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« on: February 10, 2016, 04:30:03 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Digest 2-8-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
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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.” |
