The Patriot Post Digest 8-26-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 8-26-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Aug. 26, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature.” —James Madison (1788.)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

That Smoke Is Hillary’s Pants on Fire1

Where there’s smoke there may be not just a fire, but a forest fire. Even as Hillary Clinton continues to deny and make light of the growing integrity scandal surrounding her use of a private email system while secretary of state, the smoke is only thickening. On Thursday, Reuters reported2 that U.S. District Court Judge William Dimitrouleas ordered the State Department “to release by Sept. 13 any emails it finds between Hillary Clinton and the White House from the week of the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, among the thousands of additional emails3 uncovered by federal investigators.” This order was in response to Judicial Watch’s request, as it is currently suing the State Department for the release of Clinton’s records. In other words, Clinton didn’t delete only emails about yoga and wedding plans.

Speaking of mass deletion, remember her pathetic quip when asked if she had wiped her email server — “What, like with a cloth or something?” Well, it was also revealed on Thursday that Clinton’s team used special software known as BleachBit to delete emails from her personal servers. Some cloth. South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy said, “She and her lawyers had those emails deleted where even God can’t read them.” He continued, “You don’t use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridesmaids' emails. When you’re using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.”

What is undeniable is that Hillary has continued to lie about her email scandal, her response to the Benghazi terror attack and her attempts to cover up her lies. Gowdy concluded, “When you are a habitual, serial liar in this facet of life, it tends to make people not believe you in other facets of life.” A statement with which we hardily agree. Sadly, to many Americans, Clinton’s lies just don’t seem to matter.

How Big Is the U.S. Debt Bomb?4

The Congressional Budget Office released its 10 year forecast of how much debt the U.S. is expected to accumulate by 2026 at current spending rates. And — surprise — the news isn’t good. The report relates some startling numbers, which are almost too large to comprehend. The national debt that currently stands at $19 trillion is forecasted to grow to $28 trillion in the next 10 years. That would put the nation’s debt at the terrifying level of 86% of GDP by 2026. The dramatic increase in government spending during Obama’s eight years in office shows little sign of slowing down even as the economy has continued to limp along at barely above a 1% growth rate.

Three areas of the highest government spending — accounting for 69% of the total annual budget — are Social Security, government health programs (Medicare, Medicaid and ObamaCare) and interest payments on the debt. Spending in these three areas is projected to increase to a whopping 77% of the annual budget by 2026. With the current rate of spending, other areas of the budget are expected to decrease as a portion of the whole. For example, defense spending is currently at 15% annually but is projected to drop to about 12% in a decade.

Clearly, the U.S. government has a spending problem — and it’s only getting worse. Unfortunately, neither presidential candidate seems inclined to address the issue at all5, let alone offer any realistic plans for budgetary restraints. Today’s politicians are leaving the problem for tomorrow’s generations to sort out, and the bill is going to come due in a painful way.

VA Whistleblower Gets the Boot6

When it comes to the Department of Veterans Affairs, miracles do happen. Just ask Anthony Salazar. The Los Angeles-based VA employee was fired last year for ostensibly violating the agency’s code of conduct. Great news, right? Well, not exactly. Even when miracles like this do happen at the VA, they’re shrouded in malicious ulterior motives. According to the Office of Special Counsel, a few years ago “Mr. Salazar described how 30 of the 88 agency vehicles were unaccounted for, explained how ten fleet cards were suspected of fraudulent purchases, and pressed the urgent need for the VA to get the situation under control.”

That’s pretty alarming stuff, and an ensuing investigation found Robert Benkeser, who oversees the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, culpable. According to The Daily Caller, “The department convened an ‘administrative investigation board’ (AIB) that resulted in ‘a letter of counseling’ to Benkeser for mismanaging the motor pool.” But instead of rectifying the situation and moving on, a vengeful Benkeser terminated Salazar … for exposing his own misdeeds. As the Caller goes on to note, “The ease with which Salazar was fired … stands in contrast to the many employees who unambiguously committed egregious misconduct and are still on the job.” No joke.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports, “A 76-year-old veteran committed suicide on Sunday in the parking lot of the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center on Long Island, where he had been a patient, according to the Suffolk County Police Department.” An anonymous source said the man, Peter A. Kaisen, “went to the ER and was denied service. And then he went to his car and shot himself.” If the VA put as much effort into helping folks like Mr. Kaisen as it does looking to retaliate against whistleblowers — a problem that’s systemic — perhaps fewer vets would be killing themselves.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

David Harsanyi: Have More Kids. It’s Good for the Planet.7
Charles Krauthammer: The Bribery Standard8
Mona Charen: Hillary Clinton’s Felonious Friends in Virginia9

For more, visit Right Opinion10.

TOP HEADLINES

ObamaCare Sticker Shock Hits Key Senate Races11
Millions From Maxed-Out Clinton Donors Flowed Through Loophole12
University of Chicago: No ‘Safe Spaces’ Here13

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report14.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Hillary Seeks to Put Trump and Blacks in Their Place15

By Michael Swartz

Aside from being reminded just how corrupt and deceitful she was about her email (and our national security) as secretary of state, we haven’t heard a whole lot from the Democrat presidential nominee lately. But yesterday in Reno, Nevada, Hillary Clinton took a speech originally intended to explain more about her economic program and made it into an race-baiting indictment of Donald Trump, saying his campaign had made the “alt-right” of foreign policy isolationists, immigration hardliners and a smattering of white supremacists a mainstream part of the Republican Party. This followed on the heels of the release of a campaign ad16 making the claim that “these [alt-right] people support Trump because they believe Trump supports them.”

Clinton is like every other Democrat in seeking to play the race card at every opportunity, but the circumstances here were particularly suspect. Trump had made the case earlier in the week in Michigan that blacks had “nothing to lose” by voting for him. And he has a point: It’s obvious that Democrat policies of doling out to the minority community just enough to survive but not enough to thrive in return for their votes17 demanded a different approach. And Trump had “nothing to lose,” either, as his polling numbers in the black community barely register above zero.

For years, conservatives have agonized about how best to reach out to this most monolithic of minority voting blocs — one that barely gives the GOP the time of day. Even if Republican support among blacks only reaches 25%, they theorize, it would cripple the Democrat machine that has run most of America’s large urban poverty plantations18 for decades. Case in point: Detroit, which is a poster child for urban decay, hasn’t had a Republican mayor for over half a century.

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The Patriot Post Digest 8-26-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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But speaking Wednesday in Jackson, Mississippi, Trump took a more accusatory approach. “Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,” he shouted. It’s an approach that won’t win any friends at The Washington Post19, but the message wasn’t aimed at them. (The Post couldn’t resist adding that the audience was “vastly white.” Just wondering: Do journalists ever report on the racial composition — or the size of the crowd — at a Clinton event?)

So in her Reno remarks20, Hillary trotted out the usual suspects to promote the agenda stamped on her race card: David Duke, Alex Jones and others who speak the “divisive rhetoric” that mainstream Republicans dismiss as the product of the outer fringe of the party. “Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment,” said Clinton. “But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.”

There is a compelling argument, though, that Hillary is bringing this subject up as a means of giving this small portion of Trump’s base more attention than it deserves. “Hillary is openly inviting them to center stage in the national debate,” wrote21 John Sexton. Before this campaign began, most people had forgotten about overt racists like David Duke, but in this political climate he may be seen simply as the flip side of the Black Lives Matter movement. As proof of this newfound celebrity for Duke, people now listen to and quote him22 from his internet radio broadcast, where he noted, “I believe the values of the alt-right — my values, your values — are winning right now in the Republican Party. But we’ve got to carry it forward. We’ve got to get Donald Trump elected.” (Duke, however, has stopped short of formally endorsing Trump, and Trump, after initially whiffing on the subject, disavowed Duke.)

That enthusiasm from Duke makes the sobering assessment23 by D.C. McAllister harder to take, because this most recent tactic from Hillary is just another recitation from the race card the Left has played for decades. “Instead of recognizing what the Left has been doing and fighting it with their own social psychology counter-strategy, conservatives have allowed themselves to be stigmatized,” writes McAllister. “They have unwisely accepted the premise (consciously or unconsciously) that they’re somehow guilty for America’s racist past, and have set out to prove they aren’t racist. They have failed.”

Yet we offer two more counterpoints to Clinton’s racial smear. The Democrat-founded KKK, which her ad pins on Trump, hardly exists any longer beyond a handful of guys (often Yankees, by the way) who suffer from personal demons and do not represent any modern political movement. And it was Democrats like LBJ who said of the Civil Rights Act of 196417, “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” So which party is racist again?

For Trump, there may be no right answer — his remarks about illegal immigrants from Mexico, Muslims from the Middle East, and other minorities are already public record and are part of both his appeal to certain segments of society and the cause of revulsion from millions of other voters. But witness two of the concluding sentences of Hillary’s speech: “And I’ll tell ya, when I was growing up, in so many parts of our country, [Olympian] Simone Manuel would not have been allowed to swim in the same public pool as [fellow Olympian] Katie Ledecky. And now together on our swimming team they’re winning Olympic medals as teammates.”

Hillary Clinton would have us believe that Donald Trump wants us to return to the days of Jim Crow. We, on the other hand, contend that our nation has long since moved beyond that to a point where only agenda-driven media types obsess about the race of our Olympic athletes.

So why can’t we question whether one group’s fealty to a certain political party seems to have done it a lot more harm than good for several decades? The fact that Clinton pulled the race card so ham-handedly clearly means she has no answer for this legitimate query about the Democrat Party.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

No, Late-Night Comedians Aren’t Education Experts24 — HBO’s John Oliver goes off on charter schools, but the joke’s on him.
Doctors Fight Obama’s Transgender Rules25 — A significant lawsuit against recent HHS rules regarding sex-reassignment surgery.
Minimum Wage Hikes Are Cooking Jobs26 — The restaurant industries in both Seattle and DC are bleak.
Conan: ‘Proof That Hillary’s Health Is Fantastic’27 — A humorous take on the questions about Clinton’s health.

OPINION IN BRIEF

David Harsanyi: “The problem with environmentalists isn’t merely that they have destructive ideas about the economy, but that so many of them embrace repulsive ideas about human beings. Take a recent NPR piece that asks, ‘Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?’ If you want to learn about how environmentalism has already affected people in society, read about the couple pondering ‘the ethics of procreation’ and its impact on the climate before starting a family, or the group of women in a prosperous New Hampshire town swapping stories about how the ‘the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis.’ There are, no doubt, many good reasons a person might have for not wanting children. But it’s certainly tragic that some gullible Americans who have the means and emotional bandwidth — and perhaps a genuine desire — to be parents avoid having kids because of a quasi-religious belief in apocalyptic climate change and overpopulation. … The real problem we face is sustaining population. The replacement fertility rate is 2.1, and in certain places where they fail to meet this threshold … they’ve suffered economic and cultural stagnation. … Here’s a provocative thought: Maybe it’s the best time in history to have children.”

SHORT CUTS

Upright: “The Washington Post’s reporting notes that [Gov. Terry] McAuliffe’s [clemency for felons] was popular, with 61 percent of respondents expressing support. What difference does this make to the law? If we’re going to have government by plebiscite, let’s repeal the Constitution and do everything by SurveyMonkey.” —Mona Charen

The Clinton lowdown: “The central problem with Hillary Clinton’s emails was not the classified material. It wasn’t the headline-making charge by the FBI director of her extreme carelessness in handling it. … The real question wasn’t classification but: Why did she have a private server in the first place? She obviously lied about the purpose. It wasn’t convenience. It was concealment. What exactly was she hiding?” —Charles Krauthammer

Non Compos Mentis: “[Hillary Clinton] has no reasons to trust the press corps. And the so-called email scandal is one of the reasons.” —Howard Dean

For the record: “During a focus group in Milwaukee last night, a dozen Wisconsinites who have voted for both a Democrat and a Republican for president in the past 16 years lamented the choice that looms before them in November. … The group reflected the electorate’s disenchantment and lack of enthusiasm. Asked to name a scent or smell that best describes the 2016 campaign, the answers were sulfur, rotten eggs, garbage, manure and a skunk’s fart.” —The Washington Post

The BIG Lie: “The [climate change] deniers have been very successful — surprisingly successful — because they are almost exclusively funded by the fossil-fuel industry. … This whole anti-science movement has been set up to preserve an economy that is going away.” —Bill Nye

And last… “Iranian ships pushed the US Navy around for the 4th time this week. President Obama said if this keeps up, he might slow down our cash deliveries.” —Twitter satirist @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.