The Patriot Post Digest 7-11-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 7-11-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Jul. 11, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks-no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” —James Madison (1788.)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

The Hillary Double Standard1

“No I was not,” was Hillary Clinton’s response when pressed by CBS News' Scott Pelley regarding whether or not she was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information while secretary of state. “I take classified material seriously and this investigation has proven that I had no intent to do anything wrong,” Clinton insisted earlier in the interview. It would be difficult to find anyone more adept at the art obfuscating reality and political spin than the Clintons.

The truth is Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling classified information. As FBI director James Comey stated2, “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Shockingly, after making that statement Comey did not recommend that charges be brought against Clinton.

In an attempt to prevent further Clinton carelessness — and to seek at least some consequences — House Speaker Paul Ryan formally asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to bar Clinton from receiving classified information during her presidential campaign. This is an unprecedented request in the modern era. Since the 1950s presidential candidates have been routinely briefed on intelligence matters. But this particular candidate is different. Ryan stated, “I think the DNI, Clapper, should deny Hillary Clinton access to classified information during this campaign given how she so recklessly handled classified information.”

One email of classified information sent by a Marine3 seeking to protect other Marines will earn a discharge; hundreds of classified emails intentionally kept on a private non-government authorized or secured server because you are secretary of state and prefer the “convenience” … no problem. At least that’s what Hillary Clinton would have you believe, because, as always with the Clintons, she believes the rules simply don’t apply.

Party Platforms: The Difference Between Freedom and Servitude4

 As both parties gear up for their respective conventions later this month, the glaring and growing disconnect among Democrats, particularly on the economy, is impossible to mistake. On the GOP side, the focus clearly is on reducing onerous tax rates and cutting off the federal government’s out-of-control spending. Republicans recently unveiled a tax overhaul that, at least in theory, would constrict tax filing to fit on a postcard5. And for those who question the plan’s viability, a new Tax Foundation study evokes high praise.

According to the study6, “The plan would significantly reduce marginal tax rates and the cost of capital, which would lead to 9.1 percent higher GDP over the long term, 7.7 percent higher wages, and an additional 1.7 million full-time equivalent jobs.” Additionally, “The plan would lead to 0.7 percent higher after-tax income for all taxpayers and 5.3 percent higher after-tax income for the top 1 percent. When accounting for the increased GDP, after-tax incomes of all taxpayers would increase by at least 8.4 percent.”

Meanwhile, Democrats are getting ready to accept their most anti-capitalist platform to date7. Among the changes is abolishing what the Democratic Platform Committee is calling the “starvation wage” and replacing it with a $15 minimum wage — one of the more popular talking points of Socialist Bernie Sanders. As NBC further explains, “The document goes further left than Clinton’s position on a number of issues, with Sanders policy director Warren Gunnells saying his campaign achieved ‘at least 80 percent’ of what it came for. ‘I think if you read the platform right now, you will understand that the political revolution is alive and kicking,’ he said.” In other words, the Sanders Effect is in full swing.

In a piece titled “Is Anemic Growth the New Normal?8” columnist George Will writes, “America’s economy has now slouched into the eighth year of a recovery that demonstrates how much we have defined recovery down.” As much as Barack Obama touts himself for ostensibly saving the economy, the fact is, America is in the midst of a decade of sub-3% GDP growth9. And Democrats not only want to continue Obama’s failed policies, they want to expand them. The Obama recovery has been a colossal failure. To vote for more of it is to embrace servitude.

The GOP offers a way out.

Obama’s Unilateral Disarmament10

Earlier this spring, Barack Obama hosted a nuclear summit11 to chase his dope-smoking college dream of a nuclear-free world. Well, he may not be done. Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin writes12, “The Obama administration is determined to use its final six months in office to take a series of executive actions to advance the nuclear agenda the president has advocated since his college days.” If Rogin is correct, Obama intends to use his phone and pen to further disarm the U.S. via executive action.

One of the possibilities includes extending the deadline for the New START with Russia. But that is arguably the most benign. Obama also may seek to alter long-standing U.S. policy by declaring “no first use” for American nuclear weapons. Furthermore, in addition to blocking modernization of the U.S. arsenal, he may eliminate development of the Long-Range Stand-Off weapon — nuclear cruise missile — because, Rogin says, it’s “a capability Obama doesn’t believe the United States needs.”

While the commander in chief is busy seeking to weaken the U.S., he’s greatly strengthened our geopolitical adversary, Iran. According to German intelligence, Iran has pursued “illegal proliferation-sensitive procurement activities,” especially seeking to obtain “goods that can be used in the field of nuclear technology.” In other words, the mullahs are after nuclear weapons in violation of its much-ballyhooed agreement with the West. But this is no surprise at all to readers of these pages — pretenses aside, Obama effectively gave Iran the green light with his horrible nuclear deal13.

It’s also no surprise to see that the Obama administration’s response to the German report is essentially, “Nothing to see here; move along.” According to State Department spokesman John Kirby, “We have no information to indicate that Iran has procured any materials in violation of the [nuclear agreement].” You know, other than the German report.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

George Will: Is Anemic Growth the New Normal?8
Imprimis: Freedom and Obligation — Clarence Thomas Commencement Address14
Caroline Camden Lewis: Only in Wonderland: America’s Journey Down the Rabbit Hole15

For more, visit Right Opinion16.

TOP HEADLINES

Police Fatalities Up 44% From 201517
Oregon ObamaCare Co-Op Latest Failure18
North Korea Test-Fires Submarine Missile19

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report20.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
The Left’s War on Cops21

By Arnold Ahlert

The proverbial chickens of the American Left’s obsession with divide-and-conquer politics, media-abetted false narratives, and the unrelenting vilification of police have come home to roost. Five police officers were killed22, and seven others were injured in the commission of a hate crime by racist 25-year-old Army veteran Micah Xavier Johnson, who opened fire during a Dallas Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest. Johnson’s home contained “bomb making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics,” Dallas police officials stated. His now-deleted Facebook cover photo showed a black liberation flag and a black power fist.

Despite those realities — and black Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s statement23 that the cornered, and ultimately killed, sniper admitted he had trained for his mission, was angry about recent police shootings, and that he wanted “to kill white people, especially white police officers” — the Leftmedia scrupulously avoid using the terms “racist” or “hate crime.”

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The Patriot Post Digest 7-11-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
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Likewise, Barack Obama was mystified: “I think it’s very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter.”

The latest targeting of police has also occurred24 in Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri and San Antonio, Texas25. BLM protesters took over the I-94 freeway in St. Paul, Minnesota, Saturday night and attacked26 police with concrete, rebar, rocks, bottles, fireworks and Molotov Cocktails, injuring several officers. These attacks are likely to increase, given the calls to violence and hate by many on the fringes of the BLM movement.

Unsurprisingly, the nation’s community organizer in chief wasted no time demagoguing the tragedy. Even as Obama offered praise for the heroism and sacrifice of America’s police officers, he made sure to include remarks about the “racial disparity in the justice system” and idea that people armed with “powerful weapons” make attacks “more deadly and more tragic.” Obama also used the shooting to push for federalizing police training and, just like the Orlando atrocity, attempted to dismiss the shooter’s stated agenda: “The danger is that we somehow think the act of a troubled person speaks to some larger political statement across the country — it doesn’t.”

No, the danger is a president with an odious worldview, one that makes him quick to weigh in on “stupid” Cambridge cops, a nonexistent son who would “look like Trayvon Martin,” or the “racial disparities that appear across the system year after year,” but leaves him conspicuously silent when 32-year-old Kate Steinle’s life is snuffed out by an illegal alien. A president who invited BLM activists and racial arsonist Al Sharpton to the White House in February to discuss race, crime and policing. The despicable race-baiting and violence advocated by the Left gets a free pass27 — or even support28 — from a corrupt media.

Yet it isn’t largely middle class “bitter clingers” in flyover country fomenting anti-cop racialist/separatist anarchy. It’s leftist elites promulgating the noxious ideas that America is a nation of “white privilege” and “endemic racism.” It’s a BLM movement chanting “pigs in a blanket fry ‘em like bacon,” even as one of their leaders insists29 looting is a legitimate form of protest. It is the entire metastatic progressive agenda, rotting from the ground up on violent streets and speech-suppressing college campuses, and the top down in the halls of the Obama Social Justice™ Department, where justice is no longer separated from political connections.

Do millions of American really believe their relationship with law enforcement amounts to a devil’s bargain? Or do they see a coordinated effort to demonize law enforcement with anecdotal incidents aimed at creating a broad-brush narrative wholly inconsistent with reality? Do many black communities view cops with mistrust? A 2015 study30 undertaken by the reliably leftist Washington Post revealed that police kill disproportionately more blacks than whites. Are many of those same communities virtual free-fire zones beset by crime rates that dwarf those of other communities? The same study revealed blacks commit31 a disproportionate number of crimes (eight times the number of homicides as whites and Hispanics combined) that explains the discrepancy.

Can we expect police to be completely immune to the environment in which they work? “We should hold cops to a higher standard of accountability than the average citizen because they are given great power,” writes32 Matthew Hennessey. “Yet, we can’t forget that the police are people, too.”

Or can we? It is one thing for leftists to nurture a sense of hopelessness and victimization among black Americans that can be ameliorated only by remaining within Democrat-run urban poverty plantations33. It quite another to harness that misguided loyalty and turn it into rage against a law enforcement community that is the only thing standing between Rule of Law and anarchy.

America has long endured the consequences of a morally bankrupt progressive movement that embraces anarchy — and calls it social justice. A war on cops is more like it.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

America’s (Subsidized) Fruited Plain34
Hillary Clinton’s BIG Lie35
Our Veterans Deserve Better36

OPINION IN BRIEF

George Will: “The idea that essentially zero interest rates are, after seven and a half years, stimulating the economy 'strains credulity,’ says James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. But last month he and other members of the Federal Reserve Board understandably felt constrained to vote unanimously to continue today’s rates for an economy that created just 38,000 new jobs in May, and grew just 0.8 percent in the first quarter, after just 1.4 percent in the previous quarter. The grim news is not that the economy continues to resist returning to normal. Rather, it is that this ‘current equilibrium’ (Bullard’s phrase) is the new normal. If 2 percent growth is, as he says, ‘the most likely scenario’ for the foreseeable future, the nation faces a second consecutive lost decade — one without a year of 3 percent growth. … Bullard says … it takes a while for technologies to ‘diffuse through the economy.’ And some of the diffusion — in leisure, in richer living experiences (social media; smartphones and their apps) are not captured in GDP statistics. Perhaps that helps to explain why Obama’s job approval has reached 52 percent at a moment when she who seeks to replace him concedes that the economy is so anemic that her husband will be assigned to ‘revitalize’ it.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “We must always ask: Is government working to liberate and empower the individual? Is it creating incentives for people to produce, save, invest and profit from legitimate risks and honest toil? Or does it seek to compel, command and coerce people into submission and dependence?”

Upright: “People speak of gridlock in Washington, but how can it be otherwise when one side is convinced that our existential enemy is Islam and the other side believes that Smith & Wesson is entirely to blame for the terrorist acts in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, Orlando and Istanbul?” —Burt Prelutsky

All together now: It’s not a gun problem! “We must take a hard look at the ease with which wrongdoers can get their hands on deadly weapons.” —Loretta Lynch

Demo-gogues: “We can’t just ignore [guns] and pretend that’s somehow political or the president is pushing his policy agenda. It is a contributing factor. Not the sole factor, but a contributing factor to the broader tensions that arise between police and the communities that they serve. And so we have to talk about that.” —Barack Obama

Alpha Jackass: “When we look at this Congress, we can do nothing but conclude that they are co-conspirators in the devaluation of the lives of men and women of color.” —Rep. Cedric Richmond

The BIG lie: “I have said I regret using a personal email. We turned over every document in my possession when the State Department requested it; and we turned over every device that we had.” —Hillary Clinton (Of course, she left out an important detail: “The FBI … discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.” —FBI Director James Comey)

And last… “A majority of Americans37 think [Hillary Clinton] should be criminally prosecuted — and she’s leading. Way to go, America.” —Jonah Goldberg

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.