The Patriot Post Digest 10-30-2017

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The Patriot Post Digest 10-30-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Patriot Post® · Mid-Day Digest

Oct. 30, 2017 · https://patriotpost.us/digests/52129

IN TODAY’S EDITION

Manafort is the first to go down, but his connections with Democrats are the real problem.
Don’t let the Leftmedia divert attention away from the dossier to GOP opposition research.
George H.W. Bush is nothing like Harvey Weinstein, despite leftist conflation of terms.
Even the Leftmedia are tiring of Hillary Clinton, and it’s starting to show.
Plus our Daily Features: Top Headlines, Memes, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.

THE FOUNDATION

“In our private pursuits it is a great advantage that every honest employment is deemed honorable.” —Thomas Jefferson (1795)

IN BRIEF
Mueller Charges Manafort, but Not Because of Trump ‘Collusion’1

By Political Editors

Rumors swirled over the weekend that special counsel Robert Mueller would charge someone in connection with his investigation into Russian election interference. News broke this morning that, not surprisingly, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort is the man charged. Manafort, along with his business partner Rick Gates, were ordered to turn themselves in to federal authorities to be indicted on 12 charges including conspiracy against the United States, failure to register as working for a foreign agent, money laundering, false and misleading statements and seven counts for failure to register foreign-held bank and financial accounts.

Leftmedia reports of course focus on the fact that Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign manager for four months. Yet while Trump arguably showed poor judgement in hiring Manafort, he fired him after revelations surfaced of Manafort’s connections to Russian business dealings. And what’s interesting about these new charges is that they relate to Manafort’s actions well before he was connected to Trump’s campaign.

Specifically, Manafort had a long history of working for Democrat players John and Tony Podesta on Russia-related business interests. The Podesta Group was tied to significant donations to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. It’s also important to note that John Podesta was Hillary’s campaign manager. Manafort’s connections to Democrats run much deeper than do any of his connections to Trump.

Another interesting factor, courtesy2 of National Review’s Andrew McCarthy: “And how’s this for Clintonian flair: During Senate Intelligence Committee testimony last month, Clinton campaign manager John Podesta insisted that he was unaware of any funding connection between the campaign, Fusion GPS, and the dossier. At that moment, sitting in silence next to Podesta was his lawyer, Marc Elias. If that name rings a bell, it is because Elias just happens to be the Perkins Coie lawyer who got the dossier rolling by hiring Fusion GPS in April 2016.”

What seems clear is that it’s not Trump who should be concerned but Democrats and especially the Podesta brothers.

Conservative News Site Hired Fusion GPS3

By Nate Jackson

Fusion GPS is a Washington research firm founded and staffed by several ex-Wall Street Journal reporters. So when did the outfit responsible for the phony Trump/Russia collusion dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC4 get started in the whole enterprise? Well, it turns out that The Washington Free Beacon originally hired the firm to do some research on “multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary.”

The conservative news site was unapologetic for its methods, writing in a statement5, “All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.”

The Free Beacon is funded in part by billionaire GOP donor Paul Singer, which is no doubt why it was able to afford such expensive research. It ended the arrangement with Fusion GPS in April 2016, after which Fusion approached Clinton’s campaign and offered to continue its research on Donald Trump. Steele wasn’t hired until months later.

The news is significant in establishing a timeline, especially given the effort by The Washington Post to direct some attention in its Clinton scoop to the mysterious Republican client who originally hired Fusion GPS. But it doesn’t appear that the Free Beacon committed anything other than journalism. Fusion’s research at that time had nothing to do with Russia and the entire collusion narrative was the propaganda product of Team Clinton.

We’ll see if Fusion GPS has anything to add this week in House testimony beyond invoking the Fifth Amendment as its executives did last week.

Top Headlines6

Nunes’ investigating digs up trove of Democrat connections to Russia dossier (The Washington Times7)

McConnell readies Senate confirmation votes for four appeals judges (The Daily Signal8.)

Democrats have done a 180 on corporate taxes. Here’s what they said last year. (The Daily Signal9)

Former NPR CEO: I changed my mind about supporting gun control after writing book10 on conservative America (The Washington Free Beacon11)

IRS rehired employees previously fired as security risks (Reason12)

Puerto Rico to cancel $300 million contract to repair electric infrastructure (Bloomberg13)

Historic Virginia church to move plaques honoring Robert E. Lee and George Washington (The Hill14)

California clears first hurdle to breaking into three states (Washington Examiner15)

Most Texans kneel during anthem after owner’s comments (Associated Press16)

Their caliphate in ruins, Islamic State militants melt into the desert (Associated Press17)

Policy: Combating the racism of anti-racism in education (American Enterprise Institute18.)

Policy: Why does the U.S. have such an outlier child poverty rate? Our immigration system has a lot to do with it (Manhattan Institute19)

For more of today’s news, visit Patriot Headline Report20.

FEATURED ANALYSIS
Leftists Water Down the Meaning of Sexual Assault21

By Robin Smith

Lumping actions together for the ease of public shaming or isolating and marginalizing one’s target — the Saul Alinsky method — has become standard in our culture. Forget understanding the true meaning of words. Obscuring them is the order of the day.

For example, we’ve watched the term racism become one of the first weapons leftists brandish to avoid an honest debate, and it’s typically used to bludgeon a conservative opponent rather than discuss a range of policy issues. In an effort to silence any dissenters, the Left has made the entire political Right a collection of “racists.”

But when everyone’s a racist, no one’s a racist when it really counts.

We’re seeing the same with the term sexual assault. Whether it’s the new grievance that’s going to have its own lapel ribbon for solidarity and notoriety, sexual assault victims are too numerous to count in the media in recent days. Make no mistake, authentic sexual assault is a heinous crime, and it belongs nowhere in a civil society. Several accounts of sexual assault have been exposed in recent days with Hollywood’s Harvey Weinstein and MSNBC’s Mark Halperin as the exemplars.

Yet from the feminists who demand functional equivalence with men, there’s suddenly an outbreak of complaints of offense about the toxic masculinity that leads to dirty jokes and raucous behavior. The message is, “Let me into your locker rooms. Treat me the same as another guy. But not really.”

Columnist Mona Charen offered a vivid contrast22 last week between Halperin’s behavior (for which NBC has now fired him) versus that of former President George H.W. Bush, 93 years old and wheelchair-bound with Parkinson’s disease and related dementia.

According to multiple accounts from seven different young women in his work environment, Charen relates that Halperin is accused of “pressing his erect, if clothed, gotcha10 against the bodies of young women who worked with and for him.” Charen juxtaposed that with an instance of actress Heather Lind being “triggered” by watching the recent Hurricane Relief broadcast featuring five living former presidents to suddenly publicize an incident from four years earlier. According to Lind’s recollection of her “trauma,” Bush, then 89, touched her backside and told her a dirty joke … in the presence of his wife, Barbara, with cameras rolling as he sat in his wheelchair.

The truth? Again, Bush is wheelchair-bound, so when he puts his arm around someone for a picture, it sometimes slips a little low on their body. To ease tension, his go-to joke is a pun regarding his favorite magician, “David Cop-a-feel.”

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The Patriot Post Digest 10-30-2017
From The Federalist Patriot
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That’s simply the tragic result of deteriorating physical and mental health, and it’s nothing like the predatory behavior of Weinstein. But when everything’s sexual assault, nothing’s sexual assault.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission defines harassment as “unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information.” The EEOC explains that this behavior becomes illegal when the offensive conduct is a condition of employment — that is pervasive in the workplace, creating a hostile, abusive or intimidating environment.

The Department of Justice defines sexual assault as “any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient. Falling under the definition of sexual assault are sexual activities as forced gotcha146, forcible sodomy, child molestation, incest, fondling, and attempted rape.”

The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network specifies that sexual assault is “unwanted sexual contact that stops short of rape or attempted rape.”

So which one of the following public figures has engaged in sexual assault, according to these publicly available and legally utilized definitions?

Former Vice President Joe Biden regularly offered unwanted neck massages and overly zealous public caresses while whispering in the ears of younger, attractive females. His public displays are creepy. Bush’s backside brushes are no different, but neither rise to a legal definition of anything approaching sexual assault.

The pure evil rot of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein23 includes a list of 82 accusers who say they were in various ways molested, sexually assaulted or raped24.

And now there’s actor Kevin Spacey, accused of advances on a then-14-year-old boy. Spacey’s excuse? Forget pedophilia, apparently — he’s having to choose “now to live as a gay man.”

In each of these situations, the focus is on the perpetrator largely because of his status, but there are real victims who’ve been inappropriately touched, threatened or intimidated and led to believe their word would mean nothing if they were to dare disclose the actual crimes against their person.

Yet when a wheelchair-bound old man is lumped into the same group as actual sexual predators, the authentic victims of horrific assault and abuse are diminished and vile perverts are indirectly protected with a watered-down version of the true violence that does occur against women. Simply put, if sexual assault can mean a pat on the buttocks and rape, it means little to nothing.

Recently, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly took to the press room podium. In his remarks on a completely different topic, Kelly hit the proverbial nail on the head when he recalled a better day when “a lot of things were sacred in our country.” Kelly reminisced that, in addition to Gold Star families and the dignity of life and religion, women were sacred to our society and were treated in accordance with that special status.

Today, in the craze to be the same and not just equal, feminists forfeit the specialness and sacredness that should accompany a gender created for purposes that men can’t fulfill. The need to sell headlines, to drive digital clicks and to sensationalize every bit of “news” has corrupted the value and meaning of words that are misappropriated. That misuse, in the case of the horrors of violence against women, diminishes the victims and protects the perpetrators. Oh, and don’t forget that the political Left, under the guise of speech, glorifies, monetizes and makes cause célèbre of women as objects, the distortion of gender and the perversion of sex.

Let’s commit to the dignity of life, the value of the female gender and the act of mutual respect in every aspect of society by correctly identifying misbehavior, punishing illegal acts and understanding both genders.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

The Beginning of the End for Hillary Clinton?27 — It appears Democrats and their media echo-chamber are finally beginning to distance themselves from her.
Trump, the Opioid Epidemic, and National Emergency28 — He won’t declare a national emergency because he recognizes the proper manner in which to combat the crisis.

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Tony Perkins: The Opioid Crisis and the Soul of America29
George Will: The Radiating Mischief of Protectionism30
Sen. Tom Cotton: Immigration in the National Interest31
Jeff Jacoby: Life Is Annoying. Don’t Make It Worse.32
Burt Prelutsky: Language Skills & Ills33

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion34.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Gary Bauer35: “Billionaire liberal activist Tom Steyer has launched a multi-million-dollar campaign demanding that Congress impeach President Trump. I saw the first ad on Fox News Thursday night, and found it ironic. Many of the things the ad mentions as impeachable offenses apply not to President Trump but to President Obama. One allegation made in the ad … is that Trump colluded with a foreign power, namely Russia. But as we are finding out, it’s looking more and more like Trump was just about the only person in the 2016 election not to collude with Russia. But if that is grounds for impeachment, then how does one describe the two years of secret negotiations Obama and Hillary Clinton conducted with America’s avowed enemy Iran? Those negotiations culminated in a deal that resulted in billions of dollars of cash and gold being loaded onto planes and sent under the cover of darkness to Tehran. That money is currently being used by the Iranian regime to threaten American soldiers and kill U.S. allies. The terrible deal was submitted to the United Nations and to the Iranian Parliament. But the Obama administration used every ounce of its political power to prevent it from ever getting an up or down vote in the U.S. Senate. That’s about as clear a case of collusion with an enemy that you can find.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success — only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free.”

For the record: “The only thing preventing both parties from defeating themselves is the fact that elections are a zero-sum game in which one side must win.” —Michael Barone

Upright: “Note to media: when an A-list actor quasi-admits to attempted molestation of a 14-year-old, the headline isn’t that he’s coming out as gay.” —Ben Shapiro

Inquiring minds want to know: “How is it that it’s apparently illegal to remove labels from pillows and mattresses, but politicians are free to mislabel themselves? … Why should people like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain, to mention just three of the most flagrant examples, be allowed to continue calling themselves Republicans? Or, for that matter, why should the Senate’s proudest and most prominent Marxist, Bernie Sanders, get away with labeling himself an independent?” —Burt Prelutsky

Braying Jackass: “People thought in ‘09, '10, '11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the Right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion.” —John Boehner illustrating why he’s the former House speaker

Who knew? “Well, you know, it’s been said many times that not all Republicans are racists, but all — virtually all racists belong to the Republican Party today.” —former Treasury official Bruce Bartlett

Non Compos Mentis: “Happy Birthday, Madame President @HillaryClinton.” —Rep. John Lewis

And last… “Going to big Hollywood Halloween party tonight. Only inoffensive costumes permitted. I’m going as a vanilla wafer.” —Pat Sajak

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. We also humbly ask prayer for your Patriot team, that our mission would seed and encourage the spirit of Liberty in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Nate Jackson, Managing Editor
Mark Alexander, Publisher