama’s foreign policy malfeasance34

The Biggest Sore Loser: “I only came in second because of the fact that Cruz took a lot of votes away from Carson.” —Donald Trump with a fictitious recounting of the Iowa Caucus

Belly laugh of the week: “[Michelle is] going to want to travel and roam around the world in ways we can’t do when we’re traveling in official capacities.” —Barack Obama

Late-night humor: “During last [week’s] Democratic town hall Hillary Clinton told voters, ‘I never thought I’d be standing on a stage here asking for people to vote for me for president.’ Because she thought she’d already be done being president by now.” —Seth Meyers

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.