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Right Analysis | Right Hooks | Right Opinion Patriot Headlines | Grassroots Commentary
Daily Digest
September 14, 2015
THE FOUNDATION
"The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers, and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty." —John Adams, letter to Zabdiel Adams, 1776
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
What happens when you have a presidential candidate with military experience, a legislative tenure, and conservative record of service as both lieutenant governor and governor of one of the nation's largest states? Nothing, as long as Donald Trump's sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Even with prior experience running for president and a solid second campaign, former Texas Governor Rick Perry couldn't overcome the elephant-in-name-only in the room. On Friday, Perry became the first GOP presidential candidate to drop out of the field of 17.
To be sure, part of the fault lies with Perry himself. It's almost certain he was unable to undo the first impression of his poor performance in the 2012 race to recast himself as the serious, seasoned statesman he had worked to become. Part of the blame also arguably lies with George W. Bush. Perhaps the nation wasn't ready for another Texas "cowboy" as president.
However, as we've said before, Perry's record in Texas was one the nation could have benefited from after nearly eight years of Barack Obama. As Perry described it in his suspension announcement, "During my 14 years as governor, Texas created nearly one-third of all new American jobs. We passed balanced budgets, cut taxes, set aside billions of dollars for a rainy day, and elevated our graduation rates to second highest in the nation. We did this based on conservative principles: Don't tax too much, don't spend all the money, invest in an educated workforce, and stop frivolous lawsuits at the courthouse."
Trump's rise has been fueled by the well-earned groundswell of opposition to Beltway politicos. But it's beyond ironic that the populist rebellion claimed its first casualty in a man who defined — through his 10th Amendment foundations — the federalist vision of our Founders. Was he the perfect candidate? Far from it, obviously. But he is a supremely qualified conservative, and the field is weaker without him.
It got a lot easier for the State Department to investigate Hillary Clinton's email habits, though it appears investigators won't take advantage. The company that managed Clinton's private email server from 2013 to the present, Platte River Networks, says the emails Clinton deleted may be recoverable because Hillary's server wasn't actually wiped. It's the difference between deleting — or telling the computer it can write over data (in this case Clinton's emails) with new information — and writing over the data with gibberish.
Now, the question before the State Department is whether or not the government should comb through the emails. At least two Justice Department lawyers think not. Lawyers Benjamin Mizer and Elizabeth Shapiro submitted a brief last week arguing it's okay for officials to make the decision what is private and what is public. So it was acceptable to the Obama Justice Department that Hillary deleted 30,000 emails about weddings, yoga class and possibly classified information.
Mizer and Shapiro wrote, "The evidence, if anything, demonstrates that the former secretary's production was over-inclusive, not under-inclusive" — despite knowing Clinton lied about her treatment of classified information. Nothing to see here; move along.
Days after Democrats blocked a vote that would have allowed the Senate to consider Barack Obama's foolish Iran nuclear deal, Iran's Atomic Energy Organization announced that the country has found an "unexpectedly high reserve of uranium" at a new mine, according to Reuters News. "Unexpectedly" indeed. Iran will soon start to extract the resource. "Why is this important?" one writer at Red State asks. "Because the Obama administration's entire negotiations with Iran is based on the idea that Iran has to import uranium ore.
If it doesn't have to import the ore, there is no way the [International Atomic Energy Agency] can rationally guess at, much less scientifically estimate, the amount of enriched uranium Iran is producing." And it's unlikely that Iran is simply posturing about the discovery. What does it have to gain? Obama's political maneuvers have assured that the U.S. will enter into an agreement with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, and that Iran will receive between $100 and $150 billion in frozen assets with which to continue funding terrorism.
Iran doesn't need imported uranium as the international community assumed entering the negotiation room. It only needed its assets thawed. Now Iran can run a self-sustained nuclear program while being "monitored" in a way that leaves the international community wanting answers. The deal is done, and Iran confirms we've been played. Thanks, Obama.
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
By Arnold Ahlert
Regarding immigration, the selling out of the American public now has a first-person account attached to it. In a scathing column, a pseudonym-bearing "Displaced Disney Cast Member" describes the despicable efforts of a once-iconic company to replace American workers with foreigners willing to work for lower pay. The author of the column is hardly an anomaly. Americans are not only losing their jobs to foreign replacements, they are underwriting both legal and illegal immigrants accessing America's safety net.
"I used to have a dream career at one of America's most iconic and admired companies," the former employee writes. "Twenty years of hard work, technical skill building, the fostering of relationships and a bachelor's degree in Information Technology guided me to a coveted position as an Information Technology Engineer for Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida."
Those 20 years of hard work essentially meant nothing, however, and the day that employee learned his fate was only 10 days after "Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, had just announced that the company's earnings were up well over 20 percent for the quarter and this was just one among a long series of record breaking financial results for the company." When the employee arrived at work the message he got was both devastating and infuriating. A "grim faced Disney Executive" told everyone in the room they would be losing their jobs within the next 90 days, with a final termination date of Jan. 30, 2015.
Why? Because their jobs had been given to a "foreign workforce." Then came the ultimate insult. The executive told them, "In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don't cooperate you will not receive any severance pay."
Thus the soon-to-be ex-employee was forced to endure the "disgraceful and demoralizing" experience of training his replacement. Adding insult to injury, this worker and his fellow former employees were "informed by several large IT recruiting firms that Disney has a policy in place that states all displaced Disney IT Cast Members will not even be considered as contractor workers for 12 months. Thus we have been essentially shut out and black listed by the largest employer in this very small Orlando job market."
Disney and countless other companies have brought in foreign workers courtesy of the H-1B visa program. In March, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the abuses of that program, including expert testimony from Howard University's Ron Hira and Rutgers' Hal Salzman, who told lawmakers the current system "has become primarily a process for supplying lower-cost labor to the IT industry."
What did the Senate do about the problem? Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), along with co-sponsors Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), proposed a reincarnation of the 2013 "I-Squared" bill called the "Immigration Innovation Act of 2015." Like its predecessor, the new act would increase the number of H-1B visas from the current level of 65,000 a year, plus 20,000 for holders of U.S. graduate degrees, to a whopping 115,000, "with the possibility of the cap rising as high as 195,000 depending on economic conditions," Hatch said in April. Like many of his GOP and Democrat colleagues, Hatch has sold his soul to tech industry giants such as Qualcomm and Microsoft, which have laid off thousands of American workers even as they demand an increase in the number of H-1B visas. IBM, Amazon, Intel, Google and Oracle have also told Congress such visas are necessary because there is a shortage of skilled American workers.
This writer did a previous report on the subject. Those allegations are abject lies.
Regardless, the onslaught continues. A report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released in June 2014 revealed that over the last 15 years all net job gains in the nation have gone to legal and illegal immigrants. And lest anyone think the trend is changing or leveling out in some respect, think again: A jobs chart posted by the website Zero Hedge reveals a damming reality contained in latest jobs report covering the month of August. It shows that a sky-high 698,000 native-born Americans lost their jobs last month — even as 204,000 foreign-born Americans got one.
As bad as that is, at least those immigrants are working. In another damning report released this month, CIS reveals that 2012 data show a whopping "51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households."
Welfare usage by immigrants is not uniform. The report states, "Households headed by immigrants from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent) have the highest overall welfare use. Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest."
If the words "Central America" have a familiar ring, maybe it's because the Obama administration is actively recruiting "refugees" from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — officially known as Central American Minors (CAM). A program initiated by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department is providing these illegal aliens "with a safe, legal, and orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that some children are undertaking to the United States," according to a DHS memo obtained by Judicial Watch. Once here, those children will be united with family members who may also be illegal aliens, benefiting from Obama's amnesty or deferred action programs. In other words, the administration is actively adding to the number of illegals already in the nation. Illegals who already have and will continue to compete with Americans for jobs — when they're not accessing taxpayer-funded entitlement programs.
Perhaps the only thing more maddening than the facts presented here is the contemptible notion pushed by the Obama administration, Democrats, establishment GOPers, pro-amnesty activists and a thoroughly corrupt media that any resistance to this agenda by native-born Americans is tantamount to bigotry, nativism and xenophobia. Don't believe it for a second. There is nothing remotely wrong with the desire to preserve the nation's borders, culture, language and traditions, better known as American exceptionalism. In fact, if anyone owes this nation an abject apology, it is those who would seek to undermine that exceptionalism for cheap labor and easy votes, even as they drape themselves in an aura of multicultural self-aggrandizement that is nothing less than an effort to marginalize our national identity. This is one American who will never apologize for desiring a nation that caters primarily — and overwhelmingly — to Americans. Neither should anyone else.
MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE
BEST OF RIGHT OPINION
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TOP HEADLINES
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OPINION IN BRIEF
Jim DeMint: "[I]f politicians in Washington need poll numbers to muster up a sense of decency, here are some to consider: The Heritage Foundation's American Perceptions Initiative found that 78 percent of American polled agree with the statement 'Government should not be in the business of funding organizations that harvest and sell baby parts from aborted children,' and 72 percent agree that 'taxpayer dollars would be better spent directed to the more than 13,000 health centers and hospitals providing comprehensive women's health care.' ...
The assumption that conservatives would automatically take the blame for a shutdown concedes the public debate before it even starts. Most damaging of all is the assumption that it's never the right time to follow through on your principles — even when the other side is literally in the infanticide business. That is cowardice. The fight to end taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood will be just that: a fight. And like all the struggles to return sanity and respect for human life and decency to our government, it will be a tough one. But conservatives should fight to win, not plan to fail."
SHORT CUTS
The Gipper: "Some may try and tell us that this is the end of an era. But what they overlook is that in America, every day is a new beginning and every sunset is merely the latest milestone on a voyage that never ends. For this is the land that has never become but is always in the act of becoming."
Upright: "The irony is that the historic reduction of U.S. crime since the 1990s was predicated on police singling out African-Americans — for protection. Using victims' crime reports, cops focused on violent hot spots; since black Americans are disproportionately the victims of crime, just as blacks are disproportionately its perpetrators, effective policing was heaviest in minority neighborhoods. The cops were there because they believe that black lives matter." —Heather Mac Donald
Non Compos Mentis: "If there are 10 people who have been accused [of campus rape], and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people." —Rep. Jared Polis
Alpha Jackass: "Many of [my condescending] comments are made as an entertainer... [A]s everybody said, as an entertainer, it's a much different ballgame." —Donald Trump ("If Trump wants to be judged as an entertainer ... maybe he should run for the job of entertainer, not President of the United States." —Jim Geraghty)
Lacking humility: "I fully think apologizing's a great thing, but you have to be wrong. ... I will absolutely apologize sometime in the hopefully distant future if I'm ever wrong." —Donald Trump
Demo-gogues: "The Republicans did not win last November. The Democrats lost because a lot of their supporters are demoralized. I think we can strike an excitement in those groups of people." —Bernie Sanders
And last... "John Kerry said that the nuclear deal is safe, since 'Iran could never get away with such a deception.' I see... So, anyone ever find the data on Lois Lerner's hard drive?" —Fred Thompson
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.
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