THE PATRIOT POST 03/16/2016 BIG NIGHT FOR TRUMP!

Right Analysis | Right Hooks | Right Opinion Patriot Headlines | Grassroots Commentary Mid-Day Digest March 16, 2016    THE FOUNDATION "Now is the seedtime of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now, will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read in it full grown characters." —Thomas Paine (1776) FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS A Big Night for One Man By Nate Jackson Tuesday's five primaries are in the books (almost), and Donald Trump walked away with three big wins and a virtual tie. The big one, of course, was winner-take-all Florida. Trump won "yuge" over the Sunshine State's hometown boy, Marco Rubio, and the latter dropped out after his shellacking. Ted Cruz fought Trump to a draw in Missouri (as we go to press, the two are separated by just 1,800 votes). But the night was a good one for the frontrunner in just about every way. "You explain it to me, because I can't," Trump said to his supporters. "I don't understand it. Nobody understands it." Actually, we totally understand it, and we have from the beginning. John Kasich won his home state of Ohio (his first and only victory), giving him all the justification he wanted for staying in the race. Yet he sounded delusional declaring, "I may go to the convention before this is over with more delegates than anybody else." Unless Trump and Cruz both drop out today, that's not going to happen. Nonetheless, Kasich's strategy surely must be to keep fighting for a brokered convention where he can either hope for a lifeline from the party's establishment or play kingmaker with his delegates. "In the meantime, however," writes David French, "he'll split the anti-Trump vote even further, allowing Trump to continue to win contest after contest with a plurality of voters. It's self-serving, it's vain, and it's Kasich." Likewise, Rubio's decision to stay in the race despite looming defeat everywhere undoubtedly cost Cruz wins in Missouri and North Carolina. According to Fox News, Trump now leads with 661 delegates to Cruz's 406. Kasich has 142 — fewer than the departed Rubio's 169. Winning the nomination requires 1,237 delegates, and Trump is on pace to fall 100 short. At the same time, Cruz isn't mathematically eliminated and he could get to Cleveland with a lead, but it would take a miracle for him to win the nomination outright. So we're faced with the paradox of a frontrunner and likely nominee who by all appearances is very weak in the general election, even against an all-but-convicted felon in Hillary Clinton, but who is handily beating everyone in the Republican field. What does that say about the Republican Party? Not much. There are rumblings of a third-party run regardless of who wins the GOP nomination. That's because the more Trump wins, the more entrenched voters who oppose him become — more than a third of voters Tuesday said they'd go third party if Trump wins. And if the nomination is "stolen" from Trump at the convention, his supporters will bolt because everything they ever thought about the party establishment will be confirmed. Not only that, but Trump himself thinks "you'd have riots" if he doesn't win. Welcome to 2016. Comment | Share Don't miss a deeper look into "The Ides of Rubio's March." BEST OF RIGHT OPINION Jeff Jacoby: Vote Early, Vote Foolish Star Parker: Black Americans and Reagan Ideals Walter Williams: Our Forgotten Statesman For more, visit Right Opinion. TOP RIGHT HOOKS 'Inevitable' Clinton Extends Lead The Bern is cooling down. Hillary Clinton won the five states that held Democrat primaries March 15, raking in delegates from Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Combined with the support of the Democrat Party's superdelegates, Clinton extended her lead over Bernie Sanders. Currently, Sanders has about 800 delegates to Clinton's 1,561. Last week, it appeared that the insurgent candidate within the Democrat Party was riding a surge, as he handily won Michigan in a surprise upset, calling into question Clinton's support within the Rust Belt. After the loss, however, the Clinton campaign rethought its messaging regarding Clinton's stance on the economy trade and rolled into states like Ohio with retooled talking points. Sanders lost votes in places like Florida because the closed primary shut out many of his independent supporters. With about half the delegates still up for grabs, the Sanders campaign hopes that the primaries will shift and places like California and the West will give the socialist wins with wide margins. The Clinton campaign, however, expects her support will remain consistent until the Democrat Party Convention in late July, shutting out Sanders. Already, Clinton pivoted to campaign against Donald Trump. "When we hear a candidate for president call for the rounding up of 12 million immigrants, banning all Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture — that doesn't make him strong, it makes him wrong," Clinton said Tuesday night. It's interesting that, thanks to party rules and structure, the Democrat Party is smoothly shutting out an insurgent candidate while the GOP faces a crisis of identity thanks to one's aggressive rise. Comment | Share Trump Dominates Media Coverage One criticism we've heard of our own coverage of Donald Trump is that the Leftmedia hate him, and therefore we should love him. It's true that the Leftmedia don't love Trump, but that doesn't mean they don't love to cover him — to the tune of almost $2 billion in free coverage. For comparison, the next closest presidential candidate is Hillary Clinton at $746 million. In fact, you have to combine Clinton with the entire Republican field to reach the coverage Trump alone has received. National Review's Jim Geraghty nails the implications: "A more skeptical Republican electorate would ask, 'Why?' Why are television media institutions usually hostile to Republicans suddenly going ga-ga and obsessing over every word the GOP front-runner says? Why are they so eager to cover his rallies live? Why do they allow him to call in to the Sunday shows? Why do they have 'town hall meetings' with softball questions? Why are his prime-time press conferences aired live and then dissected by a team of analysts? Is it because these television producers, anchors and programming directors have suddenly come to appreciate his call for a border wall, deportation of all illegal immigrants and a ban on Muslim immigration? Or is it because they think he confirms every negative stereotype of the conservative movement and Republican Party, that he'll get demolished in a general election, and he'll take a lot of Congressional Republicans down with him?" Comment | Share Is the ObamaCare Death Spiral Underway? A recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis bodes tremendously ill for ObamaCare. But before we provide the prognosis, let's take stock of where we are. Currently there are an estimated 12.7 million Americans getting health insurance through ObamaCare, which is a relatively slight increase from 11.7 million in early 2015. However, as Kaiser cautions, "Actual enrollment will end up somewhat lower than this because some people will not pay their premiums or will have their coverage terminated due to inconsistencies on their applications, and there is typically additional attrition as the year progresses (e.g., as some enrollees get jobs with health benefits)." This explains why the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last week reported that as of "December 31, 2015, about 8.8 million consumers had effectuated Health Insurance Marketplace coverage," which The Hill notes is "3.5 percent below the administration's target" of 9.1 million and "a drop of almost 25 percent compared to the 11.7 million people who were signed up at the beginning of 2015." There's no question that participation is bad, but even the government's "target" rate is deceiving. Why? Because paltry enrollment since ObamaCare's inception has forced the feds to set the bar much lower. And moving the goal posts is what this administration does best. Consider the magnitude of Congressional Budget Office revisions. A year ago the CBO expected around 21 million Americans to be enrolled in 2016. But by January the CBO made a mammoth change, calling for only 13 million. And if the Kaiser Family Foundation is correct, that's not too far from what will probably be the total number of consumers for the foreseeable future. Kaiser says "the 12.7 million signups so far represent 46% of the 'potential market' for the marketplaces," and an extrapolation of current trends suggests an "'effectuated' enrollment total of 14.7 million," or what it describes as "a reasonable estimate of a ceiling on what marketplace enrollment could grow to over the next several years, assuming current levels of premium subsidies and outreach." Kaiser concludes, "Judging by the experience of the top performing states, there is considerable room for enrollment growth over the next several years. However, even if all states signed people up at the rate of the top 10 states, enrollment would still fall well short of projections by CBO, suggesting that those forecasts may have been unrealistic." The reality is that government programs never live up to the hype — and numbers don't lie. As John Adams once said, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." The fact is, it was the authors of ObamaCare who had egregiously unrealistic expectations. Comment | Share Share MORE ORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE Enough With Obama's Lectures The Lesson of Breitbart Did Carson and Trump Make a 'Great Deal'? Clinton Lackeys to Be Questioned Over Email Use Another Climate Scientist Indicted for Financial Fraud Republican Lawmakers Respond to Flint Water Crisis Oil Industry Faces Economic and Regulatory Woes TOP HEADLINES Obama Nominates Anti-Gun Merrick Garland for Supreme Court 37% of GOP Voters Would Mull Third Party Over Trump vs. Clinton American Student Gets 15 Years of Hard Labor in N. Korea For more, visit Patriot Headline Report OPINION IN BRIEF Jeff Jacoby: "Early-voting laws were promoted as democratic and efficient; make voting easier, advocates argued, and voter turnout will rise. They were wrong: The data suggest that early-voting options decrease turnout. ... But the real downside to early voting, especially in a volatile primary campaign like this year's Republican presidential competition, is that voters come to the ballot without having equal access to relevant information. ... Campaigns relish early-voting laws because it enables them to 'bank' votes — early voters who have second thoughts are stuck, even if Election Day is still days or weeks away. And it stands to reason that at least some voters do have second thoughts: In Louisiana's primary this month, Trump overwhelmingly carried early voters, but narrowly lost to Cruz among voters who waited until Election Day. The whole point of having staggered primaries is to allow later voters to take account of new developments and fresh information, yet that's exactly the benefit that early voting undercuts. The transformation of Election Day into Election Month has proved one of our less successful democratic experiments. Voting works better when we do it together — not when each of us decides that we don't feel like waiting any longer." Comment | Share SHORT CUTS Insight: "The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty." —Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980) Upright: "Any normal race would be over. But this is not a normal election. We've gone from a race where the political wing of the conservative movement is at stake, to a contest where America finds itself teetering on the edge of political violence not seen since 1968. In such circumstances, patriots simply do not give up, and they especially don't give up while there are still glimmers of hope. ... Stand now. No matter the odds. There is no other choice." —David French Wait — weren't you the one who threatened to go third party? "But just let me tell you, a third party guarantees — not 90% or 99%, [but] 100%— that Democrats will win. Probably Hillary." —Donald Trump "Ferguson. Baltimore. Chicago. Everywhere Leftist protesters occupy the streets, those whose opinions are deemed insufficiently progressive are abused, mocked, ridiculed, brutalized and physically menaced. This lawlessness is rapidly becoming the norm; the Obama administration, as well as leading media and cultural figures, need to decry that normalization and act strongly against these thugs now —before the American public square is transformed beyond recognition, and ceases to be an arena for free discourse. Although this violence and brutalization of political opponents is a new phenomenon in American politics, it has a historical antecedent: the Nazi Brownshirts." —Robert Spencer Non Compos Mentis: "I don't know where [Bernie Sanders] was when I was trying to get health care in '93 and '94." —Hillary Clinton (Flashback: "I'm grateful for the leadership that many people are giving to this great reform effort, and I'm grateful that Congressman Sanders would join us today from Vermont." —Clinton, 1993) Enough with the lectures: "[I]t's worth asking ourselves what each of us may have done to contribute to this vicious atmosphere in our politics. ... And while some may be more to blame than others for the current climate, all of us are responsible for reversing it, for it is a cycle that is not an accurate reflection of America. And it has to stop.” —Barack Obama Late-night humor: "This weekend was Daylight Saving Time and we all lost an hour of our lives. Plus, I watched the Democratic debate so I actually lost three hours of my life." —James Corden Comment | Share 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.