The Patriot Post Digest 9-14-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 9-14-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
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Mid-Day Digest

Sep. 14, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” —Thomas Jefferson (1816)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Obama Blows Media Dog Whistle1

In light of Hillary Clinton’s recent health episode2 and subsequent bed rest, Barack Obama has picked up the slack and has hit the campaign trail on her behalf. At a campaign stop in Philadelphia, Obama took the media to task for not hitting hard enough against Donald Trump. Obama said, “I’m frustrated the way this campaign is covered. Donald Trump says stuff every day that used to be considered as disqualifying for being president. And yet because he says it over and over and over again, the press just gives up and says, ‘Well, yeah, you know, okay.’”

It’s interesting to note that Obama chastises the Leftmedia for not being partisan enough in their coverage of the campaign. It’s almost as if he were speaking to a Democrat grassroots organization. What’s ironic is the fact that the mainstream press has long been heavily favorable3 toward Democrats and this election year is no different. Here are just a few recent examples.

First, Clinton’s health. On Monday night, CBS News aired a Charlie Rose interview with Bill Clinton, but CBS conveniently edited out Bill’s comment that Hillary “frequently” had such health episodes. Why would CBS edit out Clinton’s remark if not to protect Hillary? Other Leftmedia outlets have variously downplayed her collapse Sunday.

Second, Clinton’s “basket of deplorables4” remark. On Tuesday, Trump’s running mate Mike Pence was in Washington meeting with GOP members seeking to establish greater party unity behind Trump. The New York Times reported on this meeting, entitling its article “Mike Pence is Rebuffed as He Tries to Rally G.O.P. Leaders Over ‘Deplorables.’” The article focused on Pence being put on the defensive to prove that Trump’s supporters aren’t a “basket of deplorables.” CNN hit Pence for not calling David Duke “deplorable,” even as Pence denounced Duke. The Washington Post ran an article entitled “Are some of Trump supporters ‘deplorable’? Here’s what the data says.” The story suggests that Clinton’s comments about Trump supporters are actually not that far off. It concluded that upwards of 83% of Trump supporters hold “objectively ‘deplorable’” views.

What Obama’s comments indicate is that Democrat leadership is unnerved by the fact that Trump continues to maintain a close race despite a lot of negative press. Obama is calling on the media to push even harder against Trump and for Hillary. But complaining about a lack of bias is laughable.

Who’s Up for a Carbon Tax?5

Most Beltway dwellers are notoriously oblivious to the needs of people in less affluent regions of America. Therefore most of them don’t understand the importance of inflation. Take low gas prices. Taxpayer-subsidized public transit makes price swings less noticeable on the wallets of workers in large metropolitan areas and even less so for those making six-figure salaries, including your senator and representative. But for most of middle class America, the difference between spending $3 or $4 for a gallon of gasoline and $1.95 can be prodigious.

So it’s hugely disappointing to see leftists exploiting low gas prices caused by the oil glut by calling for more red tape to curb driver behavior. The Washington Post editorial board laments6 the fact that “when oil prices sink, people worry less about conservation, no matter how environmentally desirable. In fact, higher fuel efficiency might also encourage some people to drive more than they would have otherwise, because their gas bills are lower.” And though the editors believe firmly in fuel efficiency standards, lower gas prices make them less than fully effective. So why not add another disincentive in the form of a carbon tax?

“A carbon tax would put a lower ceiling on national gasoline use without more aggressive regulatory interventions,” the Post writes, totally neglecting to mention that said tax is a very aggressive regulatory intervention. Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw highlights7 a few issues: “First of all, higher gas prices disproportionately affect low income people far more than the more affluent. Wealthy citizens aren’t staying up at night worrying about how much gas costs. And where are the poorer commuters going? For the vast majority of travel they are shuffling back and forth to work. … Hourly workers of modest means have to make every penny count and if you jack up their cost of commuting they take the biggest hit. Also, gas prices aren’t going to be low forever.”

In a free market, competition drives innovation. But the government is going about it completely opposite by attempting to lower emissions through coercion. We’re all poorer and less free as a result.

Obama’s Policy: Don’t Fight Terror, Fund It8

After opening the Islamic State-era by dismissing it as the “JV team,” Barack Obama has intermittently had some success9 but mostly failure in his “Inherent Resolve” campaign to “degrade and ultimate destroy” al-Qaida’s successor. He is responsible for creating it10, after all. The latest story is that U.S. commanders are lamenting how Obama’s micromanagement of the airstrike campaign11 is leaving half of all combat sorties returning without having dropped a bomb. One reason for this is Obama’s primary desire to avoid civilian casualties at all costs. No one wants civilian casualties, but when Islamic State fighters hide among civilian populations, that makes the air campaign far more difficult. Par for the course with Obama’s restrictive rules of engagement, literally half the time, the U.S. takes no action to kill terrorists. No wonder military morale12 is so low.

It’s not just the hamstringing of our own forces, either. Obama is funding terror groups with his cash ransom payments13 to Iran. Secretary of State John Kerry admitted earlier this year14 that some of the money might end up in the wrong hands, but he dismissed it as no big deal. A new report15 reveals just how much of Obama’s ransom payments went to Iranian terror — $37.4 million. We’d say that’s a big deal.

Obama once famously summed up his foreign policy as “don’t do stupid s—.” Between creating the Islamic State and then refusing to fight it very hard, and funding the Iranian terror apparatus, we’d say that’s the epitome of doing stupid s—.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Jonah Goldberg: Hillary’s Health Is a Valid Issue16
Ben Shapiro: Hillary Clinton Sees Her Own Voters as the 47 Percent17
L. Brent Bozell & Tim Graham: CNN’s Deplorable Smear of Pence18

For more, visit Right Opinion19.

TOP HEADLINES

N. Korea Will Have Enough Material for 20 Nukes by End of Year20
GOP Gains Ground in Swing State Voter Registration21
Republicans Move to Impeach IRS Commissioner22

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report23.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
No Country for Old (White) Men24

By Louis DeBroux

At least within the ranks of the Democrat Party, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is officially dead.

On Aug. 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, civil rights icon Martin Luther King declared, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Today, the absolute last thing Democrats want is for anyone to be judged by the content of their character, instead demanding everyone be judged by the color of their skin.

Then again, that isn’t entirely true. To the modern Democrat Party, the color of your skin must also be aligned with political ideology. That is why conservative blacks and Hispanics are not considered “authentic” blacks and Hispanics. In fact, because they are not also liberal/progressive means they are fair game for the most vicious, slanderous attacks.

A recent example of this comes in the form of the nomination by Barack Obama of the milquetoast, boring old white guy, Merrick Garland25, to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by the passing of revered originalist Justice Antonin Scalia26.

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The Patriot Post Digest 9-14-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
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Completing a progressive takeover of the Supreme Court is among the absolute highest goals for Democrats. With an entrenched progressive majority on the Supreme Court, Democrats can laugh off their string of humiliating losses in the U.S. House, Senate and state legislatures since Obama was elected. With a progressive Court majority, they could eviscerate any laws restricting abortion. They could reverse the hated Citizens United ruling and further restrict free speech with which they disagree. They could reverse the Heller and McDonald rulings which declared keeping and bearing firearms an individual right. They could force labor unions on America’s employees. The possibilities are endless.

Speaking last week at a conference hosted by race pimp and anti-Semite “Reverend” Al Sharpton, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), slated to be the next Senate minority leader with the retirement of Harry Reid, said, “A progressive majority on the Supreme Court is an imperative, and if I become majority leader [if Democrats retake the Senate], I will make it happen.”

But Democrats don’t just want a reliable vote; they want to make a political statement about the superiority of minorities. This is captured perfectly by a recent Washington Post headline: “Did Obama squander an opportunity by nominating Merrick Garland?”27

The article goes on to say, “Some Democrats privately fear that Obama blew an opportunity to help re-activate the coalition that elected him twice by not picking a more progressive nominee — especially a minority candidate — to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Had Obama nominated someone who really ginned up the Democratic base, perhaps Clinton and the party would have more whole-heartedly embraced him or her.”

That fear isn’t exactly private, though, because the Post quotes Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women as saying, “I’m not going to say there wasn’t some disappointment” that Obama nominated a white guy. After the death of Justice Scalia, O'Neill and NOW signed onto a letter urging Obama to nominate a progressive black woman.

Ironically, one reason O'Neill wanted a black woman as the nominee was because “Any African-American woman who might have been nominated would have been viciously attacked. … It’s possible, if those vicious attacks would have happened, then the American public would have been much better informed of the outrageousness of what the Republicans are doing.”

We say ironically because O'Neill seems oblivious to the truly vicious attacks on conservative minorities by liberal Democrats. It seems she forgot about the treatment of black conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who suffered through grotesque character assassination at the hands of Senators Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy and others. Thomas famously referred to it as a “high-tech lynching28.” In 2005, the very conservative California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman born of poor Alabama share-croppers, was subjected to similar treatment at the hands of Senate Democrats, painted as a radical and a race traitor as they filibustered her nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

To be sure, Garland would be a very reliable vote for leftists, voting consistently en bloc with the Court’s progressive wing of Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. It is nearly unfathomable that he would stray from leftist orthodoxy on issues like Second Amendment rights, abortion, affirmative action, free speech (or lack thereof), and empowering and expanding the federal government at every turn.

Yet that is not enough for progressive Democrats. Even though the end result of the judicial opinions would be nearly identical, poor Garland has two unforgivable flaws: he is a he, and he is white.

As for old white man Merrick Garland, perhaps there is still a chance to gain approval with the leftist intelligentsia and the progressive base. All he has to do is change his name to “Merry” and “identify” as a transgender black woman. That way, he’ll (oops — she’ll) have checked all of the necessary identity politics boxes favored by the scientifically challenged, anti-Constitution, progressive Left.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

ObamaCare Cure as Bad as the Disease29 — Bailing out risk corridors and using failure to advance single-payer.
Clinton to ‘Power Through’30 — A great montage of her campaign’s talking points, with the emphasis on “power.”
College Athletics Censored in North Carolina31 — The bathroom wars has college sports directors fleeing the state.
Obama’s Push to Nationalize the Electoral Process32 — His DHS is using recent voter hacking as an excuse for a possible power grab.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Jonah Goldberg: “As this pneumonia episode demonstrates, Clinton’s real problem isn’t her health but the entirely valid perception that she’s dishonest, secretive and exploits ‘the system’ — including the support of the mainstream media — for her benefit. In 2008, news outlets openly speculated about whether Sen. John McCain was too frail to be president. NBC News ran an Associated Press story under the headline, ‘1 in 4 chance McCain may not survive 2nd term.’ People remember these things. When Clinton faltered on Sunday, she not only humiliated her most loyal servants, who were kept in the dark by a campaign terrified of playing it straight with voters and the media, she also made countless people say, ‘Looks like Drudge was right again.’”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done.” —Leland Stanford (1824-1893)

For the record: “[Hillary Clinton] demonstrated a complete lack of understanding and an inability to lead the agency she headed in such a way as to maintain its mission and security. Based on the emails thus far released we know that Secretary Clinton also lacks the ability to lead her senior managers while complying with and maintaining the basic protocols designed to protect our government’s sensitive and classified information.” —James Woolsey, CIA director under Bill Clinton

Braying Jackass, part I: “[Donald Trump is] not slim and trim. He brags about eating fast food every day. Look at his health a little bit.” —Harry Reid

Braying Jackass, part II: “[Trump’s] 70, OK? He’s the heaviest … candidate since William Taft. There’s legitimate issues.” —David Plouffe

Belly laugh of the week: “Look, I understand. We’re a young country. We are a restless country. We always like the new, shiny thing. I benefited from that when I was a candidate. And we take for granted sometimes what’s steady and true. And Hillary Clinton’s steady, and she is true.” —Barack Obama (“Steady” and “true” are just about the least appropriate adjectives for Clinton we can think of.)

Non Compos Mentis: “I’m not running this time, but I sure do get frustrated with the way [Clinton’s] campaign gets covered. I’m just telling the truth. … You don’t grade the presidency on a curve. This is serious business.” —Barack Obama (“This from the man who has been graded on a curve by the press since he became a candidate in 2007. And from someone who has treated the presidency as the least serious business one can imagine.” —Keith Koffler)

And last… “While [Hillary Clinton] slanders you as deplorables and irredeemables, I call you hard-working American patriots [who] love your country and want a better future for all our people. You are everybody. Above all else, you’re Americans and you’re entitled to leadership that honors you, cherishes you and totally defends you.” —Donald Trump

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.