The Patriot Post Digest 9-7-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 9-7-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Sep. 7, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen; and we shall most sincerely rejoice with you in the happy hour when the establishment of American Liberty, upon the most firm and solid foundations shall enable us to return to our private stations in the bosom of a free, peacefully and happy country.” —George Washington (1775)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Military Strongly in Camp Trump1

Over the years, Republican presidential candidates have enjoyed strong support from the military and veterans, and this election is no different. A poll released this week shows Donald Trump with a commanding 19-point lead over Hillary Clinton among military and veteran voters. Compared with the three prior presidential elections, Trump’s current support among the military is second only to Mitt Romney, who won the military vote by 20 points. Those margins have a lot to do with how frequently both Obama and Clinton have betrayed our military2.

In spite of the release earlier this year of a letter signed by 50 Republican national security advisers stating that Trump would be the “most reckless president in American history,” the real estate mogul has continued to pick up military and veteran support. He recently received the endorsement of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, with whom Trump did a town hall meeting in Virginia Beach — where Trump accused Clinton of treating immigrants better than veterans. He has also received support from Major General Sidney Shachnow, a 40-year veteran and Holocaust survivor who said that Trump “has the temperament to be commander in chief.”

While there are those who have voiced their concerns about Trump’s views on foreign policy, citing for example his remarks regarding Russia and the war in Iraq, what may be more telling is just how disliked and distrusted Clinton is by many military personnel and veterans. When those who have taken the oath to defend this nation at risk of life and limb are presented with the choice — Donald Trump and his call to make America first, or Hillary Clinton, whose propensity for untruthfulness is seemingly limitless — the choice seems rather obvious.

Obama Using Constitution to Club Vets3

Governing according to the Constitution is exactly what every elected official ought to strive to do. They have, after all, sworn an oath to do so. But whenever Barack Obama evokes the Constitution to argue for or against a policy, one of two things is at play — he’s grabbing power, or he’s lying. Or both. Such is the case with a few reform proposals for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Congress established the Commission on Care to review the VA and recommend changes so that veterans would no longer die waiting for appointments, but would receive the care they deserve. The panel made 18 recommendations, and Obama said he agreed with 15 of them. But Government Executive reports4, “He rejected a proposal to restructure the Veterans Health Administration governance, including the creation of an 11-member board of directors to set the agency’s long-term strategy. Obama said the Justice Department has told him the reform would violate the appointments clause of the Constitution.”

In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Obama wrote, “The proposal would undermine the authority of the secretary and the under secretary for health, weaken the integration of the VA health care system with the other services and programs provided by the VA and make it harder — not easier — for VA to implement transformative change.” The former constitutional lecturer is wrong. The proposal changes the structure of oversight, moving power away from the people who’ve made such a hash of the VA’s workings, while leaving confirmation power with the president. This commander in chief has done next to nothing to make the VA work better for veterans, and now he’s hiding behind the Constitution as an excuse. The same Constitution he tramples at every whim. How disgraceful.

Chicago’s Big Murder Problem5

The astounding murder rate in Barack Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago has been something of a regular news item over the last few years. Labor Day weekend brought 13 more homicides, meaning Chicago’s total this year has now surpassed 500 — what USA Today calls6 “a grim milestone that puts the city on track to reach a murder rate it hasn’t seen since the drug wars of the 1990s.” USA Today also notes, “With murders up roughly 50% for the year, Chicago has tallied more homicides than the much larger cities of New York and Los Angeles combined.”

Naturally, the favored leftist term “gun violence” has been adopted even by many conservatives when discussing these murder statistics. But that is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a loaded term meant to put the focus on guns instead of the gangs, drugs and general cultural rot that is truly to blame. That’s especially true given the particularly onerous gun control measures in place in the Windy City.

“Impoverished neighborhoods, people without hope do these kinds of things,” said Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson. “You show me a man that doesn’t have hope, I’ll show you one that’s willing to pick up a gun and do anything with it.” It’s worth remembering a few things. Obama brought Hope ‘n’ Change™ in 2008, so why does anyone in his city lack hope? Well, that’s a rhetorical question. As is true in every one of the American cities with the highest per capita murder rates, Democrats have been in charge for half a century or more. In Chicago, Democrats have ruled for 85 years — almost as long as the Cubs have been without a World Series title. The latter may change this year. It’s way past time the former did too.

And by the way, if black lives really mattered to Black Lives Matter, they’d stop creating a climate that kills people7.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Ben Shapiro: Hillary’s Email Scandal Takes Down the FBI8
L. Brent Bozell & Tim Graham: Hillary’s Untrustworthy Temperament9
Walter Williams: Corrupt Academics and the Media10

For more, visit Right Opinion11.

TOP HEADLINES

Marine Tried to Warn a Comrade; Now He Faces a Discharge for Using Classified Intel12
U.S. Made $1.7 Billion Transfer to Iran in Foreign Cash13
Obama Regs Shutter ITT Technical Institutes14
Inside Bill Clinton’s $18M Job as ‘Honorary Chancellor’ of For-Profit College15

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report16.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Time to End Early Voting and the Lame Duck Congress17

By Louis DeBroux

“Vote: The instrument and symbol of a free man’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.” —American author Ambrose Bierce

There are two dynamics in the modern American political landscape that have combined to act as a steady eroding current on the foundational rock of Liberty. One is the lame duck session of Congress that occurs every two years, and the other is the relatively new push for early voting. One skews the results, and one ignores the results.

With the lame duck session, politicians who are retiring or have been voted out of office have one last chance to stick it to the voters18, knowing they won’t face another election where they will have to answer to their constituents. Really, really bad legislation has a habit of getting passed during the lame duck session.

In the lame duck of 2010, following the political earthquake that was the Tea Party revolution, which saw Democrats demolished at the polls in a historic fashion after passing the so-called “stimulus” bill, ObamaCare, and other items on the leftist wish list, outgoing Democrats (with the aid of a few dependably undependable Republicans) took one final shot at their countrymen. Democrats extended unemployment benefits up to nearly two years, repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (the prohibition against open homosexuals in the military established under Bill Clinton, the repeal of which changed the focus of our military from being the world’s finest fighting force to a social experiment in the normalization of sexual deviancy and mental illness), and passed the New START treaty, which in practice forced the U.S. to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal while allowing Russia to keep, and even expand, its own.

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The Patriot Post Digest 9-7-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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In 2012, with Republicans demoralized after the defeat of Mitt Romney in the presidential election, the lame duck session yielded “the largest tax increase in history,” a $620 billion hike passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate at 2:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day, and signed by Obama while he was vacationing (yet again) in Hawaii.

The lame duck session of Congress was a rare occurrence until 2000, with only 13 such sessions between 1940 and 2000, nearly always for the purpose of addressing emergencies. Since 2000, there has been a lame duck session in every Congress, but rather than dealing with emergencies, they have been used to push through agenda items that were not dealt with during the regular session. While hundreds of millions of Americans are trying to enjoy the holidays, Congress has taken advantage of their distraction to pass amnesty measures for illegals, new regulations, and confirm controversial judges to the bench with lifetime appointments. This year, conservatives fear it may get even worse19, even with Republicans at the helm.

In short, politicians have used the lame duck session to pass legislation that is unpopular with the American people. It may be time to end the lame duck session altogether, as it was once significantly limited by the passage of the 20th Amendment.

The other troubling election issue is early voting. In recent years, more and more states have passed or expanded early voting laws. North Carolinians can start casting votes this Friday, nearly two months before Election Day. Alabamians get to start voting next week, and voters in Minnesota and South Dakota can cast ballots a week and a half later. All told, voters in two-thirds of the states can cast ballots before Election Day.

In order to maintain our constitutional republic we must have a citizenry that is informed and engaged, one which takes seriously its obligation to be thoroughly versed in the philosophy and form of our government, and its mechanisms.

Instead, we have a nation where depressingly high numbers of citizens are simply ignorant20 about America’s history and political system; where barely a third (36%) can name all three branches of government, and roughly a quarter (27%) know that it takes a two-thirds vote of Congress to override a veto.

And yet politicians work tirelessly to register as many people to vote as possible, and get them to lock in their votes as early as possible. Nearly a third of votes cast in 2012 came before Election Day, which prompts some questions: With so many voters voting so early, what if something happens to make them change their mind? And how early can early voting get before it becomes ludicrous?

As National Review’s Jim Geraghty sarcastically observes21, early voters are stuck if, “in the final debate, Hillary Clinton has a sudden mental breakdown and begins barking like a dog. (Again.) Or imagine that Donald Trump declares that he loves reading Hitler’s speeches, or some other statement completely beyond the pale. Some voters would suddenly realize they had already cast a ballot for a candidate they cannot abide, and there is no way to un-do their decision.”

True, the same can often be said for officials after they’re elected, but elections are our primary chance to weigh all the available facts and make an informed decision.

In our republic, voting is a sacred privilege, and one in which all Americans should be encouraged to participate. But more importantly, we must demand that voters have a minimum level of civic knowledge in order to participate. Early voting and lame duck sessions of Congress have caused much damage to our national well-being, and if voters are informed, they may just decide to end both.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

Death to the Death Tax22 — Obama’s Treasury is seeking to squeeze more revenue from small businesses.
Muslims Want to Rewrite 9/1123 — The facts surrounding 9/11 are very clear. Islamic radicals committed jihad on American soil.
Successfully Hammering the Coal Industry24 — Both Obama and Clinton are working to bankrupt coal.
Merkel Takes a Beating, but Doubles Down25 — Recent elections show Germans are turning on the chancellor over migration.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Ben Shapiro: “For months Americans wondered whether the FBI, led by Director James Comey, would take down the most corrupt woman in the history of American politics, Hillary Clinton. As it turns out, Hillary Clinton took down the FBI. … There is no excuse for Clinton escaping charges. Not one. The FBI’s own documents prove that she took action that you would only take if you were attempting to obstruct justice, destroy evidence and lie to law enforcement. And yet the FBI, as a wing of the Obama White House, went out of its way to ensure that the Democratic presidential candidate would evade prosecution. That means it lacks basic legitimacy. It’s not the only agency the Obama administration has exposed as a political hammer. It has corrupted the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. The list is nearly endless. No wonder so many Americans seem willing to turn to a man who promises to burn the entire structure down, Donald Trump. There’s little worth saving here, unless you’re a Democrat hoping to uphold the integrity of institutions dedicated to preserving scandal-ridden Democrats.”

SHORT CUTS

Upright: “Many, perhaps most people who vote Republican don’t do so because of tax rates or trade agreements or Kelo or Ex-Im or even abortion or guns. Rather, it is nationalism — understood as the political expression of the emotion of patriotism — that’s the substructure of support for the Right, the policy specifics about taxes and the rest being the superstructure. Voters who don’t particularly care about the three-legged stool of conservatism voted Republican anyway because they were one-nation patriots and the Democrats had become the party of post-Americanism and balkanization. This is the real source of the revulsion at Obama — it’s not his father’s race and it’s not really even Obamacare and the other outrages of this administration, outrageous as they are. It’s his post-Americanism, which combines his citizen-of-the-world pretensions with an aggressive campaign of deconstructing the American people.” —Mark Krikorian

For the record: “The media’s general lack of interest in Clinton scandals also shows that most journalists have a ‘temperament’ problem. They present themselves to the public as ornery, nonpartisan watchdogs, but in reality they’re the aggressively obsequious partisans that swoon over Clinton when she buys a burrito. Is it any wonder that trust in the media is so low?” —L. Brent Bozell & Tim Graham

Art of the deal: “[Hillary Clinton] has 33,000 emails that she deleted. When is she going to release her emails? Let her release her emails and I will release my tax returns immediately.” —Donald Trump

A vast right-wing conspiracy: “I believe I have created so many jobs in the conspiracy theory machine factory, because honestly, [Republicans] never quit.” —Hillary Clinton

Belly laugh of the week: “They even went after my foundation last week. Now that was really funny. I was sort of Robin Hood, except I didn’t rob anybody. I just asked people with money to give it to people who didn’t have money.” —Bill Clinton (He must mean giving money to Hillary, who, after all, was “dead broke” when the foundation kicked off.)

And last… “Late Friday, at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, the FBI released some of the notes that agents took during their Fourth of July weekend interview with Hillary Clinton. Do you see the pattern here? Fourth of July… Labor Day… I can’t wait until Thanksgiving!” —Gary Bauer

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.