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Tuesday’s virtual Democratic convention was set to focus on how Trump has totally messed up the brilliantly successful foreign policies crafted by Democrats like Hillary “Benghazi” Clinton and John “Logan Act” Kerry. Before you listen to them try to convince you that standing up to China, crushing ISIS, defending Israel, making our allies pay more for their own defense, dealing directly with North Korea's threats, renegotiating trade deals in America’s favor, arming Ukraine against Russia, cutting off funding for Iran’s terrorism and nuclear ambitions, and crafting a landmark Middle East peace agreement are all horrible blunders by the Bad Orange Man, take a look at this chart.

It tracks the death toll and the amount of territory controlled by ISIS between 2013 and 2018. Note the trends under Obama and under Trump. It’s called “The Rise and Fall of ISIS,” so you can sort of guess the trends. Of course, it doesn’t include all the people tortured, wounded, disabled, enslaved and raped by terrorism’s “J.V. team,” as Obama famously called them. Those numbers are so large, I don’t know if they’ve ever been tabulated, but they would take a much bigger chart.

To sum up: No, I don’t want to return to the “good ol’ days” of Democrat-run foreign policy, thanks. I believe the blundering amateur is doing a far better job than the striped-pants diplomatic “professionals.”

This “mailbox” conspiracy theory is getting so crazy, and so many people actually believe the lies in the media, that we’re going to talk about it again today. It’s so ridiculous that Tucker Carlson, on Monday night, introduced his segment on it by saying, “Like cows taken by UFOs, or crop circles, mailboxes are disappearing mysteriously across this country. This is a big story, it may be more serious even than ‘Russia collusion,’ says Nancy Pelosi. No mailbox is safe tonight.”

It’s ridiculous, but extremely serious at the same time because, tragically, a lot of people do swallow it, and many in the media, major media and social media combined, are working overtime to make SURE those people and all their friends believe it. Facebook and Twitter are fine with this garbage. So, what is this insane story? It’s that the President of the United States is actually working to prevent the mail from delivering completed ballots by plotting to have official U.S. mailboxes in “blue” areas STOLEN.

During a “virtual” fundraiser from his basement on Friday, Joe Biden said that “they’re going around, literally, with tractor-trailers, picking up mailboxes! You ought to go online and check out what they’re doing in Oregon! I mean, it’s bizarre.”

It’s bizarre, all right. The whole made-up story. It’s been thoroughly debunked; in fact, we pretty much tore it to shreds in yesterday’s edition, so I don’t think we need go through the whole thing again.

The Post Office moves mailboxes all the time. As Tucker reported, the USPS inspector general reported in 2017 that the postal service had removed 14,000 mailboxes over the preceding 5 years (when Obama was President).

Last week, Trump didn’t give Democrats the $3.5 billion they wanted for the USPS to help process mail-in voting; in fact, that’s why the next “stimulus” bill is on hold. Democrats are furious; they crave universal mail-in voting, unlike sane and honest people who see the potential for rampant fraud and seismic mistakes. We’ve showed you numerous examples of huge voter fraud, such as one in Nevada that involved 200,000 mail-in votes.

Tucker wondered the same thing we did: in a “blue” state like Oregon, which Biden is going to win anyway, how does Trump gain by going around pulling up mailboxes there? But this doesn’t have to make any sense; logic is so old-school.

So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is actually bringing Congress back from summer vacation to deal with this fake emergency, saying the President is trying to “sabotage the election by manipulating the postal service.” She also tried to scare the elderly by claiming they may not get their Social Security checks in the mail. (Hasn’t she ever heard of Direct Deposit? That’s how it’s been done since 2013.)

A crowd of angry demonstrators got so worked up, they showed up at the Postmaster General’s HOUSE. And now, if (when!) Trump wins, many people will be pre-set to believe that he cheated to get re-elected --- by stealing mailboxes.

Yes, Trump is against widespread mail-in voting. That’s because he’s trying to SAVE the integrity of elections. To illustrate, let’s look at why, even under ideal circumstances (which we’ll never have), mail-in voting is just a bad idea.

"We already have absentee voting,” you might be thinking, “and that’s by mail. So why can’t we all just mail in our votes?” In case you don’t know (or have friends who could use a simple explanation), absentee voting and mail-in voting are very different. In mail-in voting, ballots are just mailed out to voters on the rolls, to whatever address they have for you, which means you may not even GET your ballot. Somebody else may get it and fill it out. Maybe they fill it out for someone who’s died. (Makes you wonder why the Democrats are so all-fired enthusiastic about it. Or maybe not.) With absentee voting, you apply for the ballot and it’s sent to you, registered to YOU. That is YOUR VOTE. Voting absentee is kind of like using registered mail as compared to just regular mail, which may or may not get to you and, even if it does and you reply, may not get to where it needs to go.

Now, which way of voting is more secure? Let’s say you won the Powerball Lottery and were going to receive $100 million (well, $60 million after taxes, ha). How would you claim your winnings? Would you just sign your ticket, put it in an envelope, mail it and cross your fingers? Or would you send it registered mail? Given just those two choices, I’d certainly opt for registered mail!

On the other hand, if at all possible, I’d go IN PERSON to deliver that ticket, show I.D. and claim my winnings (even if I had to wear a mask, keep my distance and use hand sanitizer). Likewise, going in person to cast your vote is still the best choice of all. It’s time to think of your vote as THAT valuable.

Bottom line: 1) Good gracious, Trump is not taking the mailboxes. 2) Mail-in voting BAD; absentee voting BETTER; in-person voting BEST.

So, if someone spews propaganda for two hours and nobody hears it, did they make a sound?

Last night, the Democrats officially kicked off their “virtual convention,” and the results were…underwhelming. I don’t think that’s a partisan reaction. If you’re a true masochist, here’s the entire thing that you can watch on YouTube (incidentally, it was a bad idea to allow people to post comments):

That live stream went on for over two hours. Michelle Obama alone talked for over 18 minutes. But even the Party’s lapdog media at NBC could only scrape up 5-1/2 minutes of “highlights.” (It was a bad idea to allow comments on this video, too.)

And if you want the most entertaining recap of the evening, go to PJ Media’s live-blog, scroll all the way to the bottom, and read back up toward the top.

Stephen Green of PJ Media nailed the problem, writing, “What the Dems are selling requires exuberant crowds of people who aren't thinking too clearly about the longterm. That's a very difficult sell to make when staring into a webcam, sitting in front of a green screen.” There’s also only so much entertainment value you can inject when your Hollywood leftist celebrities are beaming in to lecture us on our privilege from their $20 million gated mansions. Green also described it aptly as the "'Star Wars' Prequels of conventions: Badly-directed big-name actors shoved in front of green screens to recite horrible lines they aren't invested in at all."

Steve Guest caught a hilarious clip that perfectly summed up the audience reaction: CNN cut to a family representing “viewers at home,” and they all looked as if they were about to doze off and tumble off the couch until they obviously got an off-screen cue and snapped awake and started clapping.

Granted, it was always going to be hard to rev up the base when everyone was literally phoning it in (note to “Beto” O’Rourke: that’s what “literally” means. Trump is not “literally” tearing apart the fabric of America, unless he’s going around ripping the pockets off of everyone’s shirts.) I doubt that the GOP Convention will be as exciting as it normally would be, either, although I imagine Donald Trump will muster a lot more showmanship than this stink burger. Our resident pop culture historian Pat Reeder said it reminded him of midcentury movie director Sam Woods, who told his actors before every take, “Go out there and sell ‘em a load of clams.” He said he could not only see the intense sales effort but practically smell the clams through his computer monitor. He also wondered who would actually watch this, noting that he is paid to watch it, then adding, “But not enough.”

I wonder how many people did watch it, considering the platforms showing it were so split up. Bryan Preston, one of bloggers for PJ Media, noticed that 1250 people were viewing it on the game stream platform Twitch, while “a stream of a guy playing (the three-year-old game) Horizon Zero Dawn has more than 23,000 viewers.”

Some of the lowlights for me, in no particular order: At least they did start off by playing the National Anthem, but they had to tell viewers that they may stand or kneel, whichever is their preference… They also had a prayer, which is odd considering their long-running war on prayers at all other public gatherings, even to the point of booing an attempt to reinsert God’s name into their platform at the 2012 convention…Paying lip service to Black Lives Matter and defending all those “peaceful protesters” who are burning down Democrat-run cities, but showing no respect to the police who are being killed and injured when they try to stop the riots (then again, Biden learned how it goes over with the far-left wing when he says anything even mildly complimentary about police:

…Repeating with great passion several long-debunked lies, like claiming that Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax”…And all the crazy conspiracy nuttery about how Trump is “dismantling” the Post Office (nobody ever complained about the Post Office before Trump was elected, and he’s obviously responsible for the 12,000+ mailboxes that were removed in the last five years of the Obama Administration)…

Here are a few moments worthy of more detail…

* Claiming that Joe Biden knows how to handle a pandemic because we all didn’t die of Ebola: Ebola was nothing like the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus. It was deadlier but much less contagious. H1N1 (swine flu), which hit during Obama’s term, was contagious, but not nearly as deadly. Good thing, since even one of Biden’s top health advisors admitted that Obama's response was so lacking that it was only by sheer luck that millions of Americans didn’t die. You know, like they predicted would happen under Trump, and when it didn’t, they blamed him for every death anyway.

We also know how Joe would have handled this pandemic, since he attacked Trump as a xenophobe after he shut off travel from China and Europe early on. He also blames Trump for the economic damage caused by the lockdowns, yet he and other Democrats think we should have locked down harder and sooner and stayed locked down longer. So judging by his own words, if Joe had been in charge, we would have had a lot more cases a lot sooner, and the economy would have suffered more and longer. If I’m wrong, then tell me what he would have done differently that would have made things better…Is that crickets I hear?

* Bringing in New York Gov. Mario Cuomo to talk about the coronavirus (which he called – and I am not making this up – the “European virus”) was not good strategery. Maybe they’re still living a few months in the past, when Cuomo’s handling of the virus was being hailed by the media as brilliant, back before people realized what actually happened. Another big lie told last night was that America has the highest per capita COVID-19 death rate in the world. But if New York State were a separate country, it would be #1 by a mile (1688 per million, nearly twice the per capita death rate as #2 Belgium.)

The only possible worse choice during the time of the coronavirus would have been the vastly unpopular and irrationally dictatorial Michigan Governor, Gretchen Whitmer…Oh, wait, she was a speaker. She claimed that “science” will drive Biden’s fight against the coronavirus. You know, like science tells us that the virus spreads in churches, but not at protest rallies. And it only spreads at bars if they serve food less substantial than sandwiches. Science!!

* Presenting John Kasich as an example of a Republican who opposes Trump is like trying to convince us that someone is a bad guy because the bitter former co-worker he beat out for the top job says so. Bonus: Here’s Kasich in 2012 telling us that Biden is a big liar.

* My writers said of Michelle Obama’s speech that it was infuriating for its dishonesty, but they had to give whoever wrote it props for persuasive ability. They found it to be the best-crafted pack of lies, distortions, historical revisionism, and scaremongering of the entire evening, and that’s not meant as faint praise just because all the rest were so clumsy and obvious. Making the theme “going high” while repeatedly going low was quite ingenious speechcraft. However, they did notice that while she mentioned Joe Biden by name 14 times, two words never crossed her lips: “Kamala Harris.”

Of course, the mainstream media figures are in full-out worship mode. Rachel Maddow declared that at MSNBC, once Michelle started talking, “none of us breathed for 18 minutes." That would explain the brain death.

You know a political convention isn’t a hit when the most talked-about and memed moment was the astonishingly large wall of fireplace logs behind Bernie Sanders, which drew far more interest than his speech (and was less wooden). People were asking if it was fair that one man should have so much firewood? Shouldn’t it be redistributed to people who aren’t privileged to have so much firewood?!

Personally, my theory is that he’s hoarding firewood. He knows that if these people actually get elected, that will be the only fuel available to heat your house.

Update: It's been revealed that the reason Michelle Obama didn't mention Kamala Harris in her speech is that it was recorded before Biden picked Harris as his running mate. Does anyone else wonder if she would have endorsed Joe so heartily if she'd known it wasn't going to be her?

One step forward, two steps back. In other words, Hillary skates again.

Just when we start to see progress on the Durham investigation, with FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleading guilty to falsifying a document about Carter Page (though he still ludicrously insists he didn’t “intend” to mislead), we learn that three judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals have unanimously reversed a lower court decision that Hillary Clinton would have to sit for a deposition over her use of a private email server for government work while she was Secretary of State.

Judicial Watch, as part of a FOIA lawsuit that dates from 2014 (!), had requested depositions from both Hillary and her then-attorney Cheryl Mills over the emails, and this request had been granted by Washington D.C. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth. The suit was initiated when Judicial Watch was trying to look into what happened during the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, but expanded when they discovered in that investigation that then-Secretary of State Clinton was using her own private email server at that time. Surprise! In fact, if it hadn't been for that investigation, we might never have learned about her private server.

As it was, the questioning of Hillary would have been limited in scope, but now it won’t be happening at all. The decision didn’t change the lower court’s ruling on Mills, however.

The three-judge panel was made up of two Obama appointees and one appointed by George W. Bush. Judge Robert Wilkins (an Obama pick) wrote, “The mere suspicion of bad faith on the part of the government cannot be used as a dragnet to authorize voluminous discovery that is irrelevant to the remaining issues in a case.” Make of that what you will, but be sure and compare it to other situations, such as the use of a “dragnet” for the past four years to try to get Trump on something, anything, long after the original issue in the “Trump/Russia” investigation had been resolved.

Wilkins also said that Clinton shouldn’t have to sit for a deposition because she had already provided written answers in a separate case. At that time, she wrote that the reason she had used a private server was “for convenience.” Ah, well, that’s good enough for me! Why doesn't everyone in government just use their own servers? It would be so much easier.

As THE EPOCH TIMES reports, “Wilkins further noted that Congress, the FBI, and the State Department have also investigated Clinton’s email situation.” Ah, yes, we all know how thoroughly James Comey’s FBI investigated Hillary during her “Mid-Year Exam.” The State Department covered for their former Secretary; they said that even though they'd found nearly 600 security violations (!), they couldn’t find “persuasive evidence” of “systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” As for Congress, that ship sailed in 2018; try getting Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee (or any other Democrat-led congressional committee) to do anything about Hillary Clinton’s emails and her blatant obstruction of justice and see how far you get.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said he is "disappointed" and called the decision “political.” He said it’s “contrary to longstanding precedent and undermines the Freedom of Information Act.” Indeed.

So it looks as though just because Hillary gave some lame written answers in another case, she doesn’t ever have to sit for questioning about her email server, not at all. And even though the court's decision didn’t include Cheryl Mills, whom they say has “other ways to appeal her deposition that were not available to Clinton,” my guess is that they’re referring to Mills’ ability to cite attorney-client privilege, which she will, of course, do. Gosh, Hillary, it’s so conveeeeenient to have an aide who is also your attorney (or at least was at the time) and can’t be questioned about anything you communicated to her.

The new Franklin Templeton–Gallup Economics of Recovery Study found that many Americans are shockingly misinformed about the actual dangers of the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus. While it’s certainly a serious and potentially deadly disease that we should all take reasonable precautions to avoid, most people believe it’s much more deadly than it really is, and to the wrong people.

Here are the three main findings, direct from the report:

1. "On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.

2. Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.

3. Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger by a factor of 50; and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%)."

As the study points out, we’ve known since this started six months ago that by far the greatest danger is to older people and those with comorbidities like obesity or diabetes. So what’s to blame for this stunningly high level of incorrect beliefs? Partly, it’s just paranoia over our own health, but the two most common factors among those who believe false information are…brace yourselves for a shock…political partisanship (i.e., identifying as a Democrat) and getting your information from social media. I know, you could knock me over with a feather!

If you are a Democrat who gets your information mostly from other Democrats on social media, then COVID-19 may be terrifying you -- but it's probably not your biggest problem. To see some of the many ways in which believing this false information is hurting people personally and the nation in general, check out the rest of the study at the link.

California Blackouts

August 19, 2020

Instapundit gives us a roundup of news and background on the state officials' warning in California that rolling blackouts could cut power to as many as 3.3 million homes.

This is the worst possible time, since many people are still working out of their houses and can’t return to an office with back-up generators, so businesses will not only be locked down, but shut down completely. A Reuters story on this blames the power shortage on an intense heatwave.

They’d like us to think that “climate change” is the reason, but much of Southern California was reclaimed from the desert and has always been hot in the summer (note that the last time blackouts were this bad was 19 years ago.) An intelligent state government would have taken into account the warm climate and the rising population and made plans to provide enough energy for everyone’s future needs.

Unfortunately, California hasn’t had an intelligent state government for decades. Instead, it’s had a one-party, leftist Utopian government with no regard for future consequences of their actions. They listened to radical environmentalists who considered it a victory to impose poorly thought-out eco-policies that made wildfires bigger and harder to put out and resulted in severe shortages of water and electricity. They celebrated when they shut down a power plant or blocked a new one, but did nothing to make up for the loss of energy, other than hoping that it would be magically offset by sunshine, windmills, rainbows and unicorn flatulence. These are the same “progressives” who inherited the Golden State and, even before COVID-19, managed to regress it to the Dark Ages of feudalism, homelessness, lawlessness, dangerous unsanitary conditions and ancient diseases like typhus. Sweltering in the dark with no electricity just seems like the next logical step in their long game plan to dismantle Western Civilization.

As the linked post points out, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom led the crusade against California’s last nuclear power plant, the cleanest and most effective form of non-CO2-producing energy. Now, Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling for an investigation into why the state is facing massive power blackouts. Might I suggest that he start by looking into the nearest mirror?

At least he’s finally admitting that “the transition away from fossil fuels has left California with a gap in the reliability of its energy system” and the state must reexamine its reliance on solar power and how that fits into its broader energy portfolio. Gee, who could have predicted that doing away with the only reliable sources of energy and replacing them with sources that couldn’t possibly meet the demand might result in shortages?

They say that trends start in California and spread east all across America. Let’s all hope and pray that’s not true! Because Californians are about to get a nasty preview of what America will be like if Joe Biden is elected, shuts down the fossil fuel industry and passes the “Green New Deal.”

Do you wonder how a bunch of young Americans who not that long ago were bright-eyed children eager to learn have become a mob of angry, violent leftist radicals who hate their own nation, history and culture? They were taught to be that way in our schools when parents weren’t paying attention. Here’s an article by a former schoolteacher who explains precisely how it happens:

You can add this anti-American indoctrination to a growing list of reasons why many parents are coming up with creative alternatives to putting their kids back in public school -- and the teachers’ unions, with their threats of strikes and ridiculous political demands that have nothing to do with virus safety are just accelerating that process. It's no wonder that some teachers are reportedly worried about giving online classes for fear parents will listen in and discover what their kids are being told.

At this link, the National Review takes a look at some of the proliferating alternatives to public school, from “hybrid homeschooling” to “pandemic pods.”

And here’s another chilling incentive for parents: a 2015 survey by the Nehemiah Institute found that 90 percent of church-going Christian teens who attended public schools abandoned their faith to embrace a secular worldview. That’s no surprise when you read what the former teacher said about how he was encouraged to read kids stories from all different cultures around the world, until he tried to read them a story from the Bible and was shut down immediately.

Perhaps the best piece of advice in this article is that “every church should start a school.”