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« on: May 15, 2017, 01:05:45 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Digest 5-15-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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Mid-Day Digest
May 15, 2017
IN TODAY’S EDITION
The president is finding his agenda behind the eight ball for failure to make nominations.
A conservative sitcom just got canceled, and it’s almost surely about politics.
Leftists have long used guilt as a weapon in the culture wars, but it’s getting less useful.
Daily Features: Top Headlines, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.
THE FOUNDATION
“The pyramid of government — and a republican government may well receive that beautiful and solid form — should be raised to a dignified altitude: but its foundations must, of consequence, be broad, and strong, and deep.” —James Wilson (1804)
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
Trump’s Agenda Blocked by Distractions1
Donald Trump is way behind on naming government appointments and, no surprise, Democrats aren’t helping. Thus far in his presidency, Trump has made only 85 nominations, which is lagging significantly behind the numbers posted by his three predecessors; Barack Obama had nominated 212, George W. Bush 161 and Bill Clinton 182. Even George H. W. Bush had made 135 by this point in his presidency, which is interesting given the fact that he was following Ronald Reagan.
“Leadership matters a lot, as does having the right people in place,” said Mallory Barg Bulman vice president of research and evaluation at the Partnership for Public Service. “You can’t start the game until the whole team is on the field.”
According to the White House, the slow walking is intentional. Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated, “We’re actually going through the Office of Government Ethics and FBI clearances before announcing most of these individuals. And so, there’s a little bit of a difference in how we’re doing this. But we are well on pace with respect to many of these [appointments] to get the government up and running.” However, it’s interesting to note that Trump has yet to nominate anyone for director of the Office of Personnel Management, the agency tasked with managing the federal workforce. One would think that would be a priority nomination.
But with Democrats pledging to throw up road blocks to any and all of Trump’s nominees, all while demanding that a special prosecutor be named to investigate the phony Russia-Trump collusion allegations, it would seem counterintuitive to be moving this slowly.
There’s another seemingly growing problem — Republicans, holding a slim majority, are showing some signs of splitting from supporting Trump, especially since the firing of James Comey2. The lack of consistently disciplined and cohesive communications coming from Trump and his administration, which is an intentional strategy to keep his opponents guessing, is proving to sow an increasing amount of confusion and frustration on Trump’s own side — particularly with congressional Republicans. Often they’re left scrambling to both understand and answer for statements from Trump’s White House with little to no warning. Instead of being on the offensive, the GOP is seemingly playing from behind, as if they were the minority party.
Robert Moffit, a former assistant OPM director during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and current senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said, “The bottom line is that the president can’t run the federal government out of the White House and secretaries can’t run giant agencies huddled in an executive suite. Unilateral disarmament is a victory for the swamp. The swamp creatures have won the fight. Unless you control the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy controls you.”
Trump needs to ramp up his nomination rate, encourage Republicans to stand firmly united and call out Democrats for being the party of obstructionists, if he hopes to get more of his swamp-draining agenda enacted. Americans are on Trump’s side when it comes to reforming the bureaucracy of DC, but he needs to end his distraction campaign and focus on getting his total team in place.
Last Conservative No Longer Standing3
In March, conservative comedian Tim Allen stirred trouble4 when he told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that it’s tough being conservative in Hollywood. “You’ve got to be real careful around here,” Allen said. “You get beat up if [you] don’t believe what everybody believes. This is like ‘30s Germany. I don’t know what happened. If you’re not part of the group — [They say,] 'You know, what we believe is right’ — I go, ‘Well, I might have a problem with that.’” Allen has also been vocally supportive of Donald Trump from time to time.
Lo and behold, the next contract renewals come up for his hit sitcom, “Last Man Standing,” and ABC axes its third highest-rated scripted show.
ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey just said in December that the network wanted to make a concerted effort to reach Trump voters. “With our dramas, we have a lot of shows that feature very well-to-do, well-educated people, who are driving very nice cars and living in extremely nice places,” Dungey said. “But in recent history we haven’t paid enough attention to some of the true realities of what life is like for everyday Americans in our dramas.”
So much for that.
Deadline Hollywood reports5 the cancellation was due to contract haggling between ABC and Fox’s production studios: “The Tim Allen-starring multi-camera sitcom often had gone down to the wire on renewals, with ABC and producing studio 20th Century Fox TV wrangling over the series' license fee. ABC is supposed to cover the cost of the show at this point in its run, and LMS is on the higher end for a multi-camera sitcom because of the marquee salary Allen commands, but 20th TV had agreed to license fee reductions in the past and reportedly were open to another one. This time, there was no negotiating or bargaining, with ABC simply deciding against another season.”
Come on, we’re supposed to believe that it’s licensing fees and not politics? This can’t be coincidence, can it?
Top Headlines6
Trump weighs shake-up of press team, including replacing Spicer. (The Wall Street Journal7)
Why GOP senators are pushing Merrick Garland for FBI director. (PoliZette8.)
James Clapper: U.S. democracy “under assault” by Trump — hyperbole much? (Washington Examiner9)
Bradley Manning to remain on active duty, receive health care after prison release. (USA Today10)
Trump urges Liberty graduates to find courage to challenge critics, assails Washington leaders as “failed voices.” (Fox News11)
Majority of businesses say ObamaCare mandate, minimum wage hikes, regulations threaten expansion. (The Washington Free Beacon12)
Scott Pruitt signals new post-Obama era at EPA with Alaska’s Pebble Mine decision. (Washington Examiner13)
Pence says Christians are the most victimized religion, Leftists go nuts. He’s right. (The Daily Wire14)
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards stumps for abortion rights … on Mother’s Day. (The Washington Times15)
High school takes back yearbooks with “Build that wall,” other inappropriate quotes. (Charlotte Observer16)
Policy: Big wind gets spanked in Michigan. (National Review17)
Policy: A modern framework for Internet freedom. (U.S. News & World Report18.)
For more, visit Patriot Headline Report19.
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Leftist Ideology’s Greatest Threat: Guilt-Free Americans20
By Arnold Ahlert
“In the last 50 years of culture wars in America, there has been no stronger weapon than guilt. It is the Left’s great hammer of progress.” —Mark Bauerlein21, Professor of English at Emory University
In an insightful column for American Greatness, Bauerlein nails the Left’s fundamental reason for despising Donald Trump. “He has no white guilt. He doesn’t feel any male guilt, either, or American guilt or Christian guilt,” Bauerlein explains. “He talks about the United States with uncritical approval — ‘America First’ — and that’s a thought crime in the eyes of liberals.”
That particular thought crime roils leftists most, because it is the antithesis of Barack Obama’s eight-year effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” into a nation where collective guilt would supplant American exceptionalism as society’s prevailing ethos. “Donald Trump would never refer to America as beset by the original sin of racism, as Barack Obama did frequently, and that makes him worse than a conservative,” Bauerlein writes. “President Trump is a bigot.”
Is there a drum the Left beats louder than the assertion America is an inherently racist nation? For leftist demagogues, history is more about the failure of “dead white Europeans,” a.k.a. the Founding Fathers, to eliminate slavery when it was impossible to do so, than it is about America being one of the first nations to end the worldwide-accepted practice, enduring a bloody war that cost 600,000 lives.
Moreover, more than 150 years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, Americans must remain guilty. Thus Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson, who accused Trump of having a “vast ignorance of black life,” advocates22 the establishment of Individual Reparations Accounts, whereby white Americans who never practiced slavery compensate black Americans who never experienced it. In New Orleans, history itself is being eliminated, as workers remove23 Confederate monuments that “offend” progressive sensibilities. |
