The Patriot Post® · Training School Shooters, Election Oddities, Fires, and the Media

By James Shott ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/57634-training-school-shooters-election-oddities-fires-and-the-media-2018-08-14

Did you see anything in the news of the compound in New Mexico where 11 young people ages one to 15 years old were being held in squalid conditions, and at least one of them was being instructed on how to shoot up a school? This is not just speculation; the information came from court records filed last week.

News reports — which were fewer in number than the situation called for — said that one of the five “extremist Muslims” arrested at the compound, which had neither electricity nor plumbing, was training one or more of the children to commit school shootings. And the children and captors are all related.

Prosecutors allege that Siraj Ibn Wahhaj is the son of a Brooklyn imam, also named Siraj Wahhaj, who was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, according to the New York Post.

One report noted that Taos County officials became tired of waiting for the federal government to act against the compound and took matters in their own hands. Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe said the children “looked like third world country refugees not only with no food or fresh water, but with no shoes … and basically dirty rags for clothing.” The remains of one child were found at the compound.

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Ohio’s U.S. House special election featured Republican Troy Balderson versus Democrat Danny O'Connor in a race Balderson was expected to win handily, as O'Connor had been trailing Balderson in the polls and early vote counts.

And then, “Ohio election officials on Wednesday found 588 previously uncounted votes in the hotly contested special election for Ohio’s 12th Congressional District,” The Hill reported, narrowing the lead to only 1,564 votes.

Still left to count at that time were 3,435 provisional ballots and 5,048 absentee ballots, meaning the final result was sure to change.

Some wondered where these votes had been hiding since Election Day, and it was explained that “the votes from a portion of one voting location had not been processed into the tabulation system” at the polling place, according to the Franklin County Board of Elections. No one explained how or why this irregularity occurred.

Further casting a shadow on the legitimacy of the vote from this Buckeye State district was the revelation that there are 170 registered voters over 116 years of age still on the rolls of the 12th District, and 72 of them cast ballots in the 2016 election.

This raises legitimate questions of how many votes are still floating in electoral space, waiting for someone to discover them, as well as how many other voters are on the roles improperly.

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The horrible wildfires in California are inflicting misery and causing great damage to thousands of state residents. Unfortunately, this tragedy has once again been used by the politically motivated Left to push one of its favorite themes: climate change/global warming.

With an estimated 600,000 acres already destroyed by fire and thousands of residents displaced because their homes have been destroyed, the radical environmentalists are heeding the words of former Obama White House Chief of Staff and now-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

But someone with actual knowledge of effective woodlands management takes a different view. Forester Bob Zybach said that when President Bill Clinton introduced a plan that was aimed at saving the spotted owl and ancient trees back in 1994 by restricting logging in the old-growth forests, that plan was a mistake.

He knew how ecosystems thrive, flourish, die, and are reborn. “We knew exactly what would happen if we just walked away,” he told The Daily Caller. Years of mismanagement have served to turn the forests into a ticking time bomb.

Zybach said that when Native Americans lived on the land and practiced human management of forests, they used controlled burns to clear pastureland and undergrowth for hunting. Without human management, nature will do the pruning, and we see now how that works. “You take away logging, grazing and maintenance, and you get firebombs,” Zybach said.

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The news media in general may not be the “enemy of the people,” as President Donald Trump’s words have been twisted to suggest by some in the media, but many in the industry are the enemy of the president. The troubled Boston Globe is working to organize a “day of editorials” on Aug. 16 denouncing what the newspaper called a “dirty war against the free press.”

And then there’s the opinion piece by Tina Dupuy in USA Today suggesting amending the U.S. Constitution to abolish the presidency. She wrote that since this president is a tyrant who will not be removed through the constitutional process of impeachment, the presidency must be abolished.

The only way to get rid of Trump is to get rid of the presidency itself?

Clearly, many in the news media have abandoned journalistic ethics and now believe it is just fine for them to become the story rather than to merely report the story.

More and more, one word is becoming especially applicable in politics today. That word is “unhinged.”