The Patriot Post Digest 10-26-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 10-26-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Mid-Day Digest

Oct. 26, 2016

IN TODAY’S EDITION

Vets get a temporary reprieve from bonus repayment, but not from Obama’s contempt.
Clinton’s campaign staff knew they had to “clean this up” after Obama lied about emailing her.
Illegals go door-to-door for Hillary. They’re with her.
Another failed attempt to tie gun laws to mass murder.
And more news, policy and opinion.

THE FOUNDATION

“We may look up to Armies for Defence, but Virtue is our best Security. It is not possible that any state should long remain free, where Virtue is not supremely honord.” —Samuel Adams (1775)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

The Pentagon’s Bonus Blunder Fallout1

On Monday, we wrote that the Pentagon had ordered current soldiers and veterans mistakenly granted re-enlistment bonuses by the California National Guard a decade ago to repay those bonuses2. The news sparked a firestorm of controversy with lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle calling for the waiving of the bonus repayments. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said Tuesday, “Anybody who volunteers to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States deserves our gratitude and respect. Period.” On Wednesday, he ordered a temporary “suspension” of the recollection effort.

Not so fast on those waivers, says Barack Obama. His spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, “I don’t think [Obama’s] prepared to go that far at this point.” That’s not surprising considering Obama’s malicious destruction of military morale3.

Consider what resulted from the VA scandal. In 2014, the VA paid out $142 million in bonuses, the same year the wait-time scandal came to light, and no attempt was made to recover those bonuses. In one instance the VA acknowledged that two senior executives had abused the agency’s hiring system in relocating to take new jobs while collecting bonuses amounting to over $400,000, and yet the VA chose not to seek recovery of those funds.

Obama, like many leftists, has an almost palpable disdain for the military. Darin Selnick, a retired Air Force captain and former official at the Department of Veteran Affairs, said, “There is a clear bias against veterans. They [the Obama administration] think veterans should start at the bottom like everyone else. The government culture wants everyone to start from the bottom in government. But it’s not as if veterans never worked for the government. They worked for the Department of Defense.”

Obama has been happy to put the financial squeeze on the military in order to push his political agenda. He has viewed the military as nothing more than a line item in the budget that takes money from his favored redistribution schemes. Democrats have historically enjoyed little political support from the military, because they have often fought against spending on the military. They will go to bat all day long for their union buddies and welfare recipients, but their attitude toward the military is one of begrudging acceptance or downright antagonism. We hope in this case the public outcry and congressional pressure will move the Pentagon to permanently reverse course on its ill-advised bonus recovery order. America’s solders and veterans deserve better.

Clinton Camp ‘Clean Up’ for Obama4

We already know that the real reason Hillary Clinton wasn’t indicted for her illegal handling of classified information is likely that Barack Obama himself would have been implicated5. He emailed her at least 18 times, using a pseudonym in some of them, and then lied to the American people about it, saying he only found out about her private email system “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

Thanks to the WikiLeaks dump of Clinton campaign communications, we now know her team knew this was a major problem and shifted quickly to spin mode. Soon after Obama’s lie, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Scherwin emailed Jennifer Palmieri and other Clinton campaign staffers: “Jen, you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.” One of the other staffers, Nick Merrill, forwarded that email to Cheryl Mills and others. Mills later emailed John Podesta, saying, “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.” I.e., Obama lied and Clinton’s crew had to cover it up.  But even before Obama’s lie, Clinton’s campaign was trying to figure out what to do about the emails between Obama and Clinton. Podesta suggested in one email that executive privilege was the get-out-of-jail card: “Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege.” Which would have been hilariously hypocritical after Obama had just boasted of his administration’s transparency.

Obama avoided claiming “executive privilege” per se, but his Justice Department and FBI also short-circuited an actual grand-jury investigation of Clinton’s email, which would have obviated his privilege. Either way, he and Clinton walk free.

Illegals Migrate Door-to-Door for Hillary6

It’s no secret Donald Trump is viewed incredulously by most women and minority voters. But one thing that certainly benefits the Clinton campaign is the presence of non-citizens who are enticing swing voters by undermining the Republican Party. A group called CASA in Action “is knocking on doors in Northern Virginia in support of Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates,” The Washington Post reports7. “The vote-seekers are some of the 750,000 recipients of temporary legal status under the Obama administration’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.”

Wasn’t it Clinton who recently sounded the alarm on the “credible reports about Russia interfering in our election”? The Kremlin evidently isn’t the only one. The headline of the Post article says it all: “They crossed the border illegally, and can’t vote. But they can knock on doors.” Sure, they’re not naturalized Americans, but Clinton is recruiting them as lobbyists anyway. And she wants to lecture about interference?

Speaking of interference, you can add child sex trafficking to the list of threats posed by illegal immigrants. Some alarming statistics were compiled in a Washington Times column8 by William C. Triplett II, who quotes an anonymous government official on Texas' southern border: “All these stories about unaccompanied minors crossing the border, nearly all of them are boys. Where are the girls? The girls are already gone. The cartels spot them and haul them off the buses coming to the Mexican side of the border. They target the 13- to 15-year-olds.”

As Triplett put it, “Some proponents of the current open borders policy also claim to be defenders of women’s rights. It is, therefore, supremely ironic that one unintended consequence of open borders is a substantial spike in sex trafficking of young girls.” In fact, just this week Clinton said, “If you believe women and girls should be treated with dignity and respect, and that women should be able to make our own health care decisions and that marriage equality should be protected, then you have to vote.” Yet it’s obvious that her policies don’t comport with her supposed beliefs, like in May 2013 when Clinton expressed a supportive view of open borders9: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”

What’s more important — expanding the constituency of illegal immigrant voters or addressing the crimes of a small but not-inconsequential number of them commit? Perhaps women need to re-examine their preferred candidate’s campaign slogan, “I’m with her.”

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Thomas Sowell: Turnout Time10
Walter Williams: Dumb American Youth11
Star Parker: NAACP Denies Education Civil Rights12
John Stossel: The Ruling Class13

For more, visit Right Opinion14.

TOP HEADLINES

Clinton Camp Admits: ‘They Wanted to Get Away With It’15
Court Halts Another Executive Order16
Berkeley Students Barricade Bridge, Force Whites to Cross Creek17

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report18.

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The Patriot Post Digest 10-26-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Stop Trying to Blame Gun Laws for Violence19

By Lewis Morris

Standard leftist dogma is that stricter gun control laws and restricted access to guns and ammunition will reduce firearms-related deaths. Honest statistics from objective sources have yet to produce data that supports this viewpoint, but that hasn’t stopped the Left from pushing anti-gun rhetoric and legislation on the state and federal level.

Democrats have used virtually every mass shooting in the last several years as a political springboard to further their anti-Second Amendment aims, but the facts keep getting in their way. Even The New York Times had to admit in a recent screed20 on mass shootings that their reportage couldn’t make any substantive connection between gun murders and lax gun laws. This wasn’t for lack of effort.

The several-thousand-word exposé is comprised mainly of anecdotes of numerous gun murders, and they are designed to appeal to our baser emotions, not to treat us to a reasoned, factual argument.

In examining 130 mass shootings, the Times found that in more than half of those cases, “at least one assailant was already barred by federal law from having a weapon … but nonetheless acquired a gun.” When factoring in those who ran afoul of state and local gun laws, the Times found that 64% of the shootings in its investigation involved at least one person who violated an existing gun law. Of the remaining cases, 40% never had a problem with the law and could have obtained a gun legally even under the strictest of legal conditions.

What they didn’t mention is that 100% of those killers violated laws against murder.

It’s of little doubt that the Times reporters wanted to use these stories to present a case for greater gun control, but they have unintentionally proved what many level-headed people already know. The way to reduce gun deaths is not to restrict law-abiding citizens from exercising their constitutional rights. Tougher gun laws are no guarantee that a potential killer will be deterred from committing a crime. (In fact, mass shootings are almost always perpetrated in “gun free zones,” where only victims are disarmed.) Nor can laws anticipate a traditionally law-abiding citizen suffering a severe mental break that causes them to commit murder.

But if the Times' analysis isn’t enough to prove the point, take a look at the city of Chicago. Since before our current president was merely a community organizer in the Windy City, Chicago has competed for the title of Most Violent City in America. Murders are out of control, and gangs have law-abiding citizens running for cover. And thanks to Chicago and Illinois gun laws, they are running unarmed.

Unfortunately, many Chicago pols think the reason for the city’s outrageous level of violence is due to lax gun laws21 around them.

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence ranks the state of Illinois eighth among the 10 states with the toughest gun laws. Illinois is one of only four states that places a waiting period for purchasing any firearm, and it has one of the strictest concealed carry laws in the country — the state doesn’t even recognize concealed carry permits from any other states. Furthermore, gun owners can inadvertently break laws within the state due to overlapping and competing gun restrictions in different jurisdictions.

There is one certainty in this ongoing debate over how to deter gun violence in America: More laws will not solve the problem if criminals cannot be deterred by the laws already in place. It is impossible to prevent every death-by-firearm from happening — no more than preventing death by hand or foot — and taking away citizens' constitutional rights won’t bring us closer to a peaceful society. Beyond that, we are reaping what we have sown with family and cultural decay. The problem of violence will persist until people can have an open dialogue about the problem without clinging to platitudes and personal agendas that have no connection to responsible and constitutional gun ownership.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

Obama’s Coat Tails May Be Shorter Than Expected22 — Not that it’s stopped him from campaigning for his own legacy.
Climate Fraud … Again23 — An organization studying global warming admits it claimed work it did not do.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Thomas Sowell: “Some of us this election year don’t even want to say the words ‘Clinton’ or ‘Trump’ — and with good reason. However, there is one word that we should keep in mind: ‘Turnout.’ If we sit home in disgust on election day, we forfeit the right — and the duty — to elect a Congress that can keep either of these dangerous people from doing permanent damage to this country and to the future of this generation — and generations yet unborn. … Painful as it may be to realize that we are reduced to considering the impeachability of a presidential candidate, that is a reality that will not go away, just because we don’t like it. How impeachable is Hillary Clinton? Since she would be ‘the first woman President,’ any criticism of her, much less any impeachment, would bring loud howls from the media across the country that ugly sexist bias was behind any opposition to anything she did — no matter how awful. Hillary in the White House would have a blank check, and she would not hesitate to use it. Donald Trump has no such exemption. Neither the media nor Congressional Republicans would automatically spring to his defense if he overstepped the line. His impeachability may be his most important asset in a year of painful choices.”

SHORT CUTS

Insight: “If liberty is worth keeping and free representative government worth saving, we must stand for all American fundamentals — not some, but all. All are woven into the great fabric of our national well-being. We cannot hold fast to some only, and abandon others that, for the moment, we find inconvenient. If one American fundamental is prostrated, others in the end will surely fall.” —Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927)

For the record: “The [Supreme Court], when it began at the time of the Constitution’s writing, had six members. They had six members for several years. They had 10 members for several years after the Civil War. They functioned with an even number of members. … Half of our cases are unanimous. The 5-4 cases are probably 20%, and it isn’t the same five and the same four.” —Justice Stephen Breyer

The BIG lie: “Obamacare has saved millions of Americans money. We don’t need to do what Donald Trump is saying and rip it out root and branch. We need to sit down together and iron out some of the kinks, and help make sure we can improve on what is already working for millions of Americans.” —Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Belly laugh of the week: “So far the ACA has been doing a pretty good job keeping insurance premiums low, and we have to redouble the efforts of that.” —ObamaCare architect Ezekiel Emanuel

Upright: “The Democrats promised something very unlikely: That we’d provide more health-care coverage for more people and spend less money doing it — and that the typical annual health-insurance premium for an American family would decline substantially, by an average of $2,500 a year. The opposite is happening: Premium prices have gone up, and they are expected to go up by [an average of] 25 percent in the coming year. … Is there another product you use the price of which increases at that rate, or anything like that rate?” —Kevin Williamson

Late-night humor: “CNN is reporting that Clinton ‘may have gone to Cubs games with her father as a kid, but after leaving Illinois, and around the same time she ran for Senate in New York, the former first lady touted her love for the New York Yankees.’ How convenient. As a 10-year-old she wears a Cubs hat. A mere 40 years later, she’s in a Yankees hat. Is there no hat she won’t wear?” —Stephen Colbert

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.