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Trump still holds the aces against Hillary Clinton

August 12, 2016

Trump still holds the aces against Hillary Clinton, Spectator (UK), , August 13, 2016

WILMINGTON, NC - AUGUST 9: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the audience during a campaign event at Trask Coliseum on August 9, 2016 in Wilmington, North Carolina. This was TrumpÕs first visit to Southeastern North Carolina since he entered the presidential race. (Photo by Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)

WILMINGTON, NC – AUGUST 9: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the audience during a campaign event at Trask Coliseum on August 9, 2016 in Wilmington, North Carolina.(Photo by Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)

Last week, the New York Times ran the page one headline ‘Pence Supports Ryan, Showing GOP Turmoil.’ There was turmoil in the Republican party because Mike Pence, its vice-presidential nominee, had endorsed the candidacy of Paul Ryan, its most powerful congressman. One wonders what the Times would have called it had the two men actually disagreed about something. The Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had waited days before endorsing Ryan, a signal that he had not forgotten Ryan’s slowness to back him in the spring. And the whole press is now in a frenzy of negative reporting about the Trump campaign. These have been ‘weeks of self-inflicted controversies and plummeting poll numbers’ among Trump’s Republicans. It has been a ‘meltdown’, a ‘cascade of blunders’, a ‘panic’.To judge from the headlines, Trump cannot win, because he is disrespecting the families of America’s war dead, bullying babies and helping Vladimir Putin spy.

But there was no meltdown. Democrats got a polling ‘bounce’ after their convention that pushed Hillary Clinton back to the seven–point lead she had enjoyed at the start of summer. Trump has taken a few pratfalls, but it is well to remember that he is not the worse off for the many he took earlier in the campaign.

Fights with the parents of Humayun Khan, a Muslim US army captain killed in Iraq, started the idea of a Trump collapse. The father, Khizr Khan, a Pakistani-born US citizen, appeared at the Democratic convention to attack Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration and berated him for his understanding of the constitution. Trump wondered aloud why Khizr Khan’s wife, Ghazala, who had stood silently beside him in a headscarf, hadn’t herself been allowed to speak.

Trump’s foes believe recent US political rhetoric has established a ‘rule’ whereby anything associated with patriotism and sacrifice gets turned into a popular commodity — even Islam. Trump himself believes a version of this and only 13 per cent of Americans think he was right to speak back to the Khans. Just because swing voters may honour Humayun Khan’s sacrifice, however, does not mean that on election day they will relish the memory of having been angrily lectured on their own constitution in Islam’s name.

The primary strength of Donald Trump’s campaign is hidden in plain sight: he is genuinely funny. If elected he would be the first president since John F. Kennedy to possess a sense of humour. Those who cover his campaign seem eager to punish him for this distinction. When Wikileaks released internal emails from the Democratic national committee, Democrats, with no evidence, sought to blame the leak on Russian intelligence, implying that Russian president Vladimir Putin was trying to get Trump elected. Trump replied that, if that were indeed the case, perhaps Russia would be so kind as to share the 30,000 official emails that Hillary Clinton kept on a private server during her tenure as secretary of state. (Congressional investigators have sought them, but Clinton claims to have deleted them.) The Los Angeles Times news story began: ‘Donald Trump dared a foreign government to commit espionage on the US to hurt his rival on Wednesday, smashing yet another taboo in American political discourse and behaviour.’

At a speech days later, Trump tried to put the mother of a crying baby at ease — when she left he joked, ‘I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking.’ Mother and baby soon returned. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page wrote that Trump had ‘booted a crying baby from a rally’. It wasn’t so much a bad week for Trump as a week of bad press.

Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times has written that the confabulation and extremism of Trump are making journalists ‘throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half century, if not longer’. Paul Waldman of The Week writes that the unusually negative coverage is not due to the media’s treating him differently but to ‘the simple fact that Trump is in fact such a different candidate’.

It goes deeper than that. Western elites are hardening into something like a class. Having little contact with other social classes, they may, on certain issues, never have met someone who disagrees with them. They cannot distinguish between wishes and facts, and see no need to. ‘This is a bad moment for Mr Trump, so a good one for America,’ wrote the Economist last week. ‘As Trump’s feud with his party deepens,’ the Los Angeles Times headlined, ‘some discuss what to do if he quits the race.’ An ex-speechwriter for George W. Bush encouraged Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, to repudiate him.

The Trump meltdown reports were far from reality. But they may yet become reality in voters’ minds. Part of the reason his campaign is alleged to be ‘melting down’ is that it has wound up in confrontations with elite institutions. But these have lost authority in recent years. This week four-dozen Republican foreign policy aides warned that Trump ‘would put at risk our country’s national security and wellbeing’. Trump correctly noted that the signatories included the people who brought the world the Iraq war. It was similar to the episode in June when Moody’s Analytics, a subsidiary of the agency that misrated the world’s derivatives on the eve of the financial collapse of 2007–08, warned that Trump’s economic policy would cause a recession and Clinton’s would create jobs. The report was written by Mark Zandi, a Hillary Clinton donor.

The road to the presidency for Trump is a narrow one. He does lag in the polls. He lacks experience and savvy electoral and policy personnel. But he ought to win it. He need take only Ohio and Pennsylvania away from Hillary Clinton.

Issues likely to arise in the coming months — immigration statistics, terrorism incidents, protests by Black Lives Matter — favour him. He will enter the 26 September debate with enviably low expectations. The myth persists that he is dumb. Even though Trump has shown a gift for vaulting ahead with every new debate. And even though, measured by the gap between the modesty of its beginnings and the heights it has already attained, his is one of the more effective campaigns any US candidate has run for anything.

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump
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Compromised: Justice Dept. Refused FBI Probe of Clinton Foundation

August 11, 2016

Compromised: Justice Dept. Refused FBI Probe of Clinton Foundation, Front Page Magazine, Matthew Vadum, August 11, 2016

(Please see also, Report: Justice Department declined FBI request to investigate Clinton Foundation. — DM)

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The highly politicized Department of Justice swatted down pesky FBI requests to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, CNN reported yesterday.

CNN buried the lede, as it frequently does on news stories that make Democrats look bad. The online version bears the innocuous-sounding headline, “Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation.”

It is not until the 25th paragraph that the article states that an unidentified law enforcement official gave CNN a heads-up earlier this year. As the probe of Clinton’s private email servers was ramping up “several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.”

At that time, the article continues, the Justice Department “declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to open a case.”

Not even enough evidence to look into the foundation’s affairs?

Not more than a year after the publication of Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, opened the floodgates for investigative reporters to dig into the matter.

As I’ve written before, various lawyers have told me there is already a strong legal case against Mrs. Clinton. The fact that she destroyed email evidence — evidence subject to a congressional subpoena, no less — is already evidence in itself that she obstructed justice through spoliation of evidence. Spoliation means you can take as evidence the fact that evidence has been destroyed. Courts are entitled to draw spoliation inferences and convict an accused person on that basis alone.

The only reason FBI Director James Comey didn’t recommend she be prosecuted is because, well, he lacks a spine and he’s corrupt. He said there was no evidence of Clinton’s “efforts to obstruct justice,” a requirement that does not actually appear in the Espionage Act.

Evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation is everywhere, yet CNN and much of the mainstream media are still doing everything they can to ignore, misrepresent, or downplay the questionable things Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did through the foundation.

The congenitally corrupt Clintons created their private email system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requesters, shield Hillary’s correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to their corrupt foundation, which, amazingly enough, still enjoys tax-exempt status.

These illegal, insecure private email servers Clinton used while at the State Department are at the heart of the scandal over her mishandling of an Islamic terrorist attack in militant-infested Benghazi, Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. Even now, four years after the assault, the Obama administration has failed to provide an autopsy report about Stevens who was initially reported to have been ritualistically sodomized before being murdered by Muslim terrorists.

Every few days Judicial Watch has been releasing emails obtained under FoIA that may ultimately lead to evidence of political interference at the highest levels that provided cover for the anticipatory presidential bribe processing vehicle known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

“No wonder Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin hid emails from the American people, the courts and Congress,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “They show the Clinton Foundation, Clinton donors, and operatives worked with Hillary Clinton in potential violation of the law.”

On Tuesday the watchdog group published emails sent to Abedin, Clinton’s longtime aide with generational ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking favors. Abedin now vice-chairs Clinton’s presidential campaign. She also worked at the State Department with Clinton and with her at the Clinton Foundation.

“The new documents reveal that in April 2009 controversial Clinton Foundation official Doug Band pushed for a job for an associate,” according to a Judicial Watch summary. “In the email Band tells Hillary Clinton’s former aides at the State Department Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin that it is “important to take care of [Redacted]. Band is reassured by Abedin that “Personnel has been sending him options.” Band was co-founder of Teneo Strategy with Bill Clinton and a top official of the Clinton Foundation, including its Clinton Global Initiative.”

Emails also show Abedin left then-Secretary Clinton’s daily schedule, presumably a  sensitive document, on a bed in an unlocked hotel room.

“An email on April 18, 2009, during a conference in Trinidad and Tobago, from aide Melissa J. Lan to Huma Abedin asks for the Secretary’s “day book binders.” Abedin replies: “Yes. It’s on the bed in my room. U can take it. My door is open. I’m in the lobby. Thx.” Moreover, the emails show the annoyance of another Clinton aide that the schedule was sent to an authorized State Department email address and not to an unsecured non-state.gov account.”

Other emails show Clinton campaign adviser and pollster Mark Penn provided Clinton advice on NATO and piracy. Clinton fundraiser Lana Moresky asked Clinton to have the State Department hire someone. Clinton asked Abedin to follow up and “help” the applicant and asked Abedin to “let me know” about the job.

Meanwhile, the Left is trying to take the focus off the Clinton Foundation.

A high-profile watchdog group controlled by Hillary Clinton ally David Brock is demanding the IRS investigate Donald Trump’s personal foundation for allegedly aiding his presidential campaign.

The call by CREW, or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has to be the most obvious political hit job of this election cycle.

CREW is a member of what some in the conservative think tank community call the “Brocktopus,” that is, the network of groups the disgraced former journalist runs, which spends oodles of money defending all things Clinton. An admitted serial liar, Brock’s empire of sleaze also includes “conservative misinformation” watchdog Media Matters for America, pro-Hillary disaster-control spin site Correct the Record, and American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that promotes Hillary and attacks her critics.

CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder asked the IRS to investigate the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a tiny nonprofit founded by Trump decades ago to give away profits from his book, The Art of the Deal.

How the foundation, which ranked 4,347th in the FoundationSearch “Top Foundations by Assets for the state of New York” list would help the Trump campaign isn’t clear. “The Trump Foundation has no full-time staff, and gave away just $591,000 in 2014 — the last year for which records are available,” the Washington Post reports.

It’s possible the Trump Foundation has been helping the Trump campaign but the philanthropy is so anemic it is difficult to imagine it doing much to help its benefactor’s political career. Even if the IRS takes up this piddling little case not much is likely to come of it. It’s a political stunt by CREW, a nakedly partisan group under the boot of one of Hillary’s biggest backers.

It’s the wheeling and dealing Clinton Foundation with its involvement in billion-dollar transactions, its ties to shady figures, and the debt it owes to the unsavory governments of countries around the world that needs to be properly and thoroughly examined.

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton Cash film, Clinton cover ups, Clinton Foundation, Clinton obstructions of justice, Clinton unsecured server, Corruption, Department of Justice, Department of State, Donald Trump, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton
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Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense: Spengler

August 10, 2016

Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense: Spengler, Asia Times, , August 9, 2016

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

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Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”

“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!”

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed “moderate Islamists” in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime. Hayden’s specialty was signal intelligence, and by all accounts he was good at his job. He is clueless about foreign policy.

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Trump responded, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” That is exactly correct. He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity.

trumpclubRepublican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks to the Detroit Economic Club at the Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan August 8, 2016. REUTERS/Eric Thayer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

The Republican Establishment believed with fervor in the Arab Spring. Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol went as far as to compare the abortive rebellions fo the American founding. It backed the overthrow and assassination of Libya’s dictator Muamar Qaddafi, which turned a nasty but stable country into a Petri dish for terrorism. It believed that majority rule in Iraq would lead to a stable, pro-American government in that Frankenstein monster of a country patched together with body parts taken from the corpse of the Ottoman empire. Instead, it got a sectarian Shi’ite regime aligned to Iran and a Sunni rebellion stretching from Mesopotamia to the Lebanon led by ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Trump is vulgar, ill-informed and poorly spoken. He has no foreign policy credentials and a disturbing inclination to give credit to Russia’s Vladimir Putin where it isn’t due. But he has one thing that the fifty former officials lack, and that is healthy common sense. That is what propelled him to the Republican nomination. The American people took note that the “experiment” of which Gen. Hayden spoke so admiringly was tough not only on the ordinary Egyptian, but on the ordinary American as well. Americans are willing to fight and die for their country, but revolt against sacrifices on behalf of social experiments devised by a self-appointed elite. That is why the only two candidates in the Republican primaries who made it past the starting gate repudiated the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Common sense, to be sure, isn’t enough. Trump can’t swap spit with Vladimir Putin and let the witches’ kettle of the Middle East boil along by itself without dire consequences. As Bret Stephens complained Aug. 8 in the Wall Street Journal, some of Trump’s loudest supporters make a motley virtue of their ignorance. “There was a time when the conservative movement was led by the likes of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, men of ideas who invested the Republican Party with intellectual seriousness,” Stephens wrote. I knew the late Irving Kristol, who trained and promoted most of the cadre who ran the first Reagan Administration, and Robert Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal — brilliant men from whom I learned a great deal, some of which I had to unlearn afterwards.

But the Republican Establishment today is guided not by the likes of Irving Kristol, but by his epigonoi. His son Bill Kristol has never published a single essay of intellectual significance, and the same is true of Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz, son of the estimable Norman Podhoretz. To be a “neo-conservative” in the 1970s in the mold of Irving Kristol and former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz meant to repudiate the leftist views of one’s youth and make the leap to the Reagan camp. The original neo-conservatives knew how wrong they had been in their youth, and re-learned their politics after forty. Unlike their forbears, today’s neo-cons never have had a self-critical moment. Today’s guardians of the sacred flame of the sacred conservative flame are to the manure born.

The choice, sadly, lies between an unlearned interloper with common sense and an Establishment whose policy response is predictable as the emergence of a gumball from a supermarket machine after a quarter is cranked in. They are mediocre ideologues incapable of learning from past failures, clinging to their careers because they are unsuited for honest work. Trump may not know much but he is capable of learning. That can’t be said for his detractors.

“It isn’t just that the emperor has no clothes,” I wrote in a review of Angelo Codevilla’sbrilliant 2014 book To Make and Keep Peace. “The empire has no tailors.” Three administrations of Bush father and son have produced a monotone Establishment of functional foreign policy morons. One can’t find many prominent national security officials to oppose the signators of the anti-Trump letter because a whole generation of functionaries has been bred from the same stable. America will have to learn foreign policy from scratch. For my money, I’ll take the rough-edged outsider over the recidivist failures.

The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the view of Asia Times. 

Categories: 2016 elections, Arab Spring, Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Islamist "democracy", Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Never Trumpers
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Clinton Ignores Questions About Father of Orlando Shooter Attending Her Rally

August 9, 2016

Clinton Ignores Questions About Father of Orlando Shooter Attending Her Rally, Washington Free Beacon,, August 9, 2016

Hillary Clinton ignored questions on Tuesday about whether she knew that the father of the Orlando shooter was going to attend her rally in Kissimmee, Florida on Monday.

Reporters asked Clinton about Seddique Mateen–father of Omar Mateen, the terrorist who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in June–attending her campaign event as a supporter. Clinton dodged the questions from reporters after delivering remarks about the dangers of the Zika Virus to medical staff and other health representatives at the Borinquen Medical Centers of Miami-Dade.

Mateen, a Taliban sympathizer, attended Clinton’s rally on Monday and was seated behind the Democratic nominee. He at first refused to answer questions regarding the rally, but hours later WPTV ran into him and they asked about Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton is good for United States versus Donald Trump, who has no solutions,” Mateen told WPTV.

Categories: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Orlando massacre, Taliban
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A brutal Trump AD

August 9, 2016

A brutal Trump AD, Power Line,  John Hinderaker, August 8, 2016

This ad by the Donald Trump campaign is a good reminder of why I plan to vote for him, despite his flaws. It is brutal but 100% accurate and fair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HVQRDiN1yI

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton
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A Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Be An American Tragedy

August 8, 2016

A Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Be An American Tragedy, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, August 7, 2016

tragedy

The American people are generally goodhearted. Historically, most presidents have a honeymoon period when they are newly elected. The majority of our citizens want them to do well, at least for a while.

This cannot happen for Hillary Clinton. Over half the country, even many who will have voted for her, do not believe she is remotely honest. Almost as many believe criminal charges should have been brought against her for her email scandal. They are convinced, quite arguably, that were her name not Clinton, she would be in jail.

And this before what we have just now learned–how serious, even fatal to our (and humanity’s) best friends, her use of an easily hacked home-brew email server could be.

Hillary Clinton recklessly discussed, in emails hosted on her private server, an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed by Iran for treason, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday.”I’m not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government, but in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton’s private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman,” he said on “Face the Nation.” Cotton was speaking about Shahram Amiri, who gave information to the U.S. about Iran’s nuclear program.

The senator said this lapse proves she is not capable of keeping the country safe.

To say the least, but there’s more.

Many do not think Clinton is even a moral human being. Any person who could lie to the parents of the dead over the fresh caskets of their sons, as Clinton has apparently done with the Benghazi victims–if you believe the testimony of the parents themselves as many of us do–has lost contact with basic human values.

So Hillary Clinton would be beginning her incumbency with an unprecedented level of distrust, even disgust, for an incoming president and it is hard to conceive how she could regain the public confidence necessary to govern. What could she say or do? Continue to lie, as she did yet again at her recent press conference and interview with Chris Wallace? Suddenly tell the truth after decades of dissembling? The result would be a psychic unraveling so extreme she would likely dissolve like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

No, she would undoubtedly do her best to ignore everything while a Damoclean sword in the form of  the +/- 33,000 emails, depending on what transpires between now and November, hung over her head. Who knows what’s in them? Hillary undoubtedly doesn’t like to think about it herself, but stress and endless prevarication have clearly taken a toll on her. Most 68-year old women I know can walk up the stairs by themselves.

According to FBI Director Comey, her lawyers don’t know what was in the emails either, even though they supposedly supervised their deletion. They only read the subject lines, they testified. To know the truth, it should be obvious, would have been inconvenient for them.

It’s also obvious from the mass releases so far from all sides that her server could have been permeated by who knows how many parties, state and non-state. This would lead to the inevitable.  Every even slightly controversial policy decision she makes as president would be open to question—and for good reason. Is someone blackmailing her?

And what about the Clinton Foundation? Suppose Putin — or someone else for whatever reason… destabilizing the United States perhaps — decides to reveal information definitively tying the Clintons to treasonous activities with foreign companies, potential “high crimes and misdemeanors” of the kind we are beginning to learn about in the uranium business. An impeachment trial would follow that dwarfs in implications any such trials before. Many would be swept up in it.

Is this a stretch? Not at all. More a likelihood. We’ve already seen enough of this in Clinton Cash, book and movie, to know how real it is. People aren’t going to stop looking for the truth if Hillary is elected, nor should they.

No, a Hillary Clinton presidency would be An American Tragedy waiting to happen—and not just a symbolic one like that described by Theodore Dreiser in his classic novel of that title, but one that engulfs the whole country and the world. In that worst-case scenario, our lives would never be the same.

Civil war is even a possibility. I never thought that until now, but when the rule of law has been broken, no telling what will happen.

For that reason, I desperately hope that Donald Trump will prevail, as unproven, erratic and self-destructive as he often is. I was truly disheartened the last couple of weeks. Like many, I haven’t come close to sleeping through the night. The man seemed incapable of reform.

But Friday evening there was a reprieve. Donald Trump the grown-up reappeared as he relented in his battles with people he should never have been fighting in the first place. For all our sakes, now more than ever, he should hold firm to this approach. No more dumb mistakes, if he can possibly manage it. Somebody has to prevent this American Tragedy.

As Trump himself has said, it’s not about him. It sure isn’t. Not in the slightest. It’s about us. Try to remember that, Donald, or our country is in trouble as never before.

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton character, Clinton Foundation, Clinton unsecured server, Donald Trump
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The Press and Pollsters Are Putting Too Much Cornstarch in the Cherry Pie

August 7, 2016

The Press and Pollsters Are Putting Too Much Cornstarch in the Cherry Pie, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, August 7, 2016

That’s the short take of my friend Thomas Lipscomb and I have to agree with him

Contrary to most of the media-sponsored polls (The LA Times stands alone now calling the race a tie at last view), I agree with this one: Trump will draw in millions of voters who didn’t show up to the polls before and he will beat Hillary Clinton.

I don’t pretend to be a polling expert but note others who claim to be have said much the same thing using different statistical methodologies, including Yale Professor Ray Fair (economic models) and Emory University President Alan Abramowitz (presidential approval ratings), Politik.com predicts a landslide, noting in recent years the number of people voting for Democrats has dipped while the number of those voting for Republicans has risen.

Conservative Treehouse has argued along the same lines and notes that the NYT buried its own key finding that American voters are whiter than “historic leftist presentations”.

It projects that 73,272,595 Republicans will vote this fall in the general election.

That jaw-dropping number, 7.2 million more potential votes than Barack Obama carried in 2008 and almost 13 million more than Mitt Romney carried in 2012, is the least result achievable when you turn out THE MONSTER VOTE.

[snip]

What the New York Times is statistically beginning to quantify is the existence of The Monster Vote. If you look closely at the data behind their newly discovered 10 million potential/predictable voters, you’ll notice the additional votes carry to exactly what we predicted in February.

Even if Republican projection turnout was off by 5 million votes, Trump still wins in a landslide. Heck, even if the projection turnout was off by a staggering 10 million votes, the republican nominee (Trump) would still get more votes than President Obama did in 2012 and it is highly doubtful Hillary could turn out that level of support.

♦ Even the fact the NYT would write such an article tells you there are interests (financial interests, globalists) who are looking closely and trying to quantify the challenge they have in front of them.

♦ Remember, even in honest scientific polling — the poll methodologies are based on “assumptions”, or inputs into the collected poll samples in order to make them representative of the anticipated turnout.

♦ Thanks to Donald Trump, historic turnout trends are obsolete. Additionally, historic demographics and party affiliations are also obsolete; And, more importantly, as a consequence…

…any poll data that is relying on obsolete sample methodology is going to be significantly inaccurate.

I don’t know about the methodologies or baselines used by nationally recognized polling companies this year, but I note that Democratic pollster Pat Caddell recently said Reuters midstream shift in its tracking polls comes as close as I have ever seen to cooking the results.”

There are methods for projecting and allocating undecided voters based on complex attitude structures, based on many questions that tell the pollster that this person is in movement to support someone, he said. “Sometimes, they are hiding. That happens. Particularly in the past, or in racially-sensitive cases.”

Caddell cited two examples to Breitbart News.

“On July 25, they originally reported: Trump 40.3 percent and Clinton 37.2 percent, which was a Trump margin of 2.8,” he said. “They have recalculated that now — which I have never heard of — they changed that data, to be: Clinton 40.9 and Trump 38.4, which is a 2.5 margin for Clinton.”

The July 25 Reuters poll now shows a result that reflects a 5.3 percentage point flip from the previously published results, he said.

“Now look at July 26,” he said. “On July 26 they had Trump at 41.5 percent and Hillary at 36.3. That was a 5.2 Trump margin. Then, in the new calculation, they claim that Clinton was 41.1 percent, Trump was 37.5, and the margin was 3.6 for Clinton. Same poll. Two different results. Recalculated, after you’ve announced the other results.”

“What you get is an 8.8 percentage point margin change, almost nine points swinging from one candidate, based on some phony, some bizarre allocation theory that you claim you know where these people are or you are just leaving them out,” he said. “I actually believe they are allocating them because they are claiming they are really Clinton voters and they are using something to move them to Clinton.”

As Mickey Kaus has long noted, many polls are “hamburger helper polls”, that is designed to advance a point of view of the press organs which engage the pollsters so they can promote as fact what is merely their opinion.

In any event, the recent coverage of the election by the major media suggest to me that they are panicking and throwing in as much as they can to make Hillary look as if she were a far better candidate — or at least Trump a far weaker one — than is the case. Obama’s unpresidential and unprecedented attack on Trump, the low turnout at her rallies (and cancellation of some of her appearances), the huge turnout everywhere for Trump, the promoting of the Khan phony baloney story, the Reuters polling change, the  daily press sleight of hand  all suggest to me panic  there is on the left.

The Khan Con

The media fairytale is that Trump dissed a Gold Star family. In fact, it was the other way around. The Democrats used the father of a military hero who died at the hands of Muslim enemies to argue that Trump was wrong in wanting us to suspend immigration from terrorist countries until we had better means to vet them.

How far overboard on this did the media go? This week a number of press and photographers just happened to show up at the same time as two families showed up to pay their respects, the Washington Post even had a shot of one wiping a dry eye. Thomas Sowell long pegged such people as the Khans as “mascots of the anointed”. My friend Janet Shagam has documented the coverage by press which thinks we are dumb enough not to realize this was a staged performance:

* Muslim Soldier’s Grave at Arlington National Cemetery Attracts Visitors After Trump’s Remarks About Parents

NBC Washington 4 —

* Humayun Khan’s grave becomes a shrine in the wake of his father’s speech

Washington Post —

* Strangers visit grave of Muslim US Army Capt. Khan at Arlington National Cemetery

ABC 7 News —

from the WaPo link – “Sally Schwartz, 65, and her mother, Harriet Schwartz, 85, stood before the grave. Harriet leaned on a black cane.

“We thought we’d pay our respects,” Sally Schwartz said as the women walked away. ”

From the NBC link – “D.C. resident Sally Schwartz visited Khan’s grave on Monday with her mother.”

The local ABC coverage — The story doesn’t quote Sally Schwartz but she is pictured in the video.

As for the Benghazi soldiers’ survivors there has been scant coverage — even though we know our government not only left them to die but also compounded the crime by lying to them about the motivations of their killers. In the words of another online friend “Iggy”, they were merely “unpeople from Jesusland”.

The same was true of Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and Jamiel Shaw, whose children were killed by illegal aliens, Spanish speakers watching Univision and Telemundo heard they were “anti-immigrant” and gave them only 55 seconds of air time.

Covering for Congenital Liar Hillary is Getting Harder and Harder

Hillary keeps lying about Comey’s report, which said clearly she lied about her private email server. While a number of papers challenged her on this the NYT steadfastly stuck by her story. It was so blatant even the Public Editor of that paper, Liz Spayd, called her newsroom out for covering up for Hillary. As Tom Maguire observes quoting the Spayd:

Waddya expect? The conventions are over and we are at the top of the backstretch, bracing to head for home.

“The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today and PolitiFact all challenged Clinton’s claims, saying they appeared to be based on a selective and misleading interpretation of Comey’s remarks. The Post awarded her ‘Four Pinocchios,’ the worst truth-telling rating it gives, for statements it classifies as ‘Whoppers.’ “

Yeah, whatever. The Times has suspended criticism of Hillary until after the election, due to the national emergency caused by Trump.

Topping off the week and indicative of the media panic is the news that the administration illegally transported $400 million in cash on pallets in an unmarked plane to Iran where it is being used to finance terrorists. The administration dissembled to Congress about the transaction.

The deal had to be kept secret because neither the voters nor the Congress would ever have approved it and it surely sent the wrong message — taking Americans hostage is a money-making proposition, Two more, in fact, have been taken hostage since that covert exchange took place.

It’s a deal (The Iran scam as a whole, not the ransom deal?– DM) so bad that the administration lied and said Israel approved it — prompting the foreign minister to bitterly reject that claim and respond the deal is so bad it is like Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich.

Trump criticized the hush hush deal and said correctly that Iran had made a video of the pallets of cash coming off the unmarked plane to further embarrass the U.S. This sent the partisan kiddos at the Washington Post into a tizzy, denying there was any such video, when in fact it was easily available to be viewed on YouTube, the BBC, or Memri.

In the meantime — as crowds pour into Trump rallies throughout the country, waiting in long lines for a chance to hear and cheer him, Hillary made a rare appearance before unquestioning Hispanic and Black news reporters where she looked a wreck, almost called Trump her “husb–” and then said her earlier interview lies about Comey’s report were the result of a “short circuit.” It’s a long time between now and the election. Her staff cannot continue to keep her bottled up and appearing only before small, sympathetic audiences and interviewers and I expect so much “short circuiting” from her even the low information voters will have to take notice.

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Media and Democrats, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Polls
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CIA Chief Who Edited Benghazi Talking Points, Works for Hillary Adviser, Endorses Hillary

August 6, 2016

CIA Chief Who Edited Benghazi Talking Points, Works for Hillary Adviser, Endorses Hillary, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, August 5, 2016

morrel

If only Ex-CIA boss Mike Morell had done as good of a job serving his country as he did serving Hillary Clinton.

Former CIA director Michael Morell endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and blasted GOP rival Donald Trump, accusing him of becoming an unwitting agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an op-ed on Friday.

Well we know that Morell is a better editor than a writer.

Mike Morell, then-head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), had the task of helping to prepare talking points for then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, who was slated to appear on five Sunday morning talk shows a few days later. Morell was personally responsible for “cutting some 50 percent of the text,” including all “references to Al Qaeda” and the many earlier terror attacks against U.S. and other Western targets in Benghazi. When the Senate Intelligence Committee finally succeeded in prying loose the emails that had flowed back and forth to the CIA, State Department and the White House during the talking points editing process, it was clear that Morell not only had misrepresented his own role, but also had been less than forthcoming about the close oversight role played by the White House in ensuring that all references to al-Qa’eda 15 terrorism would be scrubbed. Morell also made sure to scrub from the talking points the honest assessment that “We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

There’s a lot of details in this new report by Fox News, much of it stuff we already know. But the big takeaway from this report is that the CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, who edited the talking points that were used by Susan Rice on Sept. 16, was told in a secure video call less than 72 hours after the attack by our people on the ground in Libya that they were ‘baffled, angry, and dismayed, with Washington’s singular focus on the video. They were upset with Morell because he seemed to dismiss their reporting — none of which suggested in any way that a video was the cause of the attack. That video conference call included CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, the CIA Chief of Station in Tripoli, survivors who had been evacuated to Germany, and Greg Hicks (Deputy to Ambassador Chris Stevens).

After Hillary blamed the video at the funeral of the four men who were murdered in the attack, the Chief of Station in Tripoli then emailed Morell directly saying that the video was NOT an escalation of protests.

Despite that email, Morell still edited the talking points to blame the video, which is the same talking points Susan Rice used on the 16th in her infamous appearance on all five Sunday morning political talk shows.

Bear in mind that on Sept 12, the day after the attack, the CIA Chief of Station in Tripoli sent situation reports with the raw intelligence from the attack to the leadership of the CIA which included Morell, none of which indicated a video was responsible for the attack.

So yes. Mike is quite the author. But he’s not an unwitting agent, but a witting one.

STEVE HAYES: I will give you two examples… One, he complains bitterly in the book about cherry-picking, critics are cherry picking information that supports their case and leaving out information that doesn’t. He does the exact same thing throughout his entire two chapters on Benghazi and he does it in his interview with you. A perfect example was when you were talking about/he writes about whether this was a pre-planned attack or not.

You [Bret Baier] interviewed the CIA contractors who wrote the book 13 Hours — it said there had been surveillance of the facility, and in their book they wrote that that surveillance put them into high alert. It was a big deal that they were casing the facility before the attack. It doesn’t appear in Mike Morell’s book. He simply leaves it out. You can have questions about what they say, you can disagree, but you can’t just set it aside. And that is what he does, repeatedly.

And, oh yes, guess where Mike works.

HH: And a very last question, you’re now working for Beacon Global Strategies. One of your partners is Philippe Reines. Now I have partners at my law firm, which is Arent Fox, who are not, you know, they’re left wing Democrats, and I get along fine with them. Philippe is Hillary’s guy. And so…

MM: Yeah, yeah.

Reines was a Hillary Clinton adviser.

Categories: Benghazi cover-up, CIA, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Michael Morell
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RUSH: Obama’s Statement On Presidential Fitness – HILARIOUS PARODY

August 6, 2016

RUSH: Obama’s Statement On Presidential Fitness – HILARIOUS PARODY via YouTube, August 5, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ_Lzh8LTPc

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Humor, Obama
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Cartoons of the Day

August 5, 2016

H/t Freedom is Just Another Word

President Obama said that Donald Trump is "unfit" to serve as President.

President Obama said that Donald Trump is “unfit” to serve as President.

 

safer

 

H/t Vermont Loon Watch

death-care

Categories: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Humor, Kerry, Obama
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