The Patriot Post Digest 8-15-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 8-15-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Aug. 15, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“No wall of words, [and] no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.” —George Washington (1789)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Hillary’s Generous Donation to Herself1

In a typical Friday afternoon news dump, Hillary Clinton released her 2015 tax return. As for income, Hillary herself hauled in $1,475,000 in speaking fees, while Bill netted $5,250,000. There was much fanfare in the Leftmedia over the fact that she gave over $1 million of her income to charity. But what about the details of that charitable giving? As usual with the Leftmedia, those details simply don’t matter when it comes to Clinton — it’s that fact that she gave so much to “charity” that counts. What charity? Well, virtually all of it went to the Clinton Foundation. Yes, Clinton donated to her own foundation, a foundation that exists solely for the purpose of propping up the Clinton political brand. In other words, Clinton has been paying Bill’s salary and buying political capital through her foundation.

Couple her “charitable” giving with the recent emails released from Judicial Watch, which strongly indicate that Hillary moonlighted for her foundation2 while she was secretary of state, and the picture becomes clearer of a woman who has for years been actively organizing and manipulating the system for her own political aims.

Not only have the Clintons donated to their own foundation, but companies that already paid lucrative speaking fees to the Clintons also donated to the foundation. Douglas Becker is CEO of Laureate Education, a for-profit university, which is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. This past year Laureate paid Bill over $1 million in speaking fees, and that’s just the latest in an annual haul3 for Bill from Laureate. This same Douglas Becker also heads a non-profit called the International Youth Foundation, which received millions from USAID in 2010. USAID is a wing of the State Department. And Americans are expected to believe that Hillary Clinton had no connection to the Clinton Foundation while she served as secretary of state. Yeah, right.

Milwaukee Mayhem: ‘Is They White?’4

Some of Milwaukee’s finest Demo urban poverty plantation inhabitants, in the wake of a justified police shooting of an armed thug, spent the weekend finding cars with white motorists to assault. In a video of one such attack, a rioter yells, “Is they white?” Another responds, “Yeah, they white, get they a—!” Another yells, “Hey, they beating up every white person!” Still another rioter shouts, “He white! Beat his s—, bi—!”

They were further incited by Demo plantation manager and city Alderman Russell Stamper, who justified the protests, saying, “Our people are hurting.”

He then quoted a text from one of his cohorts: “I don’t know WTF we are going to do, but we gotta do something … when the people start setting s— on fire, that’s because they feel like they can’t do anything else. … They don’t give a f— about politics.”

Another alderman, Khalif Rainey, protested that the anarchy was a “warning cry” for a city he apparently hates: “The black people of Milwaukee are tired — they are tired of living under this oppression.”

Prior to the festivities, Milwaukee PD was already dealing with five murders Friday night.

However, unlike with the Black Lives Matter folks in Baltimore, who were paid off by Mayor Stephanie “Glossy Lips” Rawlings-Blake, Milwaukee’s Sheriff David Clarke is not going to put up with their anti-social crap.

Oh, and by the way, did we mention that the black armed thug with a long rap sheet was killed by a black police officer?

De Blasio Disappointed Assailant Not White5

Queens mosque leader Maulama Akonjee and his companion Thara Uddin were murdered Saturday in New York. A double murder in the nation’s largest city might not normally make headlines, but Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to weigh in and make it political. “While we do not yet know the motivation for the murders,” de Blasio said, “we do know that our Muslim communities are in the perpetual crosshairs of bigotry.”

First of all, was that the case here? Police detained the suspected killer Sunday night, and believe he was settling a score in a feud between Muslims and Hispanics. We suppose there is a festering bigotry in these communities, but it doesn’t quite fit the narrative leftists normally tell. Maybe, as with George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, the killer in this case was “white Hispanic.”

As for the perpetual crosshairs of bigotry, some Muslims certainly claim victim status. “We think it’s a hate crime,” said one local Muslim. “All this Donald Trump … we have been dealing with a lot of hatred lately.” Yet it is radical Islamists who always have non-Muslims and insufficiently radical Muslims in those crosshairs. The neighborhood where this murder occurred is just a dozen miles from the World Trade Center site, where nearly 3,000 innocents were in the crosshairs of jihadis. And numerous mass-casualty attacks nationwide have been perpetrated by radical Islamists targeting “infidels,” not Americans targeting peaceful Muslims.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

    Peggy Noonan: How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen6
    Gary Bauer: Then & Now7
    Burt Prelutsky: The Malcontents8

For more, visit Right Opinion9.

TOP HEADLINES

    Hacker Posts Contact Information of 200 Democrats10
    Obama to Roll Out More Climate Regulations11
    Admin Gives Green Light for Nuke Plants in Iran12

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report13.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
The ObamaCare Meltdown Continues14

By Arnold Ahlert

ObamaCare is back in the news — and none of it is good.

Earlier this month, Aetna became the latest of the nation’s five largest health insurers to stop expanding its ObamaCare coverage. Just like15 Anthem, UnitedHealthcare, Cigna and Humana, Aetna is projecting significant losses going forward.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini explained, 2016 was supposed to be a break-even year for the company’s ObamaCare business. Yet so far, Aetna has lost $200 million, and expects to hit $320 million in losses by year’s end.

Also this month, Anthem, which initially projected ObamaCare success this year, announced it’s expecting “mid-single-digit” losses instead, and CEO Joseph Swedish has told investors the company would be looking for substantial premium increases to make up the difference.

In April, UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s biggest health insurer, announced that in 2017 it will be leaving most of the state exchanges where it operates. CEO Stephen Hemsley explained the company could no longer serve these exchanges on an “effective and sustained basis.” UnitedHealthcare lost $475 million on ObamaCare exchanges in 2015, and could lose another $500 million this year.

In May, Cigna didn’t project profits or losses but said16 it expected customer reductions in its individual business.

In July, Humana also announced17 that next year they would service “no more” than 11 state exchanges, down from the 19 states where it sold policies in 2016 — following a staggering $1 billion of losses.

Moreover, the Big Five are attempting to become the Big Three. Anthem wants to take over Cigna, and Aetna and Humana want to merge. Both deals are being held up by the Justice Department, courtesy of antitrust lawsuits.

And then there are — or were — the highly vaunted ObamaCare co-ops. Of the 23 initially established, only seven remain, and six of those are currently18 on “corrective action plans,” Kevin Counihan, a top official from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), told lawmakers.

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The Patriot Post Digest 8-15-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
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Plenty of predictions were made about the unsustainability of ObamaCare, but an arrogant president and his Democrat Party colleagues who sold a pack of lies19 to a “stupid”20 American public refused to listen. Adding insult to injury the media have now “discovered” the law’s tragic flaw, as in nagging problems that “seem to center on lower-than-hoped-for enrollment, sicker-than-expected customers, and a balky internal stabilization system that didn’t deliver as advertised and was already scheduled to be pared back next year,” NBC reported21.

The Hill has also come around22, reporting, “The next president could be dealing with an ObamaCare insurer meltdown in his or her very first month.”

In the meantime, a bubble similar to the one that led to the 2008 stock market meltdown has been23 created. And once again arrogance was an integral part of the equation. Taking care of sick people is big business, and while it has been bad for the insurance companies it was a boon for large, merging health care systems and consolidating physician groups, initially touted24 as desirable by one of the law’s drafters. Yet as Dr. Thomas McElroy, CEO of Echelon-Health, explains, “No one came around to ask doctors what would happen when the most complicated patients where shuttled to the exchange plans. A small practice can’t survive; that’s why doctors are being bought up by hospital groups or abandoning insurance altogether for membership groups.”

Health insurance expert Joseph Cortelli further notes that all ObamaCare did was mask the problems associated with the reality that 10% of the population drives 80% of claims costs. “Unless government can continue to pump money into these exchanges, the end result is not hard to imagine,” he warns.

That pump isn’t happening. In October 2015, the CMS announced that its “risk corridor” program, one of the mechanisms whereby profitable ObamaCare insurers would bail out unprofitable insurers, would only pay 12.6% of claims. In February, a lawless administration illegally moved25 $3.5 billion in taxpayer funds intended for the U.S. Treasury to insurance companies.

Even overt malfeasance helped. In 2016, average premiums were up substantially in most states26.

Next year? “Insurers in 49 states have submitted their premium requests to regulators, and the average ‘enrollment-weighted’ rate increase, which accounts for market share, is in the range of 18% to 23%, The Wall Street Journal reveals27. "The Congressional Budget Office projected 8%.”

Presidential politics is part of the equation as well. The fourth enrollment period for the law begins one week before the election. Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) didn’t release28 the final rates until October 25. If it does the same this year, people will have only days to find a plan before deciding whether to cast their vote for Hillary Clinton and her “more of the same (or worse) approach, or Donald Trump, who might perhaps move to repeal and replace ObamaCare.

Or, the most lawless administration in American history could do what it did before the 2014 mid-terms: delay the beginning of the enrollment period until after the election.

Bottom line: The fourth enrollment period is make or break time. Absent an unforeseen and substantial enrollment of healthy Americans to offset older, sicker ones, a death spiral of fewer insurers charging increasingly higher rates — and thus driving more Americans out of increasingly unaffordable coverage — will be realized.

"I stand by what I said there,” Nancy Pelosi stated in 2013, defending her infamous “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” assertion in 2010. “When people see what is in the bill, they will like it.”

They didn’t and they haven’t. Instead millions of Americans have suffered needlessly for progressive hubris.

The best way to fix America’s health care system? Require every government official to be insured by the same program they inflict on the “little people.” Nothing could be more effective than that.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

    The ‘Reset’ Button Keeps on Giving29
    Top DOJ Official Denounced Ransom Payment to Iran30
    Oregon: Tax the 99% to Feed Unions31
    Obama Meets His Goal32

OPINION IN BRIEF

Gary Bauer: “More than 40 years ago, the nation was shocked by the leak and subsequent publication of the Pentagon Papers. … What was scandalous then … is the way Obama and Clinton routinely conduct business now. When Obama and Hillary negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran, the administration lied to reporters about secret negotiations and misled Congress and the American people. … When we paid Iran a ransom for the release of American hostages, the Obama administration acted like a crime syndicate — secretly flying $400 million in foreign currency, loaded onto an unmarked cargo plane, to Tehran in the dark of night. … When Al Qaeda terrorists murdered four Americans in Benghazi, Obama and Hillary blamed it on a video. When Islamists blow us up, they blame work place violence and try to insist it is anything other than radical Islamic terrorism. When Russia began executing aggressive military maneuvers … the Obama administration tried to prevent the public from knowing about it. … A congressional taskforce concluded that critical intelligence information related to the war against ISIS was manipulated to paint a far rosier picture than actual events on the ground warranted. When it comes to our security, Obama and Clinton have constantly lied in a way that puts the country in greater danger.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.”

For the record: “[Donald] Trump is right that most of the media want him to lose, but then that was also true of George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. It’s true of every Republican presidential nominee. The difference is that Mr. Trump has made it so easy for the media and his opponents.” —The Wall Street Journal

Non Compos Mentis: “I think … Hillary Clinton is the best for the country. I’m not thinking about it as a Republican. I’m thinking about it as a U.S. citizen. … I think she’d make a darn good president.” —Carlos Gutierrez, former commerce secretary for George W. Bush

Finger wagging jackass: “The FBI director said … he had to amend his previous day’s statement that [Hillary] had never received any emails marked classified. They saw two little notes with a ‘C’ on it — this is the biggest load of bull I’ve ever heard — that were about telephone calls that she needed to make. … Does that sound threatening to the national security to you?” —Bill Clinton

Nothing to see here! “[Clinton’s email scandal has] been investigated, no action has been taken by the Justice Department. They found no basis for any kind of action. I really do think it’s time for the candidates and for the American people to move on and talk about the real issues.” —former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta

Braying Jenny: “Assad, by what he did in his country, allowed ISIS to move into … Syria and get strongholds and recruit. That was the work and support of [Vladimir] Putin, who is Trump’s best buddy. So you can say Trump and his friend Putin are the founder of ISIS, which probably would be more accurate than calling out the commander in chief33 in that way.” —Sen. Claire McCaskill

And last… “Regarding the overnight rioting in Milwaukee, some good news: President Obama is on vacation and won’t be issuing inflammatory comments.” —@weknowwhatsbest

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.