The Patriot Post Digest 8-17-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 8-17-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Aug. 17, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” —Benjamin Franklin (1766)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

The Not So Great Society1

Donald Trump was in Wisconsin Tuesday, where he gave an impassioned speech highlighting the growing problem of poverty and violence rampant in many inner city black communities today. Trump called for law and order after the weekend of rioting in Milwaukee2. He declared that the “war on police3” was ultimately a “war on all peaceful citizens.” He also laid blame for the culture of endemic poverty and lawlessness squarely where it belongs: on the Democrats. Focusing on Clinton he said, “Hillary Clinton-backed policies are responsible for the problems in the inner cities today and a vote for her is a vote for another generation of poverty, high crime, and lost opportunities. I care too much about my country to let this happen.”

The problems in the inner city today go all the way back to Lyndon B. Johnson and his “Great Society4” program. At the time of its passage, Democrats hailed it as a step toward raising blacks out of poverty. But their motives were not so altruistic. Similar to today with Democrats pushing amnesty for illegal aliens, their motive is not one of helping but of gaining more Democrat voters. In his book entitled “Inside the White House,” former Washington Post investigative journalist Ronald Kessler exposed Johnson’s motivation for creating the “Great Society.” Kessler quotes Johnson’s damning response to the law’s passage: “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

Fast forward back to Trump’s speech. He concluded by saying, “The Democratic party has taken the votes of African-Americans for granted. They’ve just assumed they’ll get your support, and done nothing in return for it. They’ve taken advantage of the African-American citizens. It is time to give the Democrats some competition for these votes, and it is time to rebuild the inner cities of America, and to reject the failed leadership of a rigged political system.” We’ll see if any hear his call.

Military Shrinks, Regulatory Army Grows5

America’s military readiness6 has been in steady decline ever since Barack Obama took the helm. Yet overall the federal government has grown at an insatiable rate. Obama created numerous government programs that are not only adding trillions of dollars to our national debt but also expanding the government’s already excessive influence on matters not granted its authority. A good illustration is seen in the number of federal regulators. There’s literally an army of them: 277,000 as of last year.

But that’s not an all-inclusive figure, either. CNS News explains7 that this figure “includes only regulatory agencies that explicitly restrict business transactions in the private sector. That means the 277,000 regulators they recorded in 2015 didn’t include anyone from the Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, Defense Department, or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — even though these agencies account for roughly one-third of all final rulemaking actions in a typical year.”

Even more disconcerting, consider this: Based on a 2014 “Profile of the Military Community8” report, federal regulators now outnumber the Marine Corps (187,891 active duty members) and are closing in on the Air Force (312,453) and Navy (321,599). As we’ve seen, regulators can wreak a lot of economic havoc. And the fact the number of them compares to that of our military branches should scare everybody. Obama is building the wrong army.

Americans' Love-Hate Relationship With Government9

Gallup recently polled Americans regarding their views on what sectors of industry they most trusted. The poll showed that two of the most competitive business industries were at the top of the list — restaurants and the computer industry. Interestingly — but not surprisingly — those industries viewed more negatively by Americans are health care and lawyers. However, even these were not viewed as poorly as the last “business” on the list.

Predictably, the industry that the American people least trust is the federal government. A mere 28% of Americans view the federal government positively, with 55% viewing it negatively. Citizens' views of the U.S. government have not been this bad since the 1970s. Under Barack Obama, with the passage of such abysmal laws like ObamaCare and the consistent lack of serious action taken to stem the flow of illegal immigration, more Americans may be feeling like the federal government has become all too intrusive, inefficient and flat out untrustworthy. The trouble is, voters always want to seem to give more power to that same federal government. Until that changes, we can expect more of the same.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

    Walter Williams: Is Free Trade Causing Job Loss?10
    Michelle Malkin: Hillary’s Headhunter: Sleazeball Ken Salazar11
    Terence Jeffrey: Obama’s Anti-Terror Strategy: Release Gitmo Detainees12

For more, visit Right Opinion13.

TOP HEADLINES

    Feds Reject Clinton Comparison in Classified Photos Case14
    Obama Imposes New Regulations on Trucks15
    Demo PA Attorney General Convicted on Nine Counts16

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report17.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Venezuela: From Utopia to Hell on Earth18

By Louis DeBroux

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” —former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

Writing in his book “The Life of Reason,” Spanish philosopher George Santayana declared, “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

That axiom may be nowhere more true than in the portion of humanity that endlessly embraces authoritarian government despite its inglorious record of failure. The failure, according to the Left, arises not in the flawed philosophy itself, but in the improper application of it. Many of the greatest atrocities in human history occurred in the last century at the hands of leftist, totalitarian regimes around the world, yet like a dog to its vomit, the Left ignores the fetid stench of death and oppression and comes back for more.

Venezuela is just the latest example of this phenomenon.

Three years ago, in the leftist rag Salon, writer David Sirota praised the brilliance and virtues of corrupt Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez19. Sirota effusively extolled the “indisputably positive results” of Chavez’s brand of socialism, while minimizing or dismissing his human rights abuses and strong-armed tactics in the pursuit of power, arguing he was not as bad as his predecessor. He gushed that Chavez, who had stolen private property on a mass scale in the process of nationalizing the nation’s oil industry, had “racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.”

[nChrist]

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The Patriot Post Digest 8-17-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Fast forward three short years to today, and what has become of that “economic miracle”? The picture isn’t pretty.

Like a throw-back to the dark days of Soviet Russia, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has instituted mandatory labor20 in agricultural fields. In response to Venezuela’s rapidly spiraling economic crisis, the nation’s businesses were informed they must allow the government to reassign their workers to the fields in order to try and grow sufficient food to feed a nation that suffers from dire hunger problems. The situation has become so bad that some have taken to breaking into the zoo to kill animals for meat21. Other, less daring citizens resort to crawling through dumpsters to find food22.

Just two months after Sirota penned his hagiographic missive on Chavez’s utopia, USA Today ran a story23 reporting on how the implementation of price controls had led to a shortage of many basic necessities. It was painful enough when shortages of milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal afflicted the people, but in the end (pardon the pun), running out of toilet paper might have been the most intolerable.

Or maybe not. This year things have only gotten worse. The country has run out of bread and sugar, and its desperate citizens have been looting stores for months in search of something to eat. The nation’s hospitals no longer provide relief from suffering, having run out of medicine, gauze, gloves, soap and other critical supplies. Electricity is unreliable, medical machines no longer work, and infants die daily without proper care24, and many others die from malnutrition and disease. Chavez’s workers' paradise has become, for the victims of his legacy, a literal Hell on Earth.

Inevitably, social systems and infrastructure break down under the heavy hand of authoritarian government. Stripped of the incentive to work, devoid of the profit motive, society begins to crumble with no motivation to sustain it. In turn, the ruling faction creates enemies as the scapegoats for failure and the focal point of fury. Dissidents are rounded up, jailed, and killed25. Those who speak out are considered enemies of the state, and treated as such.

Authoritarian regimes disguise their brutality in many candy-coated flavors; Hitler’s National Socialism, Mussolini’s fascism, Soviet communism, China’s Maoist version of Marxism, and even the soft tyranny of European-style democratic socialism, which takes an ever greater portion of the fruits of man’s labor to achieve the purposes of the state to which the people are subjects. Yet whatever the flavor, at the core lays a poison pill that kills individual liberty, prosperity, and the entrepreneurial spirit which has elevated untold millions from abject poverty.

Just ask the people of Venezuela.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

    Trump vs. the Islamic State26
    The GOP’s Case for Clinton’s Perjury27
    Seattle’s False Positive28

OPINION IN BRIEF

Walter Williams: “It is true that the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been in steep decline for almost a half-century, but manufacturing employment disguises the true story of American manufacturing. U.S. manufacturing output has increased by almost 40 percent. Annual value added by U.S. factories has reached a record $2.4 trillion. To put that in perspective, if our manufacturing sector were a separate nation, it would be the seventh richest nation on the globe. … While job loss can be traumatic for the individual who loses his job, for the nation job loss often indicates economic progress. In 1790, farmers were 90 percent of the U.S. labor force. By 1900, about 41 percent of our labor force was employed in agriculture. Today, less than 3 percent of Americans are employed in agriculture. … Losing a job due to outsourcing or losing it to technological innovation produces the same result for an individual: He’s out of a job. The best thing that we can do is to have a robust economy such that he can find another job.”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “Whatever the individual motives of the censors may be, censorship is a form of social control. It is a means of holding a society together, of arresting the flux which censors fear. And since the fear cannot be appeased, the demands for censorship mount in volume and intensity. And one form of censorship can easily lead to other forms.” —Carey McWilliams (1905-1980)

Upright: “Our war should be on behalf of conservatism. Trump has divided conservatives on the proper tactics. But once Nov. 9 hits, we’re all on the same page again: We must either stop leftist policies from President Trump or President Clinton. And we’ll need to be allies. The first step should be recognizing the good will of those who fight alongside us, even if we don’t make the same risk calculations with regard to a conservative future.” —Ben Shapiro

The BIG lie: “The [15 Gitmo] detainees [Obama shipped to the UAE] have been vetted through what is a very rigorous process, and I can assure you that it’s a very rigorous process — looked at all of the, you know, whether they would return to the battlefield. … I don’t know the percentage in front of me, but it’s incredibly small.” —State Department spokesman Mark Toner (Fact check: “The Director of National Intelligence confirmed in its March report that 17.5% of prisoners released from Guantanamo over the years have returned to terrorist activities.” —The Wall Street Journal)

Non Compos Mentis: “There’s a guy who follows me, right back here, [he] has the nuclear codes. … [Trump] is not qualified to know the code! He can’t be trusted!” —Joe Biden

Non sequitur: “Texas has really been hit hard by the climate crisis and, for the last 35 years, has had more billion-dollar-plus climate disasters than any other state. Houston in particular has been hard hit. … These kinds of record downpours [over the last week in Louisiana] — that’s one of the manifestations of the climate crisis.” —Al Gore

And last… “We shouldn’t be letting enemies of liberty come to live among us just because stopping them might anger a primitive on the other side of the world.” —Mark Krikorian

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.