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Rest In Peace

November 12, 2016

Sad to report that one of Hollywood’s most popular leading men, Robert Vaughn, has died at 83. He’s best remembered as the star of the iconic ‘60s spy series, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” which is enjoying a revival thanks to the vogue for cool midcentury pop culture. But he also appeared in countless other classic movies and TV shows, including one of the most-watched movies of all time, “The Magnificent Seven.” Vaughn once revealed that the cast assumed it would be “the bomb of all time,” and they spent much of the location shoot in Mexico drinking margaritas, smoking marijuana and sitting on the toilet with food poisoning. Well, magnificence sometimes arises from humble sources.

And in case you’re wondering: yes, Vaughn’s partner on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” David McCallum (“Illya Kuryakin”) is alive and well and still acting. You can see him just about every week as medical examiner as Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard on “NCIS.” Apparently, he only takes roles with weird names on shows with acronyms in the title.

http://pagesix.com/2016/11/11/robert-vaughn-star-of-the-man-from-u-n-c-l-e-dies-at-83/

Despite what we’ve learned from WikiLeaks (that Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents was as well-known and worrisome to her own staff as the beyond-shady Clinton Foundation was; that it was even more egregious and damaging than we imagined; and that a concerted effort was undertaken to hide it, which clears the unnecessary bar of proving “intent” to deceive investigators)…

And despite the impossibility of reviewing over 650,000 emails in one week…

And despite the fact that we now know that at least five foreign intelligence agencies likely hacked into Hillary's server, and that Hillary allowed even her foreign-born maid access to classified information and to go into a room forbidden to all but those with the highest security clearances…

And despite Comey’s earlier claim that no prosecutor would pursue this case being blown to bits by many prosecutors such as Rudy Giuliani, who would have gladly gone to court with what they had in July, much less the mountain of new evidence that's emerged since…

FBI Director James Comey has once again yanked the football away from his outraged and dedicated law enforcement agents, and doubled down on his staggering “never mind, nothing to see here” claim from July.

If Mr. Comey has even a speck of the integrity we were led to believe that he possesses, then the only explanation I can think of is that he realized the Obama Justice Department, which has been rotted away from within by corruption and partisanship, was going to block every attempt to enforce the rule of law against Hillary Clinton. If it is true that the NYPD has devastating information taken from Anthony Weiner’s computer and was threatening to make it public if Washington failed to act, then maybe this is Comey’s way of flipping the fail-safe switch to signal state level authorities that the feds refuse to do their duty, so they have to take over.

If not, then the only explanation I can see for Comey’s decision not to pursue Hillary Clinton is that the foundational American principles of equal justice and the rule of law are dead. In that case, there is only one way to revive them. When the system is irreparably broken by the people who were put in charge of it, the last line of defense is the voters. We Americans have to do the job of replacing those who have corrupted and destroyed our system of equal justice ourselves. We now know that if we don't drain the swamp, no one else will.

My fellow Americans: turn out in record numbers Tuesday. Stand in line all day in the rain if you have to. Cast so many votes that any attempts at fraud and rigging can't overcome them. Do not reward unbridled lawlessness and corruption with a promotion to the most powerful office on Earth. Do your duty to save this great nation and the rights and freedoms its Founders bequeathed to us for yourself, your children and your grandchildren.

Vote for Trump and throw the bums out.

There are rumblings from the East that should disturb every American, as Vladimir Putin continues making moves that suggest he’s willing to risk nuclear war to rebuild the Soviet Union.

Just over the past couple of months, we’ve seen aggression such as repeated provocations of US ships and planes by the Russian military, the bombardment of Aleppo, a breakdown of communications as Putin ignores Secretary of State John Kerry over Syria, the Russian violation of the INF arms control treaty, and now, in a chilling replay of history, Putin has mobilized nuclear missiles into the westernmost region of Kaliningrad.

Russia claims it’s just a “routine drill,” but the President of Ukraine warned that he thinks Putin is planning to take over half of Ukraine to add to the “Russian Empire.” Putin fed that fear by warning Russian officials to call their relatives home from other nations in light of the heightened chances of global war. Meanwhile, about all we’re hearing from our media about Russia are attempts by the Clinton campaign to blame Russia for the WikiLeaks hack, so we’ll focus on the messenger instead of the message.

For what it’s worth, Putin denied any involvement in the hacking, calling it a lot of “hysteria” and claiming there’s nothing in the US election campaign that’s in Russia’s interest, just one candidate trying to exploit Russia to win. Normally, I’d never believe a thing Putin says, but it’s a sad commentary on the Clinton campaign that they’ve made it a tossup as to which one is less likely to be telling the truth. Voters who are about to select a commander-in-chief in inherit the dangerous mess Obama's made of the world should remember that Hillary Clinton kicked off her tenure as Secretary of State by gong to Russia with a pathetic prop “reset button” from Staples, signaling to Russia the new Obama-style approach of abject weakness in foreign policy. Because nothing insures stability in the world like America projecting weakness.

Well, the US-Russia relationship has certainly been “reset,” all right. Reset back to the 1950s. Heckuva job, Hillary and Barack.

There’s an old saying, that a conservative is just a liberal who got mugged. Kim Kardashian might soon become the face of that concept for a new generation. Like most Hollywood celebrities, Kim dutifully parroted the approved pro-gun control rhetoric following attacks on other people, such as in the mass shooting in Orlando. But last month in Paris, some armed robbers reportedly burst into her own hotel room, threatened her life, tied her up and gagged her, and fled with $10 million worth of jewelry.

Can you guess what she and husband Kanye West are doing now? According to the celebrity gossip site TMZ, they’re hiring a new security detail consisting of veterans of the CIA, the Secret Service and the Israeli special forces. And surprise: they will be packing serious heat.

I anxiously await word of whether this means Kim and Kanye now realize that all law-abiding citizens should have the right to bear arms to defend themselves, or if they’re going to adopt the standard Hollywood liberal philosophy of preaching gun control for everyone else from behind a regiment of heavily-armed security guards that the average person could never afford to hire. Personally, my way of “keeping up with the Kardashians” is just to carry my own gun.

Just when it seemed that this particular election season couldn’t make your skin crawl any more, right on schedule (on a Friday evening of a holiday weekend), the “October surprises” we’d been bracing ourselves for since summer started dropping on our heads like frozen airline sewage.

Human nature being what it is, the one garnering the most attention isn’t the one related to important public policy but to sex. The Washington Post released an 11-year-old secretly-recorded tape of Donald Trump making some offensive “locker room” type comments about women to host Billy Bush before going out to do a TV appearance. I won’t go into the details; if you want to hear them, check out this link. A warning—they are disgusting and lewd. I’d suggest actually watching the video, though, since that conveys better than out-of-context excerpts the attitude with which the remarks were intended.

http://ijr.com/2016/10/709800-here-is-a-leaked-recording-of-donald-trump-bragging-about-trying-to-have-sex-with-married-women/

Trump issued a statement in which he apologized and admitted what he said was wrong, but he pointed out that the tape was over a decade old and he is a changed and better man now (you can hear/read his entire statement here):

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/07/donald-trump-releases-statement-following-release-2005-lewd-audio/

Hillary Clinton reacted as you would expect, tweeting, "This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president,” apparently in her zeal to pile on forgetting the type of inter-gender relations that prevailed in the Oval Office the last time a Clinton was President.

(A personal aside: I admit that I am appalled by Trump’s comments. I think they are inexcusable regardless of the context or the fact that it happened 11 years ago. But I also believe that people are capable of change and deserving of forgiveness. I certainly don’t condone what he said in what he thought was a private moment 11 years ago, but here’s a good reminder that in these times of ubiquitous microphones and cameras, there are no private moments. I can truly hope he’s genuinely contrite and has outgrown it and that he himself is as repulsed by it as are those who view it.

One thing that bothers me and that nobody is mentioning is the fact that someone recorded a private conversation, sat on it for years, then released it just before an election to try to alter the course of history. This is a genuine invasion of privacy to advance a political agenda. It’s different from the hacking scandals currently plaguing Democrats. While it’s true that someone stole and exposed emails, those emails involved official business that the public had a right to know. Hillary’s problem is that she is believed to have used her private server for official business, then deleted emails that were subject to the Freedom of Information Act. If her private server really had been used only for her personal communications and someone had hacked it and released those, I would be among the first to call for the arrest of whoever did it. Similarly, if Hillary had decided not to release her personal tax forms, I would have supported her just as I did Trump. Running for President shouldn’t mean having every detail of your personal life forcibly laid bare in the public square. If you lament the choices of candidates we have, then consider what we put them through. It’s no wonder that only those with the thickest skin even consider running.)

Of course, Hillary is very lucky that the Trump tape surfaced when it did, since WikiLeaks pulled its own October surprise on her the very same night. They released emails hacked from her campaign chairman John Podesta, the most damaging featuring excerpts of her highly-paid speeches to big Wall Street firms that she’s so far refused to release. They show that despite her attempts to woo Bernie supporters by opposing deals like the TPP, she came across as practically a cheerleader for free trade in front of the wealthy financial elite. She told one Brazilian bank in 2013, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”

http://nypost.com/2016/10/07/wikileaks-releases-excerpts-of-hillarys-paid-speech-transcripts/

It’s hard to say what the fallout of all this will be. Many voters already believe the worst of the candidate they oppose, and both of these stories just bolster their negatives. Charles Krauthammer observed that it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump has said crude things in private and that Hillary has two sets of principles, one for in public and one for big donors behind closed doors. The only difference is that with these stories, we get to hear both of those things exposed in the candidates’ own words, which somehow makes it seem more shocking that it might otherwise.

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/10/07/krauthammer-everybody-knows-hillary-has-a-private-and-public-position-on-everything-and-that-trump-is-crude/

My guess is that the Trump story will prove more damaging, for several reasons. The media will pile on him while ignoring the Hillary story. Fellow Republicans will denounce and desert him, while if he were a Democrat, his colleagues would circle the wagons to defend him and attack the sleazy leaker for violating his privacy with “old news” that he’s long since “moved on” from. And again: sex sells, while the revelation that Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected is hardly news at all. Even Barack Obama told us that back in 2008.

- Mike Huckabee

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Should FBI Director James Comey be impeached for his handling of the Clinton email case? Vote here.

In the latest installment of “Political Correctness Run Amuck On Campus,” a University of Tennessee student got an F in a class on sedimentary rocks and was accused of sexual harassment under Title IX for guessing his female lab instructor’s name wrong. On a quiz, students were asked to fill in the lab assistant’s name, and if they didn’t know, “make up something good.” The student didn’t know, so he filled in the most generic female name he could think of: “Sarah Jackson.”

It turns out that is the name of a lingerie/nude model. The professor accused him of trying to sexually humiliate the lab instructor and said since there was no way to determine his intentions, the F and sexual harassment accusation stands. But wait a minute: if there’s “no way to determine his intentions,” then how did the professor determine that he meant it as a sexist slur? He implied that the student should've known that Sarah Jackson is a nude model. Really? If he had known that, wouldn't THAT have made him a sexist, under the liberal definition?

The student claims he'd never heard of a nude model named Sarah Jackson. I believe him because I never have, either. Yet somehow, the professor instantly recognized “Sarah Jackson” as a nude model. The student’s parents are appealing this outrageous decision. If I were them, I’d threaten a subpoena to look at the browser history of the professor who saw the name “Sarah Jackson” and whose first thought was, “She’s that nude model!” That might get this reversed in a New York second.

Speaking of horribly un-PC things current political figures said in years past, the Ace of Spades blog has dug up video of a “horrible old racist” using disgusting triggering language such as “illegal aliens,” “criminal aliens,” “deportation” and “secure our borders.”  Guess who said it and where, then click the link to see if you were correct.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/366136.php

 

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Yet another infuriating reminder of why this election is not about who said what about Miss Universe 20 years ago:  The Inspector General for the Veterans Administration reported that the VA shortchanged 33,400 disabled vets who are unable to leave their homes by a total of $110 million in benefits.  That was offset somewhat by the $44.3 million in homebound benefits they sent to vets who weren’t eligible for them.  One homebound disabled veteran was shortchanged by $350 a month.  On the bright side, it was finally corrected…after he went underpaid for nine years.  The VA blamed faulty computers and poor training and management. 

Answer honestly: which Presidential candidate do you think is more likely to reform the VA, replace the faulty computers, fire the incompetents and instill better training and management?  The one who buys used Blackberries off of eBay?

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/10/02/housebound-vets-denied-millions-in-benefits-by-va.html

 

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There’s been a lot of talk about the opportunities Donald Trump missed to attack Hillary Clinton during last week’s debate, but one of the easy pop flies he dropped was when she touted her economic plan.  She somehow will create jobs and make business boom by instituting trillions of dollars in new taxes and mountains of new micromanaging federal regulations.  Because it’s worked great the past eight years!  Just look at that stunning 1.2% GDP growth under Obama.

While Hillary brags about all the economists who love her plan (Flashback: Last January, 170 economists released a letter endorsing socialist Bernie Sanders’ plan, too), Larry Kudlow is not among them.  At the link, he compares the Clinton and Trump plans and runs down a list of all the Clinton tax hike proposals that her supporters adamantly deny exist. 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/10/01/hillarys_red_army_march_of_tax-hike_destruction_131946.html

 

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There are so many laws on the books that it’s said we all violate 10 of them before breakfast without even knowing it.  There are a number of problems with that: such laws kill freedom and stifle innovation, they empower the government with the abuse of selective prosecution, and they foster a double standard.  We’ve seen that recently when Hillary Clinton was let off the hook for violating laws she should have known all about, while non-elites are told that ignorance of the law is no excuse.  That applies to people who were careless with government intelligence, but also to cases such as the retiree who was charged with a crime for accidentally driving his snowmobile into a National Forest Wilderness Area in Colorado when he got lost in a blizzard. 

If any good comes out of “the Hillary defense” (ignorance of the law), maybe it will make Americans question why we have so many laws and enforce them so unequally, and demand that our lawmakers do something about it.  A new article in Reason magazine makes the case for ending the era of “accidental criminals.”  Check it out and let me know your opinion in the comments. 

http://reason.com/archives/2016/10/01/no-more-accidental-criminals

News you might have missed!

September 30, 2016

What is the medical diagnosis when your blood boils every time you read about the Veterans Administration? I ask because I have that condition. The latest outrage comes from the VA health center in Albuquerque, where dozens of veterans who tested positive for colorectal cancer were not informed in a timely manner, putting their lives at risk. Three of them waited for three to nine months before being informed, and a fourth was never told at all and only discovered he had cancer when he went to a doctor for the pain. Of those four, two have already died.

If you are thinking of withholding your vote from Trump or helping Hillary win by voting for a third party, and all the arguments about the economy, the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court and the rest haven’t swayed you, then please consider this: Hillary represents a continuation of the current Administration’s VA practices. Trump has vowed to reform the VA and put our veterans first. And we know that he’s an expert at saying, “You’re fired!” Isn’t it long past time we had someone who will put that skill to use on the VA?

http://freebeacon.com/issues/veterans-cancer-died-delays-va-hospital/

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The Washington Post asks the question that’s keeping Americans awake every night in a cold sweat of fear and trepidation: “Is my dog’s Halloween costume sexist?” Before you despair at your fellow Americans’ insane priorities, read the hilarious comments and be reassured that this lunacy has only infected people who write for the Washington Post, not (most) people who read it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/29/is-your-dogs-halloween-costume-sexist/?tid=sm_tw

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The final revisions for second quarter GDP growth are in. The economy officially grew at a whopping 1.4%. That keeps Obama on track to become the first President in history never to preside over a single year of GDP growth above 3%. Plus, while Hillary Clinton demonizes corporations and promises to soak the rich with new taxes, corporate profits over the past four quarters have declined by 4.3%. She also promises to supercharge the economy with four more years of the same liberal nostrums of taxes, regulations and government spending that have given us one of the weakest recoveries from a recession ever. Investors Business Daily points out that it’s the slowest of the 10 recoveries since World War II. If Obama’s recovery had even matched the average of those recoveries, the US economy would be $2.2 trillion bigger than it is now.

And yet, liberals keep pumping out memes to share around Facebook that try to convince us that Obama’s amazing record on economic growth outshines even Reagan’s. No, not by a longshot. A farmer can brag that his corn is growing, but if it only grows three inches in a year, everyone’s going to starve.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-29/final-q2-gdp-comes-14-us-set-grow-slowest-pace-financial-crisis

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Remember those media reports about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being booed by the crowd at a performance of the Broadway musical, “Hamilton”? Well, turns out there’s video of his arrival in the theater, and I'll bet you a Hamilton that it proves otherwise:

http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/28/media-says-netanyahu-totally-booed-at-hamilton-video-says-otherwise/

Paul Ryan

September 28, 2016

We’re seeing it: Nothing brings Republicans together better than the threat of a Hillary Clinton Presidency. Gosh, what a unifying force she’s turning out to be!

What appeared to be hopeless fragmentation --- wildly played up in the media --- within the GOP is morphing into cohesiveness as we get closer to the finish line. Evidence of this comes in the form of post-debate support from none other than Paul Ryan.

The Speaker had positive things to say about Trump’s first big one-on-one debate. We all wish Trump had offered more detailed responses and had dared to bring up a host of issues that the moderator, unbelievably, failed to mention at all. But in a strong and hopeful statement at a news conference Tuesday morning, Ryan praised him as a “spirited voice” and one who “showed that for 90 minutes he could go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton.”

It seems obvious that Donald Trump saw this debate as his “warm-up” for the contests to come. He’s a political novice, pitted against the Politician Of All Politicians, and there’s been a learning curve, to be sure. But now, when Hillary Clinton smugly says, “One down, two to go!” I can just hear him thinking, “You better believe it, sister.”

Donald Trump found himself on the defensive during much of Monday’s debate. Perhaps he hadn’t anticipated that in addition to battling Hillary Clinton over her mischaracterizations of his views, he’d have to counter the moderator as well. If so, this event had to be a rude awakening for him regarding the brutal reality of media bias and his need to prepare well for it. On Monday night, NBC’s Lester Holt couldn’t resist interrupting and pompously “correcting” Trump on his own views, repeatedly.

In one exchange, Holt insisted that Trump was not correct in stating he had not supported the Iraq war. “The record does not show that,” he said. By “record,” he was referring to an offhand comment during a 2002 Howard Stern show, before Trump had even considered the issue in detail.

In interviews from 2003 and 2004 --- with FOX News’ Neil Cavuto and Esquire magazine, respectively --- “the record” shows that Trump clearly did not support the war in Iraq. And the Esquire piece includes what turned out to be an accurate prediction of the long-term consequences of an invasion and resulting leadership vacuum. If only our leaders had been looking at the same crystal ball!

So which “facts” should so-called fact-checkers (and moderators, but I repeat myself) be using? All too often, they limit themselves to the “facts” that further their partisan goals.

For the full story, along with some refreshingly accurate fact-checking, click here.

http://ijr.com/2016/09/702847-a-2003-clip-has-surfaced-that-flips-the-script-on-trumps-iraq-war-opposition/

This post is sponsored by Iris Plans.

By now, you’ve probably heard debate analysis until you’re tired of it (I heard from a number of people who got tired of the debate itself and tuned out halfway through), but I’ll throw in my two cents. I think I have a unique perspective most of the talking heads don’t have, since I’ve actually participated in Presidential debates, including debates with Donald Trump.

First of all, when you listen to all the armchair quarterbacking about who won or lost, remember that there are two scales for determining that, and the one the pundits use is almost entirely irrelevant. They like to judge the winner on points, as if it were a UIL high school debate. By that measure, I think we can all agree that Hillary did everything a good, practiced debater should do. She obviously studied for days, memorizing what stand-up comics call “hunks,” or carefully-crafted pieces of a monologue, each word painstakingly honed to accomplish the multiple goals of making herself look steady, experienced and well-informed and her opponent seem dangerous and unready. You could easily imagine her rehearsing into her bathroom mirror, practicing smiling while sticking in the shiv.

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Trump, on the other hand, often seemed to be winging it. He’s great at that, and he landed some solid hits, but he also let a lot of softballs whiff by. He sometimes went into rhetorical cul-de-sacs, repeating the “we make bad deals” theme that can make him sound like a one-trick pony. And he let Hillary (and moderator Lester Holt, but more on that later) put him on the defensive too often. For instance, he could have brushed off some of the piddling attacks on non-issues like birtherism or what he once allegedly said about a beauty pageant contestant by reminding viewers of the serious issues America faces and how such petty nonsense pales in significance to Clinton’s demonstrated record of failure on national security and the economy. But he missed many such opportunities. Plus, Hillary made it all the way through the debate without fainting or having a seizure. I know that sounds facetious, but a lot of people were watching very closely for signs of ill health, and she managed to “power through” admirably. So on the “Tracy Flick” high school debate “win through doing homework” scale, I’d have to give the debate to Hillary.

However…

The only judges who really matter are the undecided voters in the viewing audience. And I doubt that many of them were watching to hear what Hillary said (although if she had passed out, that might have influenced their votes.) After more than 30 years in politics, Hillary Clinton is known only too well. Her carefully focus-grouped speeches about all her government experience and her 25-point plans don’t impress anyone who knows that it was bad experience and that her plans are nothing but more of the same foreign policy weakness that’s letting ISIS, Iran, Russia, China and North Korea eat our lunch and the same old big government control policies of tax/regulate/spend (sorry: “investments”) that have exploded the debt, crippled small business and put Obama on track to be the first President in history never to preside over a single year of GDP growth above 3 percent (One of Trump’s best moments came when he declared that America can’t afford four more years of her kind of experience.) And does anyone with a memory longer than a housecat’s truly believe that the 2008 meltdown was caused by tax cuts and not by Clinton/Carter policies that forced banks to give home loans to people who couldn’t pay them back? Hofstra University should’ve issued a “trigger warning” to conservatives that they might hear some revisionist history that would cause them to do double-takes that could induce whiplash.

No, undecided voters likely won’t be swayed by Hillary’s shiny new plans to deal with the disasters caused by her previous plans. Many of her claims were downright laughable, such as her smug assurance that she’s uniquely qualified to fight cyber threats from foreign governments, when we all know she thinks you “wipe” a server with a dust cloth and destroy data by hitting smartphones with a hammer, and all her own emails are all over WikiLeaks. I would also hope everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a “nuclear button” – the only person who ever traveled to Russia with a Staples-like prop push-button was Hillary. And her attempts to spark Internet memes with painful canned groaners like “trumped-up trickle down” – she said that twice, as if it would sound wittier the second time – landed with a clunk and just drew attention to her lack of spontaneity.

After 30 years of exposure to Hillary, anyone who has still not decided to support her is likely someone who really doesn’t want to but is scared of the alternative, after hearing the non-stop Democrat/media depiction of Trump as a crazy, fire-breathing, sexist, racist fascist or any other “ist” the liberals can think up. Trump proved to fence-sitters that he can show restraint when attacked, which was the whole point of goading him. For instance, when Hillary brought up some left-field accusations of sexist things he’d allegedly once said, he could have pointed out the bull elephant in the room – her husband Bill -- but he declined in deference to Chelsea being present. That may have frustrated conservatives who wanted to see blood drawn, but Trump was appealing to the undecideds who wanted to be reassured that he was a palatable alternative to Hillary. Not taking the bait helped him clear that low bar. By that far more important standard, Trump was the winner, because he was playing for votes, not an A+ from the media debate judges.

By the way, one of the best comments I saw online was from a poster on the Yahoo News comments section, who said that Trump reminded him of a doctor with no bedside manner. He tells you that you need to lose 100 pounds and stop smoking. You’re offended, you’re angry, you come up with 10 reasons why he’s crazy…and then you finally realize that he’s the only one telling you the truth.

Finally, a word on moderator Lester Holt. I’m hearing a lot of complaints about bias, and they’re not unjustified. Some of the bias was by omission; for instance, Holt devoted a ridiculous amount of time to the long-past-its-shelf-date birtherism story (news flash: Obama isn’t even running this year), yet never brought up the Clinton Foundation and its pay-to-play scandal, the immunity deals the FBI handed out like pizza discount coupons to Hillary insiders, her family’s enrichment through speeches to Wall Street banks and foreign nations with business before the government, her plan to greatly increase the flow of Syrian refugees and many other issues far more relevant to this election. And as Clinton kept giving shout-outs to her “fact-checkers” (the greatest misnomer of 2016) to save her, Holt answered her call, repeatedly arguing with Trump on her behalf (actual fact-check: Trump’s claim about the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk was correct). But there’s no point in a Republican whining about the moderator being a biased liberal. It goes with the territory. Besides, if Holt didn’t slant the questions and drill down harder on Trump, he might find himself exiled to the Siberia of TV news channels, MSNBC. Who can blame him for wanting to avoid that?

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The New York Times, to the surprise of absolutely nobody with a pulse, endorsed Hillary Clinton for President.  Here’s the full story.

It’s no surprise that the Times editors think America would be better off with Hillary. Check out the link below to their previous presidential endorsements. You have to go all the way back to 1956 and Dwight Eisenhower to find a Republican that the Times deemed worthy of the White House. That’s right: the Times editors, in their infinite wisdom, seriously believed that what America needed down through the decades was Presidents McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and, of course, a second term of Jimmy Carter instead of that crazy cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan. Read through their rationales for endorsing each one, and imagine the words being pontificated at you in the condescending, know-it-all tones of Professor Kingsfield from “The Paper Chase.”

I particularly love the excerpt from their reasoning for reelecting Bill Clinton in 1996: “The presidency he once dreamed of is still within his reach if he brings the requisite integrity to the next four years.” Yes, let’s give the Clintons four more years and see if they develop any integrity. And how did that work out? Is “integrity” the word you associate with the second Clinton term? The Times now yearns for yet another term of the Clintons in the White House. Over the ensuing 16 years, have Bill and Hillary demonstrated any growth in the area of integrity, or have their more recent exploits managed to make their lies and scandals of the ‘90s look like a kid cheating on a spelling test in comparison?

The First Debate

September 26, 2016

Tonight is the first Presidential debate, and the media are abuzz: Will Trump maintain his presidential composure or lose his temper? Will Hillary manage to remain vertical all the way through it? Will her Tracy Flick-like devotion to wonky homework and detailed 50-point plans make people forget that we’ve followed liberal plans like hers for the past eight years, and they’ve made a wreck of the economy and the world (seriously, she tries to scare us with what might happen if Trump were in power while ignoring that under hers and Obama’s watch, the word “beheadings” returned to the daily headlines for the first time since the French Revolution).

One thing that Hillary should be prepared for is that unlike the media, Bernie Sanders and the FBI, Trump will not roll over and make it easy for her. Her camp already tried to rattle him by inviting Trump critic Mark Cuban to sit in the front row. I can’t imagine that would bother Trump, but he returned fire with a Howitzer by inviting alleged Bill Clinton mistress Gennifer Flowers to sit in the front row, which set off a series of calls by Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and other alleged victims, clamoring for tickets to come fill the arena.

I’m sure the media can’t believe Trump “went there,” because both they and previous GOP candidates have always studiously refused to. But Trump is a different kind on candidate in more ways than one. He’s not a genteel Ivy Leaguer who fights by the Marquess of Queensberry rules. He’s a Queens-born street fighter. I know from personal experience that he is incredibly cordial to anyone who doesn’t attack him. But if you try to sucker punch him, you’d better brace for him to slug you back twice as hard.

Still, I think that anyone hoping for a Trump meltdown will be disappointed. Trump wrote “The Art of the Deal,” and he knows how to get what he wants. He is surely aware that most Americans don’t want Hillary Clinton for President, but they’ve been frightened by a relentless media onslaught painting him as the worst human since Hitler. All he has to do is show the world that he’s nothing like that media-created cartoon and come across as a reasonable alternative to Hillary Clinton, because, just as in previous elections, that’s all that most voters are looking for.

Arnold Palmer

September 26, 2016

There are only a handful of athletes so good at what they do that their names become synonymous with excellence in their sport. When it comes to golf, even Tiger Woods will tell you that that the “king,” the man whose name will forever stand for greatness on the links, is Arnold Palmer. Palmer died Sunday in Pittsburgh at 87, ending an astounding 52-year career as a professional golfer that encompassed 95 professional wins and 62 PGA Tour wins.

But Arnold Palmer was more than just a great golfer. Even more important, he was also a great human being. In the 1980s, he and his wife were given a tour of the small neonatal ICU and pediatrics unit of the Orlando Regional Medical Center. Deciding that the city could do better, he lend his name and his fundraising efforts to the Arnold Palmer Hospital for children. He urged the staff always to strive to make it one of the best hospitals in the world. Today, the hospital’s website cites his legacy of caring by recalling how he said that none of his achievements in golf compared to being a part of saving the life of a child.

Arnold Palmer may be gone, but his name will live on, in golf, on the children’s hospital that bears it, and let’s hope, as a sorely-needed sports role model for current and future generations.

It’s disturbing to see the FBI – once considered a ramrod-straight agency above the corruption of politics – repeatedly doing late Friday “document dumps,” just like any other shady bureaucracy with something to hide. But digging through the 189 more pages of documents relating to the “investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s email server yields some things that the Administration would obviously rather have released while most Americans are out eating wings at TGI Friday’s.

We learned that a number of Hillary Clinton staffers were granted immunity to testify, even though they might reasonably have been considered targets of the investigation. It wasn’t necessary to give them immunity to compel them to talk to the FBI or to hand over records that could have been subpoenaed and seized. Two of the immunity recipients, top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, were even allowed to continue to represent Clinton as attorneys in the very investigation they’d been potential targets of, which one legal expert described as unbelievable.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he has lost confidence that the FBI made a serious effort to investigate this scandal, adding that it was “no wonder they couldn’t prosecute a case. They were handing out immunity deals like candy.” Why, it’s almost as if the entire “investigation” was just political theater, and it was decided from the get-go that no matter what was found, nobody would be indicted.

Another stunning revelation that the FBI tried to sneak by us was the fact that President Obama sent an email on June 28, 2012, to Clinton, under a fake name that the President uses on unsecured communications. Which is interesting, considering he told CBS News in 2015 that he had no idea Hillary was using an unsecured, private server until he saw it in the news.

And then there was the email that contained a reference from a tech worker about a request for an unprecedented 60-day email retention system that the writer referred to as “the Hilary cover-up operation.” Remember how FBI Director James Comey told us that Hillary couldn’t be indicted because she didn’t “intend” to expose national secrets, even though intent isn’t necessary under the law? Well, even intentionally planning ahead to cover it up wouldn’t have gotten her busted.

If this information had been leaked about a Republican President and a GOP nominee, the media would treat it as a bigger scandal than Watergate. But it involves Hillary and Obama, so it was barely covered at all outside of conservative websites. After all, the “paper of record” (these people are forcing me to wear out my quotation marks key), the New York Times, was too busy writing their editorial endorsing Hillary for President.

Here’s more from the National Review about the FBI handing out immunity deals as if they were Chinese takeout menus and the damage that does to trust in government and the rule of law:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/440370/why-did-obama-justice-department-grant-cheryl-mills-immunity

My advice for Hillary

September 23, 2016

Having run for President a couple of times myself, I could offer the candidates some tips on things they don’t want to do. One tip I’d give to Hillary Clinton is, “Don’t remind voters of Michael Dukakis. And especially don’t remind them of SNL comic Jon Lovitz’s impression of Dukakis.”

During an oddly strained video message for the Laborers’ International Union of North America, Hillary blurted out in frustration, “’Why aren’t I 50 points ahead,’ you might ask.” Frankly, I don’t think anyone other than her was wondering about that. To most pundits, it immediately brought to mind Lovitz’s Dukakis in a 1988 SNL debate sketch, lamenting about Dana Carvey’s George Bush, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!” Whether that led to comparisons of Dukakis’ technocratic aloofness or Lovitz’s parody of his oblivious egomania in the face of electoral catastrophe, it’s not a comparison any candidate wants to face.

It also provided an open invitation for Internet wags to suggest answers to her question of why she’s not 50 points ahead – and they did. Even Trump weighed in. Some of the suggestions are at the link, along with video and some more excerpts from her speech, including a promise to fight all “so-called right-to-work” laws that prevent people from being forced to join unions to hold a job. BTW, according to Gallup, right-to-work laws are supported by 7 in 10 Americans, including 65% of Democrats. Personally, I can’t fathom why she’s not 50 points behind.

If you'd like to offer your suggestions for why she's not 50 points ahead, that's what the comments are for. Have at it.

Friday Roundup

September 22, 2016

Millennials have been sold quite a bill of goods by the left.  The media have made it their mission to push the idea that Obama is the epitome of cool, and no young person would want to risk unpopularity with their peers by not hopping on the “progressive” bandwagon.  But gradually, over the past eight years, cracks have started to appear in that narrative.  Young voters were noticeably less enthusiastic about Obama in 2012 than in 2008.  By 2016, many refused to swallow his DNC-anointed successor. Too many thought the best alternative to Hillary was socialist Bernie Sanders, but we can chalk that up to leftist professors filling their heads with economic nonsense that we hope will be dislodged once they get into the real world and have to earn a paycheck that they’d like to keep a little of.  New polls show that Trump is actually gaining ground among Millennials, many of whom are fed up with seeing their 30th birthday approaching while they're still stuck in their parents’ basements, surfing the net and working two part-time waiter jobs to try to pay off their student loans. 

And if anything will boost Trump’s support among Millennials, this is it: Trump has come out against Obama’s plans to turn over control of the Internet to a globalist body at the UN.  For eight years, the Democrats have assumed they had a lock on the youth vote, even as they made the country less secure and hampered job creation and wage growth, which harms young people just starting out the most.  But allowing China or Russia a say over what we’re allowed to see or post on the Internet?  That may be the last straw!

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/21/donald-trump-comes-out-against-obamas-united-nations-internet-takeover/

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Defenders of the Clinton Foundation urge the media to ignore the shady donors, the questionable accounting procedures and the stink of government corruption, influence peddling and pay-to-play, and look at all the good that the Foundation does for the poor and needy. Okay, let’s ask the former President of the Haitian Senate about the great things the Clinton Foundation did for the poor, suffering earthquake victims of Haiti:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/21/former-haitian-senate-president-world-trusted-clintons-help-haitian-people-deceived/

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A new Gallup poll illustrates why Hillary Clinton's tsunami of negative ads against Donald Trump isn't raising her poll support.  Even $50 million worth of ads in one month can't sell a defective product, and that's how most Americans see her. 

Gallup asked which words people remembered hearing in descriptions of each candidate.  By far the #1 word associated with Hillary was "email," with other top words including "lie," "health" and "scandal."  The top words people associated with Trump included "speech," "immigration" and "President."  That last one will terrify Democrats because they know something I've been saying for months now.

Hillary can't get above 50% by winning over more voters because there is no big pool of voters who just don't know her yet.  She's been around so long that everyone knows her only too well.  That's why the countless reintroductions of her are futile.  Her only hope is to convince voters that Trump would be even worse.  Hence all the attack ads.  Those may not be the waste of money they seem; without them, Trump might be ahead by 20 points by now.

This is why liberals who claim Trump faces a high hurdle at the debates and will crash there are deluding themselves.  All he has to do is come across as someone viewers could conceivably envision as President without fainting (which is why his numbers soared after his press conference with the President of Mexico.) 

Democrats and the media have spent many months and millions of bucks painting him as a deplorable, irredeemable, sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic cross between Hitler, Hannibal Lecter and Jabba the Hut.  If he just comes across as slightly better than that, a lot of voters may say, "Eh, at least he's better than Hillary."

http://www.gallup.com/poll/195596/email-dominates-americans-heard-clinton.aspx

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You can always count on White House spokesman Josh Earnest to make justifications for President Obama’s policies and actions that are so absurd that like Baghdad Bob, you wonder if he even believes himself.  And his latest is a triple-decker whopper with extra cheese:

 

In trying to refute Ted Cruz’s attempt to block Obama’s October 1st handover of control of the Internet to an international body, Earnest claimed that a small government conservative shouldn’t be arguing for federal control of the Internet.  He actually implied that the takeover of the Web by a board controlled by multiple foreign governments, some of them quite authoritarian and censorious, was a form of limited government. 

 

I would strongly suggest that Mr. Earnest go search up the meaning of “limited government” on Google, while he’s still able to.

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/22/josh-earnest-white-house-ceding-us-internet-contro/

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When you get all your news from sources that do nothing but mock anyone who disagrees, you have to expect that they’ll occasionally make a mockery of themselves without even realizing it.  And so, Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show” did that thing they always do – mocking some dumb rube for thinking you can stop terrorists by posting a “No Muslims” sign – without realizing he’d just obliterated the entire basis of his leftist audience’s faith in “Gun Free Zones.” 

 

Noah ridiculed the poor sap for not realizing that never in history had anyone been dumb enough to try to dissuade a killer by posting a “no killers” sign.  But that wasn’t true: he’d forgotten about Columbine High School; Sandy Hook Elementary; that Aurora, Colorado, movie theater; the Pulse nightclub in Orlando; the civic center in San Bernardino; Fort Hood…the list goes on and on.  You’ll find it here, along with much more about how “The Daily Show” accidentally threw a pie in its own liberal face.

 

http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/22/watch-daily-shows-trevor-noah-accidentally-destroy-case-gun-control/

News You Might Have Missed...

September 20, 2016

By The Numbers: Eleven times President Obama stood before the world and badmouthed America in his final UN address. No wonder he’s going to miss these UN meetings:

https://news.grabien.com/story.php?id=540

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You heard Obama congratulating himself at the UN on how much more secure the world is under his leadership vision, including his brilliant Iran nuclear deal (or more likely, you didn't hear it, if you're not a masochist). So how about chasing that down with a little stark reality? Here is a review of Jay Solomon's new book, "The Iran Wars." It chronicles years of efforts by the US government, of hard work and strategy to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions -- a difficult but effective effort that was working pretty well until a President came along who thought he knew more about Iran than all the experts. So he set about to dismantle that containment effort with the help of a minion who knew nothing about Middle East policy or history, but who had a unique knack for creating fictional narratives and echo chambers for gullible and uninformed young reporters.

Feeling more secure yet?

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/lets-make-a-bad-deal/

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Nothing focuses the mind like the threat of impeachment.  IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is testifying today before the House Judiciary Committee about his previous arrogant testimony and his agency’s failure to comply with requests for documents in the investigation of the IRS targeting of conservative non-profits.  Liberals tried to use the suspicious lack of evidence that's required by law to be preserved as proof of innocence (an argument for which Hillary Clinton has given them plenty of practice).  But today, as the sole witness with a bright spotlight on him, Koskinen admitted that his previous statement under oath about the IRS preserving all the relevant documents was false, and the agency clearly failed to preserve those emails.  He did insist that he was just mistaken, not willfully misleading Congress.  That’s a pretty good excuse, but I’d suggest throwing in a few dozen “I don’t recalls.” That’s been known to work surprisingly well in Washington.

 

http://ijr.com/2016/09/697912-irs-commissioner-admits-his-previous-statement-under-oath-was-mistaken/

 

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I’ve been asking for years how David Brock’s Media Matters for America is able to maintain its tax-exempt status as a nonpartisan nonprofit when Brock openly acts as a hatchetman for Hillary Clinton and MMFA directs its “fact-checking” efforts at Republicans.  Well, it appears that question was only scratching the surface of the creative accounting going on in Brock’s office.  Zero Hedge has been investigating, using public records that for some reason, the Obama IRS has simply ignored for years.  Take a look and prepare for the unique experience of having your mind blown by a report on nonprofit accounting procedures:

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-20/money-laundering-scheme-exposed-14-pro-clinton-super-pacs-non-profits-implicated

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Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly treated terrorism as a multi-state threat and built a terrific terrorism prevention unit that kept New Yorkers safe for over a decade. Uber-liberal Bill DeBlasio, who somehow managed to get elected mayor without a single outstanding accomplishment on his resume, decided with zero evidence that Kelly’s unit was infringing on the rights of terror suspects and immediately started trying to rein in and disband it. Now, things are blowing up on both sides of the Hudson.

See, who says your vote doesn’t matter? Your very life might depend on it.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/ray-kellys-vindication-14748.html

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Have you heard about the latest “OUTRAGE!” outbreak on the left? No, it’s not over the fact that the FBI ignored a guy who was planning to bomb New York, even after his dad turned him in as a terrorist; or that one of the Presidential candidates exposed national security information to our enemies and faced no repercussions when similar charges have landed lesser mortals in prison. No, they’re frothing at the mouth over Skittles, the chewy, fruit-flavored candy. Or more precisely, over Donald Trump Jr. retweeting a meme about the dangers of letting in waves of unvetted immigrants, by noting that if you knew just a few Skittles in a bowl were deadly poisonous, you wouldn’t ingest any of them. This was met with the usual howls and Twitter tweets about how offensive it was for Trump Jr. to compare human beings to candy.

News flash: This particular comparison has been kicking around for decades. Liberals pointed out that Nazis used it in the ‘30s to argue about the dangers of even one Jew (leave it to liberals to always find a way to compare their opponents to Nazis). On the other hand, it was also used (with M&Ms) for feminists to justify suspicion of all men, even if only 10 percent of them are monsters. I myself used the example of a few poisoned peanuts in a bowl to describe the problem with allowing waves of migrants into Europe following the deadly attacks on Paris. It got me mocked by “The Daily Show,” even though comparing humans to objects is so common, there’s a name for it: an “analogy.” Even that old dead white guy William Shakespeare did it, comparing a woman to a summer’s day; although he did start out by asking if he should do that, to avoid triggering her.

See, Millennials, how much more you learn from reading my websites than you do by getting all your news from Comedy Central? But no hard feelings. Just to prove it, I may send Trevor Noah a bag of peanuts.

The good news is that even though so-called "progressive" taxes and regulations have driven many manufacturing jobs out of the country, liberals are singlehandedly insuring that America will remain the world’s leading producer of manufactured outrage.

http://ijr.com/2016/09/697718-the-great-skittles-non-troversy-how-trump-jr-s-sweet-analogy-for-refugees-provoked-liberal-fury/

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Remember that shocking news report that the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly granted citizenship to 858 illegal immigrants who were supposed to be deported instead? Well, the good news is that the 858 figure turned out to be incorrect. The bad news: it’s actually about twice that.

http://hotair.com/archives/2016/09/20/actually-number-immigrants-mistakenly-given-citizenship-double-reported-yesterday/

Terror Hits The United States

September 18, 2016

Our prayers today for the people of New York City, jolted by an explosion last night from a device inside a dumpster, outside a building in the Chelsea neighborhood.  Fortunately, there were no fatalities, although at least 29 people were injured.  A pressure cooker bomb like the ones that went off at the Boston Marathon was also found a few blocks away, but was safely removed by the bomb squad.   This all came just hours after someone set off a pipe bomb in a garbage can on the Jersey Shore, shortly before a charity race to benefit Marines and US Navy sailors was to begin.  At this writing, all that’s known about the NYC explosion, according to Mayor DeBlasio, is that it appears to be intentional and there is “no evidence at this point of a terror connection to this incident.” 

 

Right, three people in the NY-NJ area all had old bombs to get rid of and threw them into dumpsters and garbage cans at the same time.  We shouldn't assume that's coordinated terrorism.  Maybe some people are just too zealous about keeping the East Coast tidy.

 

http://ijr.com/2016/09/695712-new-york-city-mayor-de-blasio-gives-statement-on-manhattan-bombing-an-intentional-act/

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo served in the Clinton Administration, and he proved that he learned at the feet of the master by admitting that the bombing in Manhattan now being celebrated by ISIS was “an act of terrorism,” but claiming “it’s not linked to international terrorism,” so “it depends on your definition of terrorism.”  He added that “we were really lucky that there were no fatalities this time."  Considering the people currently in charge of our immigration and anti-terrorism policies, that’s one thing we can all agree on.  Read more here:

 

http://ijr.com/2016/09/695813-gov-cuomo-on-whether-nyc-attack-was-terrorism-that-depends-on-your-definition/

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Hillary Clinton has denied reality so much that she’s reached the point where she can’t even keep her denials straight from one sentence to the next.  Last night, she slammed Donald Trump for unwisely leaping to conclusions by calling the explosions in New York and New Jersey “bombs” before having all the facts.  She apparently didn’t recall that in her opening statement just seconds prior to that, she had said, “I’ve been briefed about the bombings in New York and New Jersey, and the attack in Minnesota.” 

 

By “the attack in Minnesota,” she was referring to the man who stabbed eight people with a knife at a St. Cloud, Minnesota, shopping mall before being shot and killed by an off-duty cop.  He reportedly mentioned Allah and asked one victim if they were Muslim before stabbing them.  Also, a state-run Islamic news agency called him a “soldier of the Islamic state.”  But the police chief declined to call it terrorism and said his motive was still unknown. 

 

Yes, we mustn't leap to conclusions.  He might have just been a victim of poor motor skills.  Just like the pressure cooker device planted in a New York dumpster might not have been a “bomb,” it might have just been someone throwing away a pressure cooker in frustration over his inability to make rice without causing an explosion. 

 

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/09/17/bomb-bombings-hillary-clinton-calls-nyc-explosions-slams-trump-bomb/

My Weekend News Roundup

September 16, 2016

Blogger John Robb identified a new tax that’s crushing Europe’s economy: the terrorism tax. It’s the staggering accumulated costs of dealing with terrorist attacks. As noted in the link, a single terrorist attack in a city dissipates over time, but when you have repeated attacks, as in Paris, it creates fear and a negative image that kills tourism, which undermines the entire economy. That’s what many European nations are dealing with now, because their leftist leaders, in partnership with arrogant, unelected EU officials, threw open their borders to thousands of unvetted Middle Eastern migrants and declared it politically incorrect (or even illegal) to criticize the propagation of radical Islamic hatred and violence against their own cultures.

This just proves that "progressive" policies create ruinous taxes that destroy economies even on the rare occasions when they don't intend to.

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2016/09/the-terrorism-tax-hits-europe.html

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Shelby Eckard found out in a really good way that kids are always listening.

She’d been talking on the phone about her personal goal of raising $1,000 for PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome. Shelby is a busy advocate for PCOS awareness.

Her little boy, six-year-old Parker, probably has little if any awareness of “polycystic ovary syndrome,” but he understood that his mommy was trying hard to raise money for a good cause. While Shelby was cleaning her kitchen counter the next day, she found his empty piggy bank and the money he’d been saving up to buy a Spider-Man toy. Next to it was a piece of paper that simply said, “MOMMY.”

You’ll smile when you read the explanation he gave her when she met him at the school bus that afternoon. And that’s not the end of the story --- find out what happened as a result of her posting the sweet story on Instagram! Just click here.

http://ijr.com/2016/09/694030-mom-stunned-to-see-sons-empty-piggy-bank-on-counter-when-she-remembers-her-money-talk-with-friends/

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The talking heads are fuming at Donald Trump for playing them like a fiddle and beating them like a cheap rug.  After they spent all morning Friday breathlessly debating what he would say at his press conference about his support or repudiation of the Obama "birth certificate" controversy, he made them sit through a long parade of military veterans endorsing him before they finally realized that his previous statement that he recognizes Obama as being born in America was all he really planned to say.  Many reporters went into twitter meltdown over how Trump used their own desire to embarrass him to trick them into providing him with half an hour of free commercial time. 

This episode reveals a lot about Trump's cleverness in dealing with adversaries, but the media's reaction (fury that they were tricked into airing something important -- the statements of US veterans -- instead of something partisan and trivial) reveals even more about them. 

http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/16/media-outraged-after-trump-tricks-them-to-cover-endorsements-from-military-heroes/

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When folks on the right question Hillary’s health, they get slammed in the media.  They’re criticized as sexist (as if they wouldn’t raise similar questions about a male candidate) and partisan (as if they wouldn’t raise similar questions about a Republican candidate).  But it turns out that even some who know Hillary well and support her for President have been voicing such concerns for quite some time.

 

We know this, in part, because of Colin Powell’s hacked emails.

 

In March of 2015, Powell and Jeffrey Leeds, described by the Washington Times as a “mega-donor” to the Democratic Party, are having an exchange about Hillary.  In the email, Powell refers to the fact that she would turn 70 her first year in office and observes, “On HD TV, she doesn’t look good.  She is working herself to death.”  “Not sure, but she has launched a story line that will be picked up.  I think there’s something to it.”

 

Leeds writes back a few minutes later to say that Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has expressed concerns, too.  “Sheldon Whitehouse, who is a huge Clinton supporter, said they were both giving speeches at the same event a few months back and she could barely climb the podium steps.”

 

So when someone voices a concern about Hillary’s health --- or anything else that doesn’t seem in keeping with the “official” line -- it should be taken for what it is:  the legitimate and very natural inclination to question what we’re told, especially by someone with a well-earned reputation for hiding things.

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/14/colin-powell-worried-about-hillary-clintons-health/

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And a new plot twist emerges in the Day of Manufactured Outrage.  Former McClatchy News DC chief James Asher says that back in 2008, longtime Clinton confidante and fixer Sid Blumenthal personally shopped the "Obama was born in Kenya" story to him.  That's when the "birther" movement really got rolling.  You might remember Blumenthal from his emails with Hillary that were hacked and released by Guccifer.  Or from the revelation that Hillary was getting sensitive foeign policy data from him, despite Obama's ban on hiring him for the State Department--in retrospect, one of his best decisions.

Some journalists are still desperately trying to knock this hot potato out of Hillary's lap, claiming there's "no proof" Blunenthal was working for Hillary's campaign.  Yeah, and there was no proof he was working for her State Department until her emails got hacked.  With Hillary, the claim that "no proof can be found" always carries multiple meanings.

The Democrats need to wake up to the fact that if they wanted to destroy Trump with scandal allegations, they shouldn't have nominated someone who's done everything they might possibly think to accuse him of,  times 50.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/09/16/hillary-clinton-adviser-sid-blumenthal-spread-birther-story-editor/

News You Might Have Missed...

September 13, 2016

Remember the man who made that anti-Islam video on YouTube that Hillary Clinton (knowingly) falsely blamed for the Benghazi attack? While she went on to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars to run for President, his life was destroyed for exercising his First Amendment rights. Fox News caught up with him to find out where he is today. Suffice to say he no longer believes in democracy or freedom of speech anymore. He found out what happens when Hillary Clinton labels you as a “deplorable.”

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/09/12/blamed-for-benghazi-filmmaker-jailed-after-attack-now-lives-in-poverty-fear.html

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Donald Trump is planning a speech tonight in which he will reportedly propose a plan for six weeks of paid maternity leave from work.  He believes it would garner bipartisan support because it would be fully paid for by eliminating fraud in the unemployment benefits program.  I’m sure his numbers will be closely scrutinized, and Never Trump conservatives will attack the proposal as too liberal.  But it will be interesting to see how the Democrats and the media will somehow spin Trump’s paid maternity leave proposal as proof that he hates women. 

 

http://conservativetribune.com/trump-proposes-maternity-leave/

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Message from Iris Plans:  "Do you have a serious medical condition?  Learn one way to prevent a medical bankruptcy. Click here."

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Get the feeling that some Congress members are finally fed up to the breaking point with having Obama Administration officials urinating on their boots and telling them it’s a rainstorm?  Here’s an example of just how fed up they are that made me stand up and cheer.

http://ijr.com/2016/09/692142-jason-chaffetz-subpoenas-witness-in-the-middle-of-a-hearing-for-refusing-to-turn-over-documents/?_ga=1.199266730.529445650.1473539906

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Partisan Texas prosecutors tried to silence the makers of the Planned Parenthood expose videos with bogus indictments for the same tactics all undercover reporters use.  Now that those charges have been rightly dropped, the man behind the videos is speaking out.  And what he has to say includes a prediction about that abortion-promoting organization’s future that its supporters will hate to hear.

http://po.st/7vVw68

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Must-Read Column:  Roger Simon at PJMedia did what few if any of the elite media do: he actually followed Donald Trump on the road and went out into the crowds to ask why they support him.  It turns out that when you actually talk to working class Americans, you discover that, contrary to the beliefs of Hillary Clinton and her fans who can afford $250,000 for the sonic joy of listening to her speak, Trump supporters are not deplorable or irredeemable or un-American.  They’re also not motivated by racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, claustrophobia or any other phobia. 

Shockingly, most Trump supporters are hard-working, well-spoken, well-informed people with enough common sense to separate political hyperbole from reality.  They know as much if not more about the issues as the self-aggrandizing coastal elites do, and they have suffered the effects of the elites' lousy economic, immigration, tax, regulatory and foreign policies firsthand.  Maybe if the people who seek to lead this country would quit treating 90% of its territory as a backward foreign nation they aren’t inclined to visit – or if they’d just read a book on this subject called “Gods, Guns, Grits and Gravy” -- maybe they wouldn’t be so shocked to learn that people in “flyover country” are not knuckle-dragging troglodytes.  Yes, we even understand what you’re saying when you insult us by calling us “troglodytes.”  And we’ll remember it as we’re casting our ballots.    

https://pjmedia.com/diaryofamadvoter/2016/09/14/the-deplorables-are-teaching-trump-how-to-be-president/?singlepage=true

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Even the most Clinton-supportive liberal media outlets are questioning why Hillary's campaign has been so evasive and obviously dishonest in dealing with questions about her health. They're agonizing over why her first instinct was to lie and cover up, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it's her first instinct in virtually every situation.

Blogger John Hinderaker reminds us of a glaring example you might not even have heard about.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/09/hillarys-lsat-lie.php

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Now that the news media are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the DNC, we seem to get all our real news from computer hackers.  And so now we learn that former Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently fed up to the gills with Hillary Clinton and her people trying to blame him for their email scandal or suggest that he did the same thing.  No, having a personal AOL email address that he didn’t use for classified information was not the same as having a private, unsecure email server that you did transmit classified data over.  Some newly-leaked alleged emails reveal how exasperated Powell finally became with the “dumb” (his word), self-serving people who took over his office:

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/13/colin-powell-emails/

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Hillary's Health

September 12, 2016

Because Sunday was the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I made a vow not to post anything partisan or political. The emphasis on that day should be on coming together to remember the victims, honor the heroes and redouble our efforts to insure nothing like it ever happens again.

But it was difficult not to bring up politics when the entire Presidential race may have been blown wide open by mid-morning. Hillary Clinton was already having a terrible week, between the grilling over her email scandals at the commander-in-chief forum and inadvertently revealing the utter contempt with which she views at least a quarter of the voters (when it leaked out that she told her wealthy supporters that half of Trump’s supporters were a “basket of deplorables;” a bunch of irredeemable, not-really-American racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes and Islamophobes. She left no “phobe” unturned.)

But then came the 9/11 remembrance ceremony on Sunday morning. She somehow became “overheated” at an 80-degree outdoor venue and had to leave early, then was caught on video being helped by Secret Service agents into an SUV. Her campaign said she “stumbled,” but from the video, it appears that she nearly collapsed, couldn’t walk and had to practically be carried to the vehicle. One cop on the scene said they “threw her in like she was a side of beef.” She even lost a shoe that was left behind in her entourage’s haste to hightail it out of there.

You would think that when any 68-year-old woman – let alone one who’s a major presidential candidate and who’d recently suffered a concussion -- practically collapsed on the street, she’d be taken straight to a hospital. But no, she was reportedly taken to her daughter Chelsea’s condo, where she emerged 90 minutes or so later, insisting she felt “great” and (disregarding possible contagion) hugging a little girl for a photo op. Her doctor issued a statement saying Hillary had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, and was dehydrated and overheated, but was now already rehydrated and doing much better.

So to sum up: after suffering a hacking cough and learning she had pneumonia, Hillary went straight to a fundraiser, then two days later to a crowded open-air event where she nearly collapsed like a sack of hammers from pneumonia and dehydration and had to be dragged into a SUV that sped to Chelsea’s condo (which I assume must be equipped with IV drips and antibiotics) and emerged all better a mere hour and a half later. We should put Chelsea in charge of Obamacare; she’s obviously a miracle worker.

Despite the “nothing to see here” assurances from her campaign (which sounded suspiciously like Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch: “No, she didn’t collapse! She’s just pinin’ for the fyords!”), suddenly, even liberal pundits, politicians and media outlets are starting to panic. Hillary canceled a West Coast fundraising trip, and if she’s not up to pocketing millions of dollars from gullible Hollywood liberals, she must be really sick. The MSM thought they’d successfully demonized anyone who questioned Hillary’s health as a crazy conspiracy monger, and now they’re forced to admit this is a serious issue.

It doesn’t help that Hillary’s aides have a history of covering up her health crises in the exact same way: on September 11, 2012, they said she just had a “cold” that as the days went by, they admitted was a “severe cold,” then “flu,” then that she fell and had a concussion, then a blood clot on the brain that took months of recuperation and according to her FBI testimony, obliterated all her memories of anything possibly incriminating. I’d say they’ve now lost the right to accuse anyone questioning her health of being a wacky conspiracy theorist. In fact, if anyone suggests she has the Phage, the fictional disease from “Star Trek,” her campaign should be prepared to release her tricorder readings to disprove it.

Meanwhile, rumors are circulating that Democratic insiders are planning secret meetings to forge a back-up plan. They were already nervous about Hillary’s poll slide, then there was the “basket of deplorables” disaster (I chalk that up to foot-in-mouth disease), and now this. Could health issues be their excuse for substituting a more electable candidate at the last minute?

I have a staffer who’s been betting everyone dinners for two years now that Hillary would be the nominee, but scandals would undo her and at the last minute, Joe Biden would step in. She’d nearly given up hope of winning that bet, but now, she’s telling everyone to start saving up because she really loves lobster.

More info, quotes and the fateful video are at this link:

http://hucka.be/cwzvH7

The Commander-In-Chief Forum

September 9, 2016

The general takeaway from the Commander-In-Chief forum was that Trump didn't have detailed national defense plans and that Hillary does have detailed defense plans that unfortunately are proven losers. For instance, there was her vow that she would defeat ISIS but she would never again commit ground troops to Iraq or Syria (news flash: we currently have nearly 5,000 troops in Iraq and 300 Special Forces in Syria.) That was a reminder that she intends to continue Obama’s “strategy” for defeating ISIS, even the suicidal tactic of telling the enemy right up front exactly what we intend to do and when we’ll quit doing it and leave. As Dr. Phil might say, how is that workin’ for us?

Stephen Green at PJMedia.com dug into history to compare Obama’s results in fighting our #1 enemy to those of a previous Democratic President. Here’s what he found:

“It’s been about 32 months since President Obama dismissed ISIS as the ‘jayvee.’ 32 months after Pearl Harbor, most of Italy was in Allied hands, the breakout from Normandy was about to begin, Saipan had been secured by US Marines, and the Japanese Navy had been decisively defeated in the ‘Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.’”

And remember, that was in a multi-front world war, starting from Pearl Harbor, where the US Navy suffered a devastating attack and America’s war machine had to be rebuilt from scratch -- not the modern US military against a handful of scruffy jihadists.

I wonder if FDR would have been as successful in fighting the Axis Powers if he’d used his weekly Fireside Chats to announce how many troops we would be committing to D-Day, and the exact time and location where they would be landing?

Read more here: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/243287/

Friday News Roundup

September 9, 2016

FBI Director James Comey reacted this week to the widespread criticism of his decision to bend the law to let Hillary Clinton off the hook by sending a memo to staffers (many of whom are rumored to be furious at having the FBI’s reputation for unbiased law enforcement trashed). In it, Comey doubled-down on his decision not to recommend indictment for Clinton for mishandling classified information, insisting that it wasn’t even difficult. If he’d instead called it a “no-brainer,” that might at least be defensible.

But this story may not be over yet. The latest release of FBI notes and emails has made it clear that there is another potential, very serious charge lurking out there like the shark from “Jaws.” It’s the same charge that brought down the Nixon White House: obstruction of justice. In this case, the deliberate destruction of evidence (Hillary’s emails) using BleachBit digital deletion software, after it was placed under subpoena and ordered to be preserved.

US Army Reserve Colonel and University of Texas Professor Austin Bay has an article at Observer.com that lays out the ironclad obstruction case step-by-step with a very clear timeline. Take a look and see if you think it would be an easy decision for an FBI Director to ignore all that. Bay concludes by calling on Comey to schedule another press conference to admit he erred in July and to recommend that the DOJ proceed with indictments for three reasons: to reassert that all lawbreakers should be treated equally, to re-establish the FBI’s tarnished reputation, and to provide justice for the four Americans who died in Benghazi. Bay says if Comey refuses to do that, then he should resign.

Sadly, anyone who understands Washington won’t place any hopes or bets on that happening. Obstructing justice used to be a felony. These days, it’s so common, even the Justice Department does it.

http://observer.com/2016/09/dont-let-comey-put-a-criminal-in-the-white-house/

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It’s always fun during election season to see how candidates react when confronted with questions about their negatives that are indisputably true. For instance, if Trump is slammed for not having a detailed plan to deal with some issue or other, he simply says that his plan is to put the best people together to craft a plan, then he tells us how great that plan will be (by the way, it’s always baffled me why pundits put so much importance on a candidate’s detailed “plans” when they know those plans will have to pass Congress, where all the details will be changed anyway). Or when Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson didn’t recognize the Syrian refugee center of Aleppo, he reacted by simply admitting he had a brain glitch. Pundits declared his campaign mortally wounded, but didn’t specify whether that was because he failed to recognize Aleppo or he was just too honest for politics.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton has more skeletons in the closet than the Chicago Morgue. Not to mention all the failures of Obama policies that she’s vowing to continue (ISIS) or even double-down on (Obamacare). And resorting to honesty is never her first instinct. So I’ve noticed that she’s developed a one-size-fits-all response to an attack: turn it around and accuse the accuser of being unpatriotic for even bringing it up. For instance, if Trump criticizes the weakened state of the military under Obama, he’s insulting America’s troops. If he criticizes Obama for not listening to his generals, he’s attacking our heroic generals as weak and ineffective. If he says he wants to reverse Obama's policies and “make America great again” (something Bill Clinton said Hillary would do in a 2008 campaign ad), then he’s badmouthing America by suggesting it’s not great now.

It remains to be seen whether this strategy will work, but it did seem awfully familiar. Then I remembered where I’d seen it before. I think this might be a clip of Hillary’s campaign strategist during his college days:

https://youtu.be/ROxvT8KKdFw?t=1m18s

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Since a lot of people this week are talking about the risks of vote fraud through electronic voting machines, it’s worth noting that a newly-released internal email from George Soros’ laughably-named “Open Society Foundations” shows that they held a meeting two years ago to discuss ways that Obama could bypass Congress and promote online voting, probably the worst idea since texting while driving. Predictably, the Obama Administration later proposed exactly those Soros-approved idea for voting via table computer, dismissing objections that online voting could be tampered with by hackers.

Irony alert: we know about the Soros minions’ avid pursuit of online voting because the email was leaked to Breitbart.com by someone who apparently hacked into their computer system and stole it.

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2016/09/09/leaked-memo-george-soros-foundation-seeking-expand-u-s-online-voting/

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“Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams is also an economics MBA, master hypnotist and longtime student of persuasion techniques. His blog posts on the election campaign have become hugely popular for his unique perspective that emphasizes the candidates' psychological manipulation and persuasion tactics over politics (although they’ve cost him a lot of fans and garnered death threats because he predicted Trump would win in a landslide)

This particular post is a must-read for anyone who wonders why Democrats all suddenly started using the word “dark” when talking about Trump, and how they convinced so many people that he’s a scary, racist bogeyman when nobody who actually knows him has ever seen any evidence of that. It also has some good insights into how Trump’s political tactics mirror his business negotiation tactics from “The Art of the Deal,” and are either totally misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented by the media and his political opponents.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/149983115751/why-trump-doesnt-scare-me

Donald Trump gave a major speech today on his plans for rebuilding the US military, after eight years of Obama stretching it, depleting it and using it as a laboratory for social justice experiments. Here is a link to watch the entire speech:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-watch-live-donald-trump-lays-out-his-1473260499-htmlstory.html

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And if you’re pressed for time, here is a good summation of his points:

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/09/07/trump-unveils-plan-to-boost-military-with-more-troops-weapons.html

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For many Americans, the idea of smug, rich Hollywood liberals freaking out over them supporting Trump isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. They’re tired of being lectured to by celebrities who think that having good looks and some show business talent somehow imparts to them a superior knowledge of government policy. Perhaps the most telling quote in the piece is the Democratic fundraiser’s desperately hopeful claim that “fundraising is a kind of voting. If someone is raising a ton of money, it’s a sign of enthusiasm.”

If someone is raising a ton of money in $25 or $50 increments, that’s a sign of enthusiasm. If someone is shunning working Americans to hold fundraisers that the Hollywood and Wall Street elite fork over $250,000 to attend, that’s not a sign of enthusiasm, it’s a sign that the candidate is for sale to the highest bidder.

http://www.thewrap.com/hollywood-democrats-nervous-as-clinton-trump-polls-tighten-im-freaked-out/

The other day, I poked a little fun at the press with their mindless softball questions for Hillary Clinton by linking to a video of Homer Simpson. Well, I take it all back. Homer would be insulted if I compared his interview skills to the questions asked of Hillary on her plane as cited in this article. Whatever these hard-hitting reporters are being paid, it’s too much “D’oh!” Apparently, they wrote these questions on an orange because a softball just wasn't soft enough.

http://ijr.com/2016/09/689120-media-passing-an-orange-with-message-on-it-to-hillary-shows-theyre-really-asking-her-hard-questions/

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Here’s an example of the rare “Double Gotcha,” where candidates are blindsided with questions that require them to know the names of any people or places on Earth that they might have to deal with, but their critics don't know them, either. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was asked about Aleppo, the Syrian city that’s the center of the refugee crisis, and admitted he didn’t know what Aleppo is. It sparked widespread jokes that Johnson might have been using some of the marijuana that Libertarians want to legalize. But then, in reporting on Johnson’s ignorant, embarrassing, possibly disqualifying faux pas, the New York Times misidentified Aleppo as the de facto capital of ISIS (that’s the city of Raqqa).

I wouldn't feel too bad if I were them. Judging from the current Administration’s adroit handling of Syria, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that whoever is in charge of our Syria policy thinks Aleppo is either a brand of dog food or a forgotten Marx Brother.

http://ijr.com/the-political-edit/2016/09/689591-what-is-the-what-is-aleppo-controversy/

Conservative News Roundup

September 7, 2016

Donald Trump announced that he’s ending his “blacklist” and will once again give media credentials for his rallies and events to hostile outlets such as the Huffington Post, Politico and Buzzfeed. Trump had called their coverage of him “not nice,” “dishonest” and “disgusting,” but he’s letting them back in anyway. His reasoning: “I figure they can’t treat me any worse!”

That’s awfully sporting of him, but with the current political media, for whom “objectivity” isn’t even in their spellcheck dictionary, I wouldn’t bet the farm that they can’t treat him any worse.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3778026/I-figure-t-treat-worse-Trump-ending-media-blacklist-denying-credentials-reporters-favor-publications.html

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On a similar subject, here’s video of another African-American man praising Donald Trump for his seriousness and commitment to “reaching out and being inclusive” to the minority community. Except this was prominent Clinton supporter/Trump denouncer, Jesse Jackson, introducing Trump at a Rainbow PUSH Wall Street Project event in 1999. This bolsters the claim by a longtime entertainment reporter whose job was to dig up dirt on Trump and other celebrities that nobody ever heard any accusations of racism against Trump until the day he announced he was running for President as a Republican.

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/05/flashback-rev-jesse-jackson-praises-trump-reaching-inclusive/

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For many Americans, the idea of smug, rich Hollywood liberals freaking out over them supporting Trump isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. They’re tired of being lectured to by celebrities who think that having good looks and some show business talent somehow imparts to them a superior knowledge of government policy. Perhaps the most telling quote in the piece is the Democratic fundraiser’s desperately hopeful claim that “fundraising is a kind of voting. If someone is raising a ton of money, it’s a sign of enthusiasm.”

If someone is raising a ton of money in $25 or $50 increments, that’s a sign of enthusiasm. If someone is shunning working Americans to hold fundraisers that the Hollywood and Wall Street elite fork over $250,000 to attend, that’s not a sign of enthusiasm, it’s a sign that the candidate is for sale to the highest bidder.

http://www.thewrap.com/hollywood-democrats-nervous-as-clinton-trump-polls-tighten-im-freaked-out/

Tuesday News Roundup

August 23, 2016

Here’s your “Throw up your hands and just give up on society” post of the day. It’s West Virginia’ University’s chart for students, to try to explain the pointless, babbling word salad that is “gender-neutral pronouns.” It looks more like an eye chart. This is why the courts need to step in right away and slap down the Obama Administration’s unconstitutional rewriting of Title IX to redefine “sex” as “whatever gender identity someone wants to claim he/she/they/it/ae/ey/per/ve/xe/zie feel like.”

http://www.weaselzippers.us/290847-west-virginia-university-offers-students-guide-on-using-gender-neutral-pronouns-such-as-ve-ver-and-vis/

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HUCKABEE EXCLUSIVE! I’ve just discovered must-see secret video of a college class teaching students how to use gender neutral pronouns! It’s easier when you set it to music.

https://youtu.be/usQem53fDH8

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Want a perfect illustration of just how far to the left and over the edge of sanity the Democratic Party has moved? Watch this clip of a major national leader declaring that America is a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigrants taking jobs away from Americans, imposing burdens on social services and committing crimes against Americans. That is why this leader talks proudly of doubling deportations of criminal illegal immigrants, beefing up border security, and cracking down on hiring of illegals and banning welfare benefits to them, before he promises to do even more to stop illegal immigration.

Was this another speech by that bigoted, racist, xenophobic, immigrant-hating Donald Trump? Nope. It’s a clip from Bill Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union Address.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/08/in_1995_bill_clinton_channeled_donald_trump.html

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The group Citizens United used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain State Department call logs that show that while working as Hillary’s State Department chief of staff, Cheryl Mills had frequent contact with top Clinton Foundation executives, who would call Mills to discuss State Department business. The logs confirm that donors and insiders enjoyed unique access to the highest levels of government. But once again, Hillary’s defenders are trying to spin away suspicions. They say it’s perfectly understandable and innocent that Mills would be taking calls from VIPs. USA Today even ran an article quoting “experts” as saying that these new revelations show donors had “access,” but they don’t prove that they received any favors in exchange for money.

Um, excuse me, but…isn’t granting big donors access to top State Department contacts a perfect example of a favor in exchange for money?

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/call-logs-show-frequent-contact-between-clinton-foundation-state-department/article/2599929

Saturday News Roundup

August 19, 2016

It’s obvious the media have settled on a narrative to get Hillary Clinton elected, and they can’t deviate from it, no matter how much it is at variance with the truth. Two cherished pillars of that narrative are that the Trump campaign is in disarray and that Trump is a sexist. So when Trump announced a shakeup in his campaign staff (typical for all campaigns, by the way) that included appointing the first female general election campaign manager for a GOP nominee in history, guess what was played up as the big story and what was totally ignored?

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/scott-whitlock/2016/08/17/conway-becomes-first-woman-run-gop-presidential-campaign-nets

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The notes of Hillary’s FBI interview provided to Congress were heavily redacted with heavy, black bars –-- ironically, because of the highly classified nature of the information they contained --- but there’s still a lot to be gleaned from them. One thing we learn is that, when pressed, she apparently told the FBI that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had advised her to use private email.

According to a story in The New York Times, an account of this conversation appears in an upcoming book by journalist and longtime Clinton defender (but I repeat myself) Joe Conason. It supposedly happened when Hillary was a few months into her tenure at State, during a small dinner party hosted by Madeleine Albright and attended by Powell, Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice. According to the book, Powell advised her to use private email for personal communications and State Department email for the classified stuff. The book also says she had made the decision to use private email “months earlier.”

But Powell has released a statement saying he has no recollection of this conversation ever taking place. He did write a memo encouraging the use of a private email account for unclassified material, and he did use one for some official State Department business. But he had done so before the rules were updated and clarified. By the time Hillary took office, it was definitely against the rules to use a private server for State Department business because of “significant security risks.” And Colin Powell never did it.

We learn from this that, certainly, Hillary was looking closely, early on, at how to handle her emails. She was no neophyte when it came to dealing with classified materials, and she was (at least in theory) expected to know and follow the rules. But even now, she points fingers at other people instead of accepting responsibility. It appears that she misrepresented Colin Powell’s advice in an attempt to make it her own little “escape hatch” when testifying before the FBI. If that’s what she did, well, she’s already lied so much that she can easily throw up her hands and say, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/politics/hillary-clinton-told-fbi-colin-powell-advised-her-to-use-private-email.html?_r=0

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This is some very interesting analysis of the Iran nuclear deal. The author is an award-winning associate professor of political science, specializing in foreign policy and Islamic fundamentalism. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, at least read the last few paragraphs. It lays out a clear explanation for why President Obama has left himself no other choice than to keep wishing and hoping that if he turns a blind eye to Iran’s cheating, they won’t build nuclear weapons.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/explaining-the-obama-administration-overlooking-iran%E2%80%99s-cheating-on-the-nuke-deal

It is only Thursday...

August 19, 2016

It’s only Thursday, and already, Donald Trump has done a televised town hall and given two landmark speeches, one on foreign policy and the other on law and order, that could reshape this election if the public actually hears what he had to say.  That, of course, is why the media are desperately trying to keep anyone from hearing him, other than to wrench a line or two out of context (“extreme vetting!”) and run around waving them in alarm like an orangutan with its hair on fire. 

That’s why I urge you either to watch the videos of the speeches online or read the full transcripts.  You’ll discover that in both cases, Trump did a masterful job of detailing the horrific failures of the Obama/Clinton policies, and how they not only have had terrible consequences for America in general, but have been especially devastating for gays, women, African-Americans and other groups that the Democrats claim to care so much about.  

This is a key point because liberals love to ask why Americans would “vote against their own interests” by electing Republicans, taking it for granted that their own high-tax, low-freedom, top-down, zero growth, no-security policies are somehow in everyone’s interests.  For the first time in a long time, the Republican nominee is forcefully making the case against liberalism, and taking to their own voters.  For instance, Trump is asking African-Americans in Milwaukee who are fed up with high crime, bad schools and no jobs to consider whether voting for nothing but Democrats and Socialists for over a century (Milwaukee hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1908) might have something to do with that. 

If you don’t have time to read or watch the full speeches, check out this link to Hillary Clinton’s favorite website, Brietbart.com, where former Reagan and Bush I staffer (and adviser to my 2008 campaign) James Pinkerton picks out some highlights and finds Trump’s speeches to be stunningly Reaganesque.  Liberals like Hillary Clinton point to Reagan as the kind of sunny, positive, “good Republican” they just don’t make anymore.  But when he was around, they attacked him just as vociferously and unfairly as they do Trump, whom they accuse of being dark and negative when he’s just telling the plain truth about them.  For instance, Pinkerton cites this quote:

“Our problems are both acute and chronic, yet all we hear from those in positions of leadership are the same tired proposals for more government tinkering, more meddling and more control–all of which led us to this state in the first place…Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, ‘Well done?’ Can anyone compare the state of our economy when the…Administration took office with where we are today and say, ‘Keep up the good work?’ Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, ‘Let’s have four more years of this?’”

Oh wait, sorry.  That wasn’t Trump.  It was candidate Reagan talking about the Carter Administration at around this same point in the election of 1980, which he went on to win in a 10-point landslide after asking Americans, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” How many Americans could honestly give a different answer to that question today?  

 

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/17/donald-trump-move-two-strongest-speeches-campaign/

And the great Obamacare “sucking sound” continues: Health insurance giant Aetna, which already halted its 2017 Obamacare expansion plans, just announced that it is pulling out of insurance exchanges in 11 of the 15 states where it currently offers policies. Aetna has lost $430 million since the Obamacare exchanges opened. After the law did away with pre-existing condition limits, their customers turned out to be sicker and costlier than expected (wait, who didn’t expect that?) Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said, "Providing affordable, high-quality health care options to consumers is not possible without a balanced risk pool," eerily channeling what many of us have been warning about since even before the Obamacare boondoggle was finagled through Congress. UnitedHealthCare and Humana already announced their exits, and other major insurers are cutting back, adding reduced consumer choice to the skyrocketing costs, loss of your family doctor or preferred policy, ruinous deductibles and co-pays, and other broken promises of Obamacare.

Reminder: Hillary Clinton thinks the only thing wrong with Obamacare is that it’s just not big enough, and if elected, she’s promised to expand it. If she’s elected, let’s hope whatever few insurers remain in the Obamacare exchanges will cover nausea and depression.

For more on this story read this CNN piece here.

My News Roundup

August 17, 2016

Pennsylvania isn’t the only place where Democratic politicians are having legal problems. Just last week, we saw a lot of fawning media coverage of Somali activist Ihlan Omar, who scored a huge upset victory over 22-term Minnesota state legislator Phyllis Khan in the Democratic primary. In that heavily-Democratic district, the win set Omar up as a shoo-in to become the first Somali-American Muslim women elected to office. But now, she’s facing serious fraud allegations that she’s had three marriages with no divorces on record. One marriage was allegedly to her brother, to help him skirt immigration laws and enter the US.

Both the candidate and the party have responded to the story by denying the allegations and attacking the media and threatening to block their access for reporting them. You’d think the media would have learned by now that it takes a whole lot more than allegations of fraud to stop a Democrat from running for office.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/08/15/americas-first-would-be-somali-state-legislator-embroiled-in-potential-marriage-immigration-fraud-scandal/

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In liberals’ never-ending quest to think up new things for the government to stick its nose into, the Obama USDA has proposed new rules that would require stores that accept food stamps to carry a certain number of “healthy” items. That sounds like a good thing (especially to bureaucrats with so little private sector experience, they've never even worked in a convenience store), but here are the unintended consequences: convenience stores and other small neighborhood groceries say they can’t afford to stock a lot of items like kale and lamb that nobody wants and that will just go bad on the shelves (you can lead a horse to water, but you can't even make a horse eat kale). That will leave the stores no choice but to stop accepting food stamps, which will not only put many small grocers out of business, it will make it difficult for people who live in those neighborhoods to access any type of food at all.

On the bright side, if the government’s intention is to prevent obesity, driving thousands of grocery stores out of business with their idiotic micromanagement would certainly help further their goal.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article95794472.html

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New research is proving more and more that the idea that kids don’t need fathers is bunk. Having a father in the home makes a great deal of difference in a child’s life. But it takes more than just being present. A new study of 730 families by a Michigan State University researcher found that in families where the dad has high levels of “parenting stress,” their sons tend to have poor levels of language skills at age three, and both sons and daughters score lower on cognition tests.

So it’s great that today’s fathers are taking a more active role in helping to raise the kids. But if dads let that responsibility get under their skin, it can have a ripple effect. Click the link for more info, and, if you’re one of those dads, some advice on how to cope with stress, for your own sake and that of your kids.

http://po.st/1U0noM

How Venezuela got that way

August 16, 2016

College students who’ve had their noggins filled with the wonders of socialism always have the same reaction when you point to Venezuela, just the latest in its unbroken string of tragic failures: “That doesn’t count! The right people weren't in charge! Socialism could work if truly good people were in charge – like, say, ME!” Of course, that overlooks one of the many fatal flaws of socialism: it puts absolute power in the hands of government, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If the media were doing their job, we’d be seeing daily front-page reports on Venezuela, and how an incredibly blessed, resource-rich democracy has been brought so low that its people have no food and are being forced at gunpoint to work in the fields (forced labor being the inevitable endgame of all socialist regimes). Maybe if liberals learned that the zoo animals are also starving to death, that would alarm them into paying attention. How in the world did Venezuela get so bad so quickly?

Read the article at the link. It not only tells how it happened, but frighteningly, how it could happen here. Don’t think that’s possible because we have the US Constitution to protect us? Well, consider Venezuela’s rapid downward spiral: Government grew too powerful; greedy politicians sold power, replacing capitalism with crony capitalism; the people got fed up and started voting for whoever who promised them more stuff; and the socialist leader exerted even more power, arguing that the constitution was nothing but an outdated “piece of paper” that meant whatever he said. Any of that sound vaguely familiar?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/08/13/why-couldnt-what-happened-in-venezuela-happen-here/?singlepage=true

One of my spiritual mentors and a true giant of the Christian faith, Dr. Tim LaHaye, has passed away at the age of 90. He suffered a stroke just a few days ago and died today. What a life! What a legacy! And what a living example of faithfulness to the end!

Dr. Tim and his dear wife, Dr. Beverly LaHaye, to whom he has been married since 1947, have been the ultimate “power couple” in Christian circles for decades. He is one of the most prolific authors in Christendom, and his books truly helped change the lives of millions. And Bev launched Christian Women of America and grew it into the largest grass-roots activist organization in the nation.

I first personally met the LaHayes back in the late 70’s, but got to know them well in the early 80’s. I kept a stack of books by the LaHayes in my office during my days as a pastor 30 plus years ago, and would often give them to people going through various challenges and make the reading of their books a part of the therapy for spiritual and emotional healing. His "Left Behind” series that he co-authored with Jerry Jenkins, launched a stunning bestselling franchise that touched untold millions with the urgency of Biblical prophecy.

When I started my political pursuits, the LaHayes were among my earliest supporters and encouragers. They remained faithful through the 2016 Presidential race. Loyal friends. Not the kind who see if there is someone getting more attention and who might bring more attention to them—just faithful friends until the end.

There will never be another like Dr. LaHaye. He had a gentle manner about him, but was a dynamic teacher and speaker. He was one of the most intellectually curious people I have known, and he never stopped learning, growing, and advancing. The influence he has had on me personally and professionally is simplly profound and permanent.

I’m deeply saddened by the news of his death, but I’m filled with the joy of knowing that he is with the Lord and experiencing the reality of all that he has helped others to believe and know.

Thank you, Dr. LaHaye—I won’t tell you goodbye. Just goodnight—we’ll see you in the morning!

Tim LaHaye, “Well done, good and faithful servant."
April 27, 1926-July 25, 2016.

In a strange way, Ted Cruz may have done a great deal to unite the Republican Party in his speech at the GOP Convention Wednesday night. By failing to endorse Donald Trump in a speech so shamefully inappropriate that he was booed off the stage, he showed even his supporters that they have dodged a bullet by not nominating him.

He has doubled down on his shameful performance this morning (and was booed again), insisting that this is “not about me” but pulling out all the stops to make it all about him. In his insistence on lecturing delegates, Obama-style, he has given us all a glimpse into Cruz World, and it is not a place we want to be. And Hillary Clinton has no doubt sent him a thank-you email with little smiley-face emojis all over it.

Members of the Texas delegation are so disgusted with him that some have said he couldn’t win re-election in his home state right now. One, Dianne Caron from Tyler, even referenced me: “I think Mike Huckabee made a good point before the convention --- no endorsement, no mic.” Words used to describe Cruz included “spoiled brat,” “self-serving,” “a poor reflection on Texas” and (in an understatement) “not Reaganesque.”

For more of what the Texas delegates had to say, click here.

This post is sponsored by Iris Plans. See their ad below.

There was so much Internet sound and fury over the planned, massive anti-Trump protests at the GOP Convention that Cleveland provided enough barricades and police to hold off an assault by the US Marines. But in reality, the protests have mostly been an unattended fizzle.

Not surprisingly, most Americans who have jobs found better things to do with their time than go to Cleveland in July to make fools of themselves in public. Organizers are baffled by why nobody showed up to join them in denouncing Trump, America and cops and chanting for “revolutionary communism.” Those who did show up have mostly provided moments of unintentional humor, like the man who was interviewed by PJ Media, ranting that Trump was a dictator who would turn America into a “banana republic,” blissfully unaware of the irony of saying that while wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Then there was the downright sad moment, when, on the very night that bereaved parents spoke of their children murdered by illegal alien felons that the Obama Administration refused to deport, the C-SPAN camera cut to a pathetic-looking Code Pink protester, sitting all alone in the nosebleed seats with a banner reading, “Welcome, Refugees.”

It’s probably too much to hope that the low protester turnout will serve as a lesson to the media to stop confusing Twitter mobs and Facebook rants with actual groundswells of public support. The tail does not wag the dog, and the loudest voices don’t necessarily represent the most people. Remember, the Internet is a tool for magnifying malcontents. It’s like sending a cricket chirp through Metallica’s P.A. system. It might make a terrifyingly loud noise, but it’s still just a cricket.

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A Fantasy Washington...

July 18, 2016

This post is sponsored by Iris Plans.  

As ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks continue to escalate, it’s getting harder and harder for hapless“progressives” to keep blaming them on Republicans, Christians, the NRA and trucks. So they’ve resorted to their last mental trick for denying reality: banning the words that accurately describe it. The left and their media sycophants no longer have to deal with terrorist attacks because they’ve declared the word “terrorist” to be biased and banned it. It will now be referenced in hushed tones only as “the T-word,” for purposes of labeling anyone who actually utters it a bigot who is biased against…what, terrorists?

I have an idea for a project that would be perfect for a developer like Donald Trump: he could cut a deal with the Disney Corporation to build a fantasy replica of Washington, DC. It would look like the real Washington, except with a virtual reality Congress, White House and Supreme Court that were all safety-tested so that no matter how immature the participants were, they couldn’t harm themselves or others. Instead of letting them use US dollars, they could be given billions of Disney dollars, which they couldn’t destroy the value of. And instead of having to deal with the bloody reality of radical Islamic terrorism, they could just join hands, sing “It’s A Small World” over and over and over, and declare the "Problem-That-Must-Not-Be-Named" solved.

That way, when leftists ask voters to “send us to Washington,” we can just send them there, where they can be happy reveling in a fantasy of power while we restock the real Washington with serious, clear-eyed representatives of the people who don't want to lived in Fantasyland, aren't afraid to use accurate words, and are ready to start repairing the damage that Washington's eight-year vacation from reality has inflicted onto America and the world.

A Fantasy Washington where we can send all the “progressives”…at last, a “shovel-ready project” worth the expense!

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Twenty Years Ago Today

July 15, 2016

This post was sponsored by Iris Plans.

The opening line of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was this: “It was 20 years ago today….”

Well, exactly 20 years today, July 15, 1996, I became the 44th Governor of Arkansas under some of the most bizarre circumstances in the history of the nation. My predecessor, convicted weeks earlier in a federal trial, had set the date of July 15 for his resignation. It was odd that he would cling to power for another 7 weeks after the verdict, and in most circumstances, the press and the public would have demanded that he step down immediately since he was constitutionally ineligible to serve once convicted. But this WAS Arkansas, after all, and things done in the land of the Clintonistas didn’t have to follow the rules. There was no point in my trying to challenge the decision. The legislature was 90% Democrat and would have never pushed for THEIR governor to leave to make room for that interloper Republican. And the press certainly could be expected to be objective. They were reliably liberal and protective of whatever the the ruling class desired. Could a lawsuit have been filed to force the issue? Seriously? At that time, all judicial elections were partisan and almost 100% of the judges in the state were Democrats.

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The 7 weeks allowed the outgoing governor the ability to spend the remaining budget from the fiscal year that ended on July 1, and the ability to spend most of the next fiscal year’s budget in the first two weeks of the new budget year. And since about half of the state’s 1200 plus appointed positions to boards, agencies, and commissions came up for appointment on July 1, this allowed a convicted felon to appoint over 700 people whose terms would range from 1 to 10 years. Hundreds of millions were spent, I was saddled with appointments that were of the old establishment Democrat “good ol’ boy” crowd, and virtually no one said a word.

On the day of what was to be my swearing in, chaos broke loose. Although the previous Governor’s staff had mostly resigned, taken other jobs, and in many cases sold homes to relocate, and though many of my incoming staff had left their jobs, sold their homes, and moved to Little Rock to begin the transition, he called me at exactly 5 minutes before the swearing in to say he had changed his mind and wasn’t going to resign after all. It was as if the Capitol exploded. Thousands of Republicans were on hand to witness the first Republican governor in 26 years and only the 3rd since Reconstruction. The reneging of the promised resignation sent shock waves throughout the state and even Democrats in the legislature were outraged.

For the next 5 hours, two men claimed to be Governor. I called the legislative leaders to my office and told them that I planned to give the outgoing Governor an ultimatum—either resign or we would launch impeachment proceedings the following morning. It was the most surreal experience and created a Constitutional crisis. Lawyers, Supreme Court Justices, the Attorney General, and legislators all tried to consider the options. That afternoon, the Democrat Attorney General followed by the legislative leaders publicly stood with me. And late that afternoon, the outgoing Governor finally declared he would resign effective immediately when even his closest friends urged him to do so.

That was how my 10 1/2 years as Governor began. With a crisis of historic proportion. While many felt it was a horrible way for me to have to start my tenure as Governor, I look back and see it as a blessing. The sentiment dramatically and suddenly shifted from resentment of “this Republican” becoming Governor to people coming to my support and being able to see whether I had the leadership skills to handle a crisis and navigate through the unknown. It was a defining moment for me, the political structure of the state, and the future.

As the song says, “It was 20 years ago today….”

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