The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Apoplectic

Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are really, really good at just one thing—when faced with charges of dishonesty, corruption or malpractice, they can quickly create a narrative to first deflects blame, then obfuscates, and finally re-directs blame away from their candidate toward those who are trying to uncover the truth. In addition, the Democrats, unlike the GOP, maintain party discipline. There have been no prominent Democrats, not one, who have questioned Clinton's honesty or lack of ethics during the latest reprise of the Clinton email scandal.

The current narrative goes like this:
  • Comey sent his letter only to GOP senators (caught in this outright lie, the Dems and Hillary have walked this back)
  • James Comey and the FBI are now "partisan arm" of the GOP (although that didn't seem to be the case in July)
  • The FBI's actions are "unprecedented" (ahh, unprecedented ... and what about Hillary Clinton's unprecedented and criminal use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State?)
  • Comey has "appeased" the GOP (by keeping his word to re-open the investigation should new email be found)
  • Comey made a "mistake" by informing Congress that new emails were found (okay, I suppose it would have been better to hide the information so the public be kept in the dark)
  • Comey may have "broken the law" by announcing the reopening of the case (that's particularly hypocritical, given Hillary's less than savory activities)
  • Comey's action is "threatening Democracy" (dishonesty and corruption by the future President of the United States is the real threat to democracy)
It's the last bullet point that is comical. Andrew McCarthy comments:
How rich of Hillary Clinton to complain now that FBI director James Comey is threatening the democratic process by commenting publicly about a criminal investigation on the eve of an election.

Put aside that Comey did not say a single thing last week that implicates Clinton in a crime. The biggest coup for Clinton in the waning months of the campaign has been Comey’s decision not to prosecute her — a decision outside the responsibilities of the FBI director and publicly announced in a manner that contradicts law-enforcement protocols. There has been nothing more irregular, nothing that put law enforcement more in the service of politics, than that announcement. Yet, far from condemning it, Mrs. Clinton has worn it like a badge of honor since July. Indeed, she has contorted it into a wholesale exoneration, which it most certainly was not.

Just to remind those whose memories seem so conveniently to fail, Comey is the FBI director, not a Justice Department prosecutor, much less the attorney general. The FBI is not supposed to exercise prosecutorial discretion. The FBI is not supposed to decide whether the subject of a criminal investigation gets indicted. The FBI, moreover, is not obligated to make recommendations about prosecution at all; its recommendations, if it chooses to make them, are not binding on the Justice Department; and when it does make recommendations, it does so behind closed doors, not on the public record.

Yet, in the Clinton e-mails investigation, it was Comey who made the decision not to indict Clinton. Comey, furthermore, made the decision in the form of a public recommendation. In effect, it became The Decision because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had disgraced herself by furtively meeting with Mrs. Clinton’s husband a few days before Comey announced his recommendation. Comey, therefore, gave Mrs. Clinton a twofer: an unheard-of public proclamation that she should not be indicted by the head of the investigative agency; and a means of taking Lynch off the hook, which allowed the decision against prosecution to be portrayed as a careful weighing of evidence rather than a corrupt deal cooked up in the back of a plane parked on a remote tarmac.

Now, suddenly, Mrs. Clinton is worried about law-enforcement interference in politics. And her voice is joined by such allies as Jamie Gorelick (President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general) and Larry Thompson (Comey’s predecessor as President George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general and an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump). Like Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Gorelick and Mr. Thompson were delighted by Director Comey as long as his departures from orthodoxy were helping Clinton’s candidacy.
With the help of their trained hamsters in the media, the Clinton campaign had brilliantly redirected attention away from their dishonest, corrupt and incompetent candidate and focused it on Donald Trump's travails. The reason the Dems and Clinton are apoplectic is because this recent incident reminded the voting public of all the reasons why they shouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE:
---------------------

There's also this historical irony discussed by Roger Kimball:
It was Hillary Clinton in 1992 denouncing President George H.W. Bush after special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh issued an indictment the weekend before the election [emphasis mine] against former Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-Contra case.

As Paul Mirengoff notes at the Powerline blog, "The Clintons seized on the new indictment, howling about a 'culture of corruption' that supposedly pervaded the administration." We all know what happened then: "Bush’s poll numbers declined and Bill Clinton won the election." Mirengoff is right: we should "keep this history in mind during the coming days when you hear Democratic hacks talking about how awful it is for law enforcement officials and/or prosecutors to 'interfere' in the presidential election process."
So ... from Hillary's pont of view, it's okay when an arm of the federal government acts against the interests in a GOP presidential candidate late in the game, but it's not okay when the same thing happens to her. Riiight.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Disgusting

I spoke with a friend who has never voted Republican in his lifetime (he's over 70 years old). He is a true Blue Democrat who has already voted for Hillary Clinton in early voting, truly hates Donald Trump, and thinks that all government problems are caused by the "obstructionist" GOP. And yet, after James Comey's October surprise, he's now convinced that HRC is "corrupt" and that the entire affair is "disgusting." That assessment is accurate.

Over the past 36 hours, the Clinton Machine has gone into a full defensive posture, using the now well-known S.O.P. that they always use: (1) lie—Huma indicates she has "no idea" how those emails made it onto Anthony Weiner's hand-me-down (my assumption) laptop computer; (2) play the victim—Comey's actions are "unprecedented and unfair;" (3) cynically suggest that all information should be public—knowing full well that is unlikely to happen, and (4) get surrogates to suggest that Comey is a partisan—it's all simply an attack by the GOP.

Michael Goodwin discusses the Clintons and scandal—something that has dogged them for 30 years—when he writes:
They can’t help themselves. They are corrupt and corrupters, the ­Typhoid Mary of politics.

Whether by nature or nurture, they are programmed to ruin, Friends, allies, institutions — all are stained by their touch.

And always, the Clintons blame somebody else. Now it’s FBI Director James Comey’s turn to embody their all-purpose bogeyman, the vast right-wing conspiracy. Somebody, sometimes everybody, is out to get them, unfairly of course ...

Still, Clinton is understandably panicked because the timing of Comey’s announcement could cost her the election. Her demand that he release everything immediately is also understandable, even as she knows it is impossible for him to release potential evidence before it is examined.
The voters of the United States are about to elect a woman who is criminally dishonest and corrupt. Some justify their incredibly bad decision to vote for Hillary by suggesting that all politicians are dishonest and corrupt. Others suggest that Donald Trump is the devil. Still others argue that she's the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Therefore, they're left with no other choice.

But there is always a choice.

Hillary Clinton is a criminal. Her actions over the past 15 years indicate a pattern of corruption that has enriched her and her husband, provided lucrative contracts only to those who have "donated" to her sham charity, and endangered the security of our country in order to keep her dealings secret. Even worse, her corruption opens her up to blackmail by very bad international actors when president—her policy decisions may very well be driven by a need to keep her 33,000 deleted (but hacked) emails secret.

In their heart of hearts, all but the most delusional Democrats know this, and like my Democrat friend, they secretly feel that their candidate is "corrupt" and that the entire affair is "disgusting."

But what's really "disgusting" is that anyone could vote for a presidential candidate who under active criminal investigation by the FBI.


UPDATE:
----------------

The ever-entertaining Mark Steyn provides us with this gem:
Hillary has spent the last year successfully avoiding the snares of her husband's sexual pathologies, only to step right into her closest confidante's husband's sexual pathologies.

There is a certain symmetry about all this.
Indeed. And most humans love symmetry.

Friday, October 28, 2016

Eleven Days to Go

Allow me to speculate. Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin communicating hourly via email. The topics involved everything from the inner workings of the State Department, to The Clinton Foundation, to political manipulation of the State Department, to the Teneo consulting firm (for whom Abedin worked while employed at State), to fat cat donors from foreign governments, to anybody else who came within the purview of the Clintons. It's very likely that Huma Abedin used a notebook computer for these communications.

At some later time, Aberdeen decided to give the notebook computer to her husband, Anthony Weiner as a hand-me-down, a practice not uncommon between spouses—in fact, I've done it a number of times myself. Prior to doing this, Abedin did what what was prudent—she deleted all personal, private, and in her case, Clinton related emails and files.

She didn't use a sophisticated system like BleachBit, but rather simply deleted those emails and files, thinking they were gone for good. She didn't realize that a "delete" simply modifies the disk directory; it doesn't actually delete the content that continues to live on the disk drive.

When Anthony Weiner was placed under FBI investigation for his sexting scandal, the FBI seized his computers including Huma Abedin's hand-me-down. It's unlikely that the FBI realized the computer was originally Abedin's, until they did a forensic analysis on the hard drive.

The forensic analysis turned up thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton had illegally deleted from her server. It's probable that a significant number of these emails are incriminating on a variety of levels. Some may have contained secret or top-secret communications as attachments. Others may have described unsavory practices between the State Department and The Clinton Foundation, and still others may have provided hard evidence of Pay-for-Play at the State Department. Who knows?

When this new find and information was presented to FBI director, James Comey, he had no choice but to make a difficult political decision and open up the botched FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton once again. It was a political bombshell.

Hillary Clinton and her supporters are now crying foul, suggesting that the introduction of this so late in the political campaign is "unfair" and "partisan." However, Hillary has no one to blame but herself. The Clintonistas narrative will be that Comey should have waited until after the election. That's like saying that if Hillary Clinton shot Bill Clinton next Wednesday after finding him in bed with a nubile 25-year old, the police should suppress that information until after the election because it might reflect badly on Hillary. Utter nonsense!

For those of us who believe that Hillary Clinton is dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent, it's difficult not to take some satisfaction in all of this. It's highly unlikely that any adjudication will occur before election day. However, the atmospherics are awful, and it could very well be a game changer in this crazy election.

The juxtaposition of Hillary Clinton's lost emails and Anthony Weiner's (a.k.a. "Carlos Danger") sexting scandal is both comical and pathetic. And we still have 11 days to go!

UPDATE-1:
-----------------

There's a wry twitter post after the bombshell broke that I can't resist sharing (author unknown). It goes (paraphrasing slightly) like this:

Anthony Weiner provides us with clear evidence that despite rumors to the contrary, the Clintons don't kill people.

UPDATE-2:
-------------------

The Wall Street Journal editorial board comments:
Mrs. Clinton could be entering the White House amid an ongoing ethics investigation, which may be a historical first. If Republicans hold Congress, investigations of the FBI investigation are a near-certainty, with agents sworn to tell the truth. Did Mr. Comey reopen the case because of internal dissent within the FBI about the probe and his apparent political favoritism? Or did he worry that a congressional probe might uncover new evidence if he didn’t give the FBI a do-over?

Mrs. Clinton has herself to blame for this fiasco. Nobody forced her to use a private server, ignore warnings about classified material, and then stonewall when her conduct was exposed to voters. Even her advisers were privately shocked, or claimed to be. In a hacked John Podesta email from July 2015, [Democratic partisan] Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress vents: “Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered? Like [the] whole thing is [expletive] insane.”

It may be insane, but it’s also vintage Hillary Clinton—her preoccupation with secrecy, her recklessness, her lifelong conviction that she’ll never be held accountable. The poor American electorate, already beleaguered enough by the election choice, must now factor James Comey’s reprise into its decision.
Ask yourself this: Would any employer offer you a job if the employer knew your were undergoing a criminal investigation by the FBI? I thought not.

American Wasta

In his thinking person's spy thriller, I Am Pilgrim, author Terry Hayes discusses the wreckage (economic, intellectual, and cultural) that is the Muslim Arab Middle East when he writes about Saudi Arabia. As an example, he uses wasta—an Arabic word that means corruption within and around the government, its bureaucracies, and its people. It implies bribery but also connotes more widespread influence peddling. Hayes writes:
"In the absence of democracy and efficient bureaucracies, wasta is the way the Arab world works—it means connections, influence, a web of old favors, and tribal history. With wasta, doors—even to palaces—open. Without it, they remain forever closed."
When I read those sentences, I couldn't help but think about the direction our country is moving with the likely election of Hillary Clinton—call it American Wasta.

Kim Strassel reports on the latest Wikileaks bombshell revelations (read the whole thing) with a summary statement:
In an election season that has been full of surprises, let’s hope the electorate understands that there is at least one thing of which it can be certain: A Hillary Clinton presidency will be built, from the ground up, on self-dealing, crony favors, and an utter disregard for the law.

This isn’t a guess. It is spelled out, in black and white, in the latest bombshell revelation from WikiLeaks. It comes in the form of a memo written in 2011 by longtime Clinton errand boy Doug Band, who for years worked simultaneously at the Clinton Foundation and at the head of his lucrative consulting business, Teneo.
Strassel goes on to describe the unethical and near-criminal self-dealing that enriched the Clintons from the very big money interests that Hillary sanctimoniously condemns on the stump. Early in this campaign I asked how the Clintons—a couple with no private sector jobs and no company ownership went from broke to a $100+ million net worth in 15 years. Now we know, and it isn't pretty. In fact, it stinks to high heaven!

The Wall Street Journal writes:
This excerpt [Band's description of the inner workings of The Clinton Foundation]and all the potential conflicts it describes, plus Chelsea’s warning about business “hustling” at foundation events, would seem more than ample cause to trigger an IRS audit of the foundation. For that matter, why aren’t the IRS and prosecutors already on the case? Any normal foundation has to keep records to show it is separating its nonprofit activity from any for-profit business.
But, of course, the IRS has been compromised by the Obama administration and is now weaponized to attack only the opponents of Obama, Clinton and the progressives. And if you think its bad and corrupt now, just wait.

With Clinton's likely victory, the elites will have triumphed—their connections and influence remaining safely intact; their horrendously bad decisions and policy unassailable. The web of old favors will remain as solid as ever. The "friends of the Clintons" will have access while others will have little or none. Bribery—in the guise of donations to a sham charity along with excessive speaking fees for the Charity's directors—will flourish, and the "tribe" made up of the Democrats and their media sycophants will vanquish all others.

America Wasta—get ready for it. It's coming on January 20th.

UPDATE:
----------------

The Wall Street Journal writes in the same editorial noted above:
It’s also worth noting that in the vast digital trove of Mr. Podesta’s stolen emails we haven’t noticed emails from Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps they don’t exist. But American voters shouldn’t worry merely about the emails released before the election. What emails or memos exist that these hackers, Russian or not, could be withholding for leverage after the election with another President Clinton?

The Clinton campaign has suggested that Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putin because the Russian has something on the Republican. The question is what do any number of possible bad actors know about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s mixing of business, charity and politics?
Looks like the WSK editors have finally caught up with those of us who have been concerned that Hillary's 33,000 missing emails (you know, the ones about "grandchildren and yoga") have been hacked (a 100% certainly, given the Wikileaks evidence) and will become fodder for blackmail from very bad actors. They write:
It’s also worth noting that in the vast digital trove of Mr. Podesta’s stolen emails we haven’t noticed emails from Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps they don’t exist. But American voters shouldn’t worry merely about the emails released before the election. What emails or memos exist that these hackers, Russian or not, could be withholding for leverage after the election with another President Clinton?

The Clinton campaign has suggested that Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putin because the Russian has something on the Republican. The question is what do any number of possible bad actors know about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s mixing of business, charity and politics?
Hillary has already demonstrated she will do anything to stay in power. If blackmailed (a very real possibility) with hacked email written in her own words and indicating criminal wrong-doing or explosive dishonesty (say, about Benghazi), I have no doubt she would sell-out her country to stay in power.

UPDATE-2
----------------------

After discussing the main stream media's continuing attempts to protect Hillary Clinton from the awful implications of the Wikileak's document by suggesting the Julian Assange and the Russians are the bad guys in all of this, Timm Amundson writes:
... a paradox exists that cannot be ignored. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the mainstream media are all telling us that Putin and Assange are the bad guys. Bad guys they might be, but in effect they are providing information to the American people that Clinton and Obama do not want them to have, because if the American people have this information, they would not approve of what Clinton and President Obama have done.

Color me reactionary, but I don’t think Putin and Assange are the folks we should be most concerned about right now. They are only influencing the election based upon larger disclosure of the facts. Clinton, Obama, and the media are influencing the election based on attempts to suppress and distort the facts.
Clinton and her trained hamsters in the media are desperately trying to run out the election clock. But the wrong doing described in the Wikileaks documents will dog Clinton well into her presidency.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

The Good Old Days

Back in the good old days of Richard Nixon and Watergate, you know, before the Department of Justice was compromised by hyper-partisan politics, before the FBI became a political tool wielded by the president rather than the government law enforcement arm, before members of the sitting president's political party supported him mindlessly no matter how bad his decisions were or how corrupt his actions became, citizens of this country could expect that even the President and certainly high government officials were not above the law.

No more.

Michael Goodwin writes:
Oh, for the good old days of Watergate and of public servants like Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus. We should be so lucky now.

Instead, we have a sitting president, Barack Obama, who presided over a corrupt Justice Department and the FBI. And instead of public servants of principle, we have a gaggle of quislings, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who put partisanship and their careers ahead of duty.

Rather than ending a national nightmare, a transfer of power from Obama to Clinton would start a new crisis of confidence. Consider the threshold question of whether the Justice Department could ever be trusted to prosecute anyone in public office.

If Clinton is guilty of only “mistakes” and “bad judgment” in setting up a private server, sending and receiving national secrets and destroying thousands of government e-mails, on what fair basis can any public official be held accountable?

Is the bar for prosecution raised or lowered depending on political connections?
But maybe all of this is just a political persecution—an evil right wing conspiracy trying to denigrate Hillary Clinton? I'm afraid not.

Goodwin continues:
Thanks to The Wall Street Journal, we also know the FBI ignored outrageous conflicts of interest among its own leadership while supposedly investigating Clinton and one of her top associates, Virginias Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe. The paper reported that the head of the FBI’s Washington office met with McAuliffe as the official’s wife was running as a Democrat for the Virginia legislature, and that McAuliffe funneled nearly $700,000 to her campaign.

That aide, Andrew McCabe, went on to oversee the shoddy Clinton probe, and is now No. 2 in the FBI, second only to Director James Comey. And we’re supposed to believe all this is kosher?

Wait, there’s more. Remember that the FBI failed even to investigate the pay-to-play patterns with donors to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state. Several reported transactions look like straight-up bribery, yet there is no sign a single person in the Justice Department suggested an inquiry.

From start to finish, it is obvious that the FBI gave Clinton special treatment. The failure to impanel a grand jury and issue subpoenas, the granting of five immunity deals to her aides, and the agreement to destroy potential evidence all lead to the conclusion that Comey bent the rules to make sure Clinton was cleared.
This is all convoluted and exceedingly complex. As I've stated a number of times in recent weeks, Clinton uses complexity and obtuse dealings and connections as a shield against liability for unethical and illegal activity.

But here's the thing. At some level, the public sees through the complexity and comes away with the uneasy feeling that Hillary Clinton is a criminal. They're not wrong.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

100-Percent

Even the Democrat's trained hamsters at the NYT, the LAT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC can't avoid news of the implosion of Obamacare. Obama-friendly CBS News reports:
WASHINGTON - Premiums will go up sharply next year under President Barack Obama’s health care law, and many consumers will be down to just one insurer, the administration confirmed Monday. That will stoke another “Obamacare” controversy days before a presidential election.

Before taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less.

Moreover, about 1 in 5 consumers will have plans from only a single insurer to pick from, after major national carriers such as UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Humana (HUM) and Aetna (AET) scaled back their roles.

“Consumers will be faced this year with not only big premium increases but also with a declining number of insurers participating, and that will lead to a tumultuous open enrollment period,” said Larry Levitt, who tracks the health care law for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Republicans will pounce on the numbers as confirmation that insurance markets created by the 2010 health overhaul are on the verge of collapsing in a “death spiral.” Sign-up season starts Nov. 1, about a week before national elections in which the GOP remains committed to a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Window-shopping for plans and premiums is already available through HealthCare.gov.

The sobering numbers confirmed state-by-state reports that have been coming in for months. Administration officials are stressing that subsidies provided under the law, which are designed to rise alongside premiums, will insulate most customers from sticker shock. They add that consumers who are willing to switch to cheaper plans will still be able to find bargains.
With insurers fleeing the system, rates rising dramatically, young, healthy people avoiding the program, and deductibles at stratospheric levels, I think it's fair to say that the program is an abject failure.

Of course, the Democrats try to put lipstick on a pig by telling us that many millions are covered. Of those millions, between 80 and 90 percent are "subsidized" by the taxpayer. The taxpayer money that is now dedicated to Obamacare "subsidies" cannot be applied to debt reduction, infrastructure, education, defense or any other government function.

In my very first post on Obamacare (July 22, 2009) I wrote:
Every politician at the federal level has a very large ego. It goes with the territory. And most suffer from so much hubris that they begin to believe their own bullshit. (excuse the language, but its appropriate in this context).

They tell us "If you like your current health-care plan, you can keep it" even though any government sanctioned health care option will slowly invade the private medical insurance landscape like crabgrass, forcing private options to wither and die.

They argue that their legislation will lead to “savings” even though the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office clearly states that no “savings” will be achieved under the current legislation.

They believe that they can run 15 percent of the economy even though the vast majority of legislators and our President have never run a business of any kind, never met a payroll, and never balanced a budget.

They tell us that 47 million people go without health insurance, even though no one can substantiate the number or put it into context (e.g., as many as 10 million are illegal aliens). They fail to mention that (doing the math with their inflated numbers) 84 percent of Americans are insured and have immediate access the world-class medical care.

And then, our President tells us that the current problems facing American business, job creation, and the economy in general are somehow tied to health care. To quote a commenter named "Cowboy" at The Belmont Club, "This is absurd. Our financial panic never had anything to do with health care, but rather the ticking time bomb of securitized mortgages and various similar financial instruments which spread risk wantonly all over our financial sector. Doctors and Big Pharma didn’t cause this pain."

Would targeted reforms of health care be a good idea? Of course, but a total restructuring of the system is … well, it’s through-the-looking-glass crazy. But then again, what more can we expect when the designers’ strongest attributes are ego and hubris.
And there I was, just a lowly citizen in 2009 who took a hard look at the then-proposed legislation (it wasn't passed until almost a year later) and got it all just about 100-percent right. Funny how the smartest (progressive) guys in the room lead by the "smartest president ever" got it just about 100-percent wrong, and then lied to get it passed by Stepford Wives Democrats who never encountered a big government idea they didn't like.

In a just and fair world, the Dems would be held to account for the healthcare debacle that they, and they alone, created. But this isn't a just and fair world—an idea that will be reinforced over and over again during the next four years.

UPDATE-1:
-----------------------

The Wall Street Journal editorial board summarized the Obamacare debacle nicely:
At every stage of the ObamaCare saga, liberals said not to worry. Sure, the law was unpopular when Democrats rammed it through Congress on a partisan vote in 2009-10, but voters would learn to love it once the subsidies started rolling. That didn’t happen, and in 2014 President Obama tried to buck up Democrats by saying that “five years from now” people will look back on the law as “a monumental achievement.” Two years later it’s worse.

Nothing could shake the liberal faith in their supposed landmark: Not the Healthcare.gov website fiasco of 2013, or the millions of individual health plans that were cancelled despite President Obama’s promise about keeping them. The left kept the faith as the entitlement subtracted from economic growth, hurt incomes and killed jobs. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber called the critics stupid, and Mr. Obama denigrates anyone who disagrees with him as illegitimate or politically motivated.

Now reality is confirming what the critics predicted. ObamaCare’s regulatory mix—benefit mandates, requiring insurers to sell coverage to all comers, and narrow ratings bands that limit how much premiums can vary by health status—was tried by several states in the 1980s and ’90s. Every one saw the same results that are now unspooling nationally: high and rising costs, low and declining enrollment, and less insurer and provider competition.
Obamacare has been a strong metaphor for a broad range of existing blue model policies (e.g., pensions, public assistance, entitlements) and those to be proposed in the future (e.g., "free" college tuition): (1) define a real problem, but (2) propose "crazy" solutions that are doomed to fail from the beginning; (3) call anyone who criticizes the crazy policies "uncaring" or worse; (4) use dishonesty, emotion, and parliamentary tricks to get the policy passed into law; (5) make illegal changes to the law to avoid early, predictable failures; (6) as things begin to unravel, talk about "investments" and "subsidies" to mask huge infusions of taxpayer money that were never planned to happen; (7) continue to twist the statistics to avoid real fixes, and last, (8) lie, obfuscate, and if necessary, find a scapegoat to avoid taking the blame for championing failed policies.

Works every time! Be prepared to watch it in action after January 20th.

UPDATE-2:
------------------

David Harsanyi writes:
Of course mandating and subsidizing health-care insurance will decrease the number of uninsured. Yet Left punditry seems to be under the impression that coercing people to participate in their plans is revolutionary policymaking. But countless times in 2009, the president promised that exchanges would offer those newly insured Americans more quality “choices” and “affordability” and push down rates overall. (He promised the rest of us that health-care premiums would fall by $2,500 for a family of four. Instead, they’ve risen by over $4,800.) ...

The number of health-care insurance carriers in the exchanges will drop from 298 this year to 228 in 2017. In five states — Alaska, Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wyoming — there will be only be one insurance company providing plans in 2017. It’s one too many for many on the Left.

Obamacare is working so well that Democrats are now pressuring Republicans to fix it and Hillary Clinton is arguing that to save it we need a “public option” — a euphemism for a government-run insurance program that incrementally undermines competition and care by allowing political considerations to dictate price.
Let's just take a deep breath and consider the idiocy of a "public option." Progressive thinking always falls back on the following meme—if our ideas fail miserably, it isn't the idea itself, it's just that we haven't spent enough, regulated enough, or forced enough people to participate. Following that dictum, let's fix Obamacare by implementing a public option—after all, the feds do such a cost effective, efficient job of running any program—e.g., look at the VA. And for those who argue that Medicare is a counterexample, remember this—even by the most liberal estimates, the Medicare program in its current form will go bankrupt in about 10 to 15 years.


Tuesday, October 25, 2016

The Idiot and the Criminal

Donald Trump is an idiot. He is too ignorant to recognize what's necessary to persuade independent voters that he's not unhinged. He does have serious, if not fully formed policy ideas, but he is too full of himself to recognize that attacks on his morals or his business acumen are NOT what undecided/independent voters are most concerned about. He is too tone deaf to recognize that his petty attacks on his antagonists do little good and most probably much harm.

In his "Gettysburg" speech, Trump suggested some reasonably good policy ideas suggesting:
  • terms limits on members of Congress (a good concept that is reasonably popular with the electorate)
  • federal spending limits (a very good concept that is also popular with almost everyone but democrats)
  • a constitutional amendment that proposes a balanced budget (a very popular idea, except among democrats)
  • tax reductions and reform (a popular idea, except among democrats)
  • border controls (a popular idea among 60+ percent of the electorate)
  • immigration controls for countries that have significant Islamist presence (a popular idea among 70+ percent of the electorate)
All of this represented solid policy concepts, but Trump, in what can only be described as a fit of idiocy, decided to announce that he would sue his recent female accusers for defamation. So policy goes out the window. The Democrat's trained hamsters of the media don't have to report it because The Donald is once again attacking woman, solidifying the meme that has buried him.

You know, he's done this so often, you'd almost think he wanted to lose this election. But I don't think that's it. Trump does it because  he thinks only his way is the right way. He does it because he doesn't listen to solid political advice. He does it because he's an idiot.
***
Hillary Clinton is a criminal. She runs a criminal enterprise that would land her in jail if the same laws that apply to you and me were applied to her. Clinton's genius is that her crimes are extremely complicated and convoluted, so proving criminality or criminal intent is difficult, particularly when Democrats run the Justice Department. She cloaks her criminality in complexity and skates as a result.

Consider the drip, drip, drip of serious allegations that have surfaced throughout the past few months:
  • She knowingly maintained secret information of her private server and lied about its presence. Both the server and the secret documents violated State Department Rules and federal law (Yeah, I know, the FBI didn't find reason to recommend indictment, but see below)
  • In contravention of campaign finance laws, her campaign coordinated attempts to promote violence at Trump rallies and then suggested that it was Trump and his supporters who were violent!
  • In contravention of  campaign finance laws, she coordinated with super-PACs in an effort to harrass and embarrass her opponent.
  • In violation of federal law, she and her husband initiated pay-for-play via the State Department and the Clinton Foundation on numerous occasions. The pay-for-play often involved foreign actors who do not have this country's best interests at heart.
  • Just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Terry McAuliffe, long time Clinton flunky and Governor of Virginia, tried to influence an senior FBI official by providing almost a half million dollars in support for the official's wife to run for state senate in Virginia, one week after the Clinton email investigation began. Oh, by the way, the FBI official was promoted and became a lead coordinator in the Clinton investigation performed by the agency. 
  • Just yesterday, Judicial Watch reports that John Bentel, the State Department’s former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat took the Fifth 90 times during a deposition on the email scandal in Federal court.
I could go on for another 50 bullet points, but what's the point. Hillary Clinton is a criminal.

So, we have idiot and a criminal running for president, and likely, the criminal will become president. I guess that makes idiots out of all of us.

Update:
-------------------

Many of my progressive friends talk incessantly about an "unhinged" Donald Trump being anywhere near the nuclear launch codes. He's "tempermentally unfit," they intone with gravitas.

The CEO of a major company once said that he always judged his new hires by how they treated the wait staff in a fine restaurant. If they're overbearing, gruff, or too demanding," he said, "that's how they'll be as managers. I'd never hire a person like that."

In a revealing piece in the conservative National Review,Deroy Murdock recounts dozens of reported instances in which Hillary Clinton has been overbearing, gruff, or too demanding when working with her underlings—Secret Service agents, state troops and others. Here's a snippit:
“She derives pleasure from lording over other people who cannot do anything about it and who are less powerful than she is,” author Ronald Kessler told Newsmax TV’s J. D. Hayworth.

In fact, Clinton’s well-documented history of profane, unhinged outbursts against those who work for her spans decades. While Clinton’s vulgarity is presented here in relatively family-friendly form, fill in the blanks and imagine the pain that this woman inflicted when she uttered these words.

“I’m not voting for Clinton,” Air Force Staff Sergeant Eric Bonner posted on Facebook in July. “It’s because she actually talked to me once. Almost a sentence,” wrote the Air Force K-9 handler. “I got to do a few details involving Distinguished Visitors.” “One of my last details was for Hillary when she was Secretary of State,” Bonner continued. “I helped with sweeps of her DV quarters and staff vehicles. Her words to me?”

According to Bonner, Clinton told him, “Get that f***ing dog away from me.” “Then she turns to her security detail and berates them up and down about why that animal was in her quarters,” Bonner added. “For the next 20 minutes, while I sit there waiting to be released, she lays into her detail, slamming the door in their faces when she’s done. The Detail lead walks over, apologizes, and releases me. I apologize to him for getting him in trouble. His words, ‘Happens every day, Brother.’”

“Hillary doesn’t care about anyone but Hillary.” “Stay the f*** back, stay the f*** away from me!” the then-–First Lady screamed at her Secret Service agents. “Don’t come within ten yards of me, or else! Just f***ing do as I say, okay!!?” Clinton demanded, according to former FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s Unlimited Access, page 139.

“If you want to remain on this detail, get your f***ing ass over here and grab those bags!” Hillary yelled at a Secret Service agent, as Joyce Milton reported in The First Partner, page 259. The officer explained in vain that he preferred to keep his hands free, in case a threat arose.

“Good morning, ma’am,” a uniformed Secret Service officer once greeted Hillary Clinton. “F*** off!” she replied, as Ronald Kessler documented in First Family Detail, page 16.

“Put this back on the ground!” Hillary Clinton screamed at the pilot of presidential helicopter Marine One. “I left my sunglasses in the limo. I need my sunglasses! We need to go back!” Clinton so abused the chopper’s crew that they christened it Broomstick One.
Heh. So ... everyone thinks Trump is an a##hole, and they're probably right. But it appears that Hillary is an even bigger a##hole, it's just that she hides it better in public. Unless, of course, all of these independent reports are part of a "vast right wing conspiracy."

Maybe it's Hillary Clinton who is the "unhinged" candidate. I wouldn't hire her, that's for sure.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Abandon All Hope

Almost every poll, it seems, indicates that Donald trump is going to lose big—very big. Every progressive talking head—meaning most of the talking heads on main stream media—gives us a smug smile and indicates that the Democrats are moving money and emphasis to down-ballot races. It's over!

And yet, there appears to be a very subtle fear that hides behind the smugness, evidenced in their eyes. It might be that deep down they know their candidate, Hillary Clinton is a corrupt and dishonest politician. Maybe the public, at the last minute, might reject their demonization of Trump and ... do the unthinkable!

So in the grand tradition of a "rigged" election—you know, one in which the media has taken sides, shapes the narrative, and otherwise does everything possible to sway the electorate in the direction of their candidate, recent "news" stories blanket the media telling us about a ABC News poll in which Clinton leads Trump by 12 percentage points nationally. The underlying message is adapted from Dante's Inferno and is aimed directly at Trump voters: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The strategy is predictable and far from subtle—convince Trump voters to stay home—abandon all hope.

But let's take a look at the ABC News poll that got so much MSM attention over the weekend. ZeroHedge comments:
Like many of the recent polls from Reuters, ABC and The Washington Post, this latest poll included a 9-point sampling bias toward registered democrats.
"METHODOLOGY – This ABC News poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone Oct. 20-22, 2016, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 874 likely voters. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions are 36-27-31 percent, Democrats - Republicans - Independents."
Of course, while democrats may enjoy a slight registration advantage of a couple of points, it is nowhere near the 9 points reflected in this latest poll.

Meanwhile, we also pointed out that with huge variances in preference across demographics one can easily "rig" a poll by over indexing to one group vs. another. As a quick example, the ABC / WaPo poll found that Hillary enjoys a 79-point advantage over Trump with black voters. Therefore, even a small "oversample" of black voters of 5% could swing the overall poll by 3 full points. Moreover, the pollsters don't provide data on the demographic mix of their polls which makes it impossible to "fact check" the bias...convenient.
It's not worth getting caught up in the statistical weeds at this point or in the notion that there is a notable lack of Clinton enthusiasm among many Democrats. Suffice to say that a 12-point Clinton lead nationally is ... well ... questionable.

Rather, it might be worth noting a John Podesta (Clinton's campaign manager) email released as part of the Wikileaks hack. Again from ZeroHedge (Podesta's words from the email are italicized):
Now, for all of you out there who still aren't convinced that the polls are "adjusted", we present to you the following Podesta email, leaked earlier today, that conveniently spells out, in detail, exactly how to "manufacture" the desired data. The email starts out with a request for recommendations on "oversamples for polling" in order to "maximize what we get out of our media polling."

I also want to get your Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February. By market, regions, etc. I want to get this all compiled into one set of recommendations so we can maximize what we get out of our media polling.

The email even includes a handy, 37-page guide with the following poll-rigging recommendations. In Arizona, over sampling of Hispanics and Native Americans is highly recommended:

Research, microtargeting & polling projects
- Over-sample Hispanics
- Use Spanish language interviewing. (Monolingual Spanish-speaking voters are among the lowest turnout Democratic targets)
- Over-sample the Native American population


For Florida, the report recommends "consistently monitoring" samples to makes sure they're "not too old" and "has enough African American and Hispanic voters." Meanwhile, "independent" voters in Tampa and Orlando are apparently more dem friendly so the report suggests filling up independent quotas in those cities first.

- Consistently monitor the sample to ensure it is not too old, and that it has enough African American and Hispanic voters to reflect the state.
- On Independents: Tampa and Orlando are better persuasion targets than north or south Florida (check your polls before concluding this). If there are budget questions or oversamples, make sure that Tampa and Orlando are included first.

Meanwhile, it's suggested that national polls over sample "key districts / regions" and "ethnic" groups "as needed."

It's perfectly okay for Podesta (a rank partisan) to recommend over-sampling when it benefits his candidate. But is absolutely NOT okay for the main stream media to follow his advice—unless of course, they're complicit in rigging the polls and indirectly, rigging the election.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that every poll is rigged, but rather that because the media is so blatantly anti-Trump, it is possible that their overall bias also creeps into the way they and their polling contractors do their polls. That oversampling is common. That might be why, even with these overwhelming "abandon all hope" results , there still appears to be a bit of unease in the land of the progressives.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

The Worst Possible Outcome

In my last post, I noted that through his own lack of discipline, poor focus and shallow policy knowledge, Donald Trump will lose an election that could have been easily won. With the exception of her Stepford wives supporters, most objective observers and a majority of voters understand that Hillary Clinton is dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent where it matters—accomplishing substantive things. They'll vote for Clinton as a vote against Trump. On the other hand, many voters will vote for Trump, not because they're enamored of the man, but because his core ideas are not all bad and his claims that the election process is "rigged" hold true.

Although the Dems and the media would have you think he's suggesting widespread and rampant voter fraud. But in his typically muddied language and incoherent style, what Trump really means is that the elites have rigged the election against him. Whether it's the main stream media, the entertainment industry, or the glitterati who populate the arts—Donald Trump is characterized as the devil. Even worse, there is clear, irrefutable evidence (think: Wikileaks emails and the Project Veritas videos) that the Clinton campaign plotted with the media to be sure Trump was demonized.

In my last post, I noted that many who will vote for Trump are actually voting against media bias:
[A Trump vote is] also a middle finger directed at the mainstream media, who more than any single entity, have worked hard to destroy Trump. It's only fair to note that Trump has helped them enormously with the task, but nonetheless, their bias is palpable.
I'm not the only person who feels this way. Derek Hunter, a #NeverTrump adherent, has now decided that he'll vote for Trump as a vote against media bias. He writes:
Bias has always been a factor in journalism. It’s nearly impossible to remove. Humans have their thoughts, and keeping them out of your work is difficult. But 2016 saw the remaining veneer of credibility, thin as it was, stripped away and set on fire.

More than anything, I can’t sit idly by and allow these perpetrators of fraud to celebrate and leak tears of joy like they did when they helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. I have to know I weighed in not only in writing but in the voting booth.

The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won’t do it, it’s something. Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don’t want me to, and I believe I must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton ...

After the last debate, when no outlet “fact checked” Hillary’s lie that her opposition to the Heller decision had anything to do with children, or her lie that the State Department didn’t lose $6 billion under her leadership, I couldn’t hold out any longer.

A Trump administration at least will include people I trust in positions that matter. I don’t know if they will be able to hold him completely in check, but I know a Clinton administration will include people who have been her co-conspirators in corruption, and there won’t even be a media to hold her accountable.

The Wikileaks emails have exposed an arrogant cabal of misery profiteers who hold everyone, even their fellow travelers deemed not pure enough, in contempt. These bigots who’ve made their fortune from government service should be kept as far away from the levers of power as the car keys should be kept from anyone named Kennedy on a Friday night. My one vote against it will not be enough, but it’s all I can do and I have to do all I can do.

I won’t stop being critical of Trump when he deserves it; I won’t pretend someone is handing out flowers when they’re shoveling BS. But I’d rather have BS shoveled out of a president than our tax dollars shoveled to a president’s friends and political allies.
And there's the real difference. In a Trump presidency, as crazy as it might be, the GOP (unlike a Democratic party that has fawned over Clinton's lies and corruption) will oppose him vigorously if he suggests crazy stuff. The media will be apoplectic and will aggressively investigate even a whiff of dishonesty or corruption. The military will push back should he recommend bad stuff, and the Dems (at least those who haven't emigrated), will oppose all of his agenda.

Sadly, with Hillary's election, Obama 3.0 will begin. BS will be piled high. The media and the Dems will tell us to enjoy its sweet smell. No independent entity will provide a check for Clinton's dishonest and corrupt practices; bad decisions and policies will abound, and our country will sink further into malaise. There are no good outcomes here, but the worst possible outcome is a presidency for Hillary Clinton.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Fight Back

If you think back to the frightened reaction among elites to the Brexit vote, you'll better understand the elite's reaction to Donald Trump. You can also fully comprehend why they've worked so hard to ensure that this election skews in Hillary Clinton's favor. The elites, it seems, can adapt easily to dishonesty and corruption, but they cannot abide a candidate who can't be anticipated in advance.

First, a comment on Brexit. Despite armegeddon-like warnings of economic collapse; despite suggestions that Brexit leaders were unhinged, despite condemnation by the elites in the U.K., and despite polling that indicated a clear E.U win, the "little people" rejected E.U. rule and decided that they wanted their sovereignty back. Their vote indicated that they were fed up with the elites defining the best course of action, particularly because the elites are often wrong, and the little guy is the one who often suffers as a consequence of their mistakes.

Now, Trump. With polls indicating a clear Clinton victory, the elites seem smug and celebratory, but at the same time, uneasy. They're thinking about Brexit.

Sally Zelikovsky takes a hard look at Trump support when she writes:
Support for Trump is more of a jury nullification -- a complete rejection of all of the evidence. Not the evidence of how bad things are -- we all know our economic, cultural, and national security health is hanging by a thread. It is the wholesale renunciation of all that political gamesmanship has wrought. Things may be grim, but if we don’t address the underlying cause of “WHY” our outlook is bleak and it doesn’t matter who is elected. The cycle of misery will just continue. Too few who earn their living inside the Beltway seem to get this; and the few who do, rarely have national exposure.

It is also too simplistic to cast the Trump phenomenon as the natural outgrowth of the fading glory of the angry and frustrated white man juxtaposed against the ascendant power of minorities -- the throwaway line that permeates political commentary. It is far more nuanced than that.

The Trump phenomenon is better understood as a colossal F U to all of the lies and broken promises politicians have hoisted upon the masses over the years. It is the savage blowback to the money-sucking rules and regulations and taxes that heavily burden a broad range of the middle and upper middle classes. It is a YUGE “suck it” to the self-aggrandizement and pocket lining that goes on within the Beltway. It is a swift backlash against the swarm of Beltway wannabees who want in on DC action in order to enrich themselves on the backs of the people, to the detriment of the country.
And it's also a middle finger directed at the mainstream media, who more than any single entity, have worked hard to destroy Trump. It's only fair to note that Trump has helped them enormously with the task, but nonetheless, their bias is palpable.

Throughout any presidential campaign, name calling, accusations of bigotry and racism, and outlandish suggestions that the GOP candidate will do great harm (e.g., start a nuclear war) are commonplace, regardless of the Democrat on the ballot. It seems that the Democrats get a free pass to demonize every GOP presidential contender. For example, along with their media allies, they demonized Mitt Romney—an ethical, honest, and competent politician and executive. Romney did what all GOP contenders of the past did. He took it. He never fought back, but that didn't stop the Dems from suggesting he was responsible for the death of a woman who died of Cancer; that he rejected 47 percent" of the electorate, not by calling them "deplorable" or "irredeemable" as this year's Democrat contender has done (by the way, many media outlets defended Clinton for that remark), but by simply noting that they were probably beyond his message. He allowed debate moderator Candy Crowley to defend Barack Obama (incorrectly, it turned out) during the second debate and did so without a word of protest. Gentlemanly—all the way to a election loss.

To say the least, Donald Trump is not gentlemanly. He fights back — hard. Maybe his style is coarse and his language is muddy, but he fights back. That makes the elites very uncomfortable—after all, the GOP candidate is supposed to take the slurs hurled at him by the Dems and their media hamsters. They always have, haven't they? So, when Trump punches back, the elites tell us that he's "unhinged," that he doesn't have the "temperament" for the job, that he's "whining"—all because he defends himself against scurrilous attacks.

Noah Rothman
summarizes all of this when he writes:
Democrats flatter themselves when they grieve over the fact that the 2016 campaign has not been one of ideas but of competing personalities and tawdry scandals. Presidential campaigns are never contests of ideas; not if the left and their allies in media can see to it. Presidential campaigns are always characterized by a test of whether the Republican candidate harbors ignoble racial, sexual, or gender stereotypes in their hearts. Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush; all these Republicans were subject to the charge of racism. No reed was too thin for the liberal establishment to collectively perch themselves.

The result, as New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni indicated, that it is possible “Democrats have cried wolf so many times that no one hears them now.” That kind of introspection on the part of the left has, however, been exceedingly rare. Too few are internalizing the lesson of 2016.
But why should the Dems change their strategy? The last 8 years have demonstrated that their domestic and foreign policy positions are demonstrably ineffective. So ad hominem attacks—accusations of racism or bigotry or misogyny—no matter how "reed thin" are a viable and effective option. The sad thing is that the larger voting public buys it—either out of general laziness, ignorance, or apathy. After all, it's easy to vote against someone who is a racist or a bigot or a misogynist and its easy to believe those accusations if you don't think critically, don't investigate the attacks, and/or don't really care. In the past, GOP candidates tried to fight the accusations but did so ineffectively because they didn't play dirty.

Trump has fought back and tried to play dirty, but his efforts have not worked. He has neither the intellectual skill nor the focus to fight back hard but do so without looking like a bully or a moron. In fact, even if he did have the skill, Clinton's hamsters in the media would shout him down. The Clinton propaganda machine has gravely wounded Trump, and Hillary Clinton will likely win. She might even win big. She'll claim that she has attained a "mandate" and that the country is behind her. If that's the case, then the country is behind dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence. I can't believe that's true.

Clinton and her supporters will expect the "deplorables" and "irredeemables" to lick their wounds and fade away. Her army of progressives will march onward, compounding the domestic and foreign policy mistakes that created the deplorables and irredeemables in the first place. She'll win while the country loses.

Friday, October 21, 2016

The Next Four Years

Julian Assange and Wikileaks have created enormous problems for Hillary Clinton, her political cabal, the DNC, and indirectly, a main stream media that refuses to investigate the many indications of Clinton's corruption and outright criminality. The Clinton's have a long and sordid history of political and personal revenge focused on political enemies (think: House of Cards). At the moment, Assange is #1 on their enemy's list.

This week, it appears that a Clinton affiliated entity (more in a moment) tried to tie Assange directly to the Russians and also to a pedophilia charge. Facts continue to emerge, but Tim Johnson provides background:
The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks is claiming that an elaborate and somewhat wacky smear campaign has targeted the group’s founder, Julian Assange, to paint him as a pedophile and Russian client.

WikiLeaks said the smear efforts, which it’s outlined in tweets and a series of documents over the past two days, include a sham offer from the Russian government to pay Assange $1 million to promote a women’s dating site and a separate scheme to link Assange to a criminal case in the Bahamas.

The assertions are the latest twist in events that have kept Assange and WikiLeaks at center stage of the presidential campaign. The smears come as WikiLeaks releases tens thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and from the personal email account of campaign chairman John Podesta.
To avoid addressing the incriminating content of the hacked emails, Clinton and her campaign do what they always do, they obfuscate. They talk about the Russians, about hacking, about espionage, about anything but the content of the emails. When they can't avoid the content, they imply it is forged.

And when that doesn't work, they attack the messenger—viciously. Johnson provides an outline of the case:
The alleged smear campaign centers on a Houston company, toddandclare.com, that describes itself as an online dating site for single women.

A representative for the company, Hannah Hammond, wrote to Assange’s legal team in London and Sweden with an offer to pay him to appear in a tongue-in-cheek five-minute television advertisement for the company that it said would air on the Lifetime channel.

“The source of the $1 million is the Russian government. It will be wired to Mr. Assange’s nominated account, upon his cooperation, and before filming of the ToddandClare.com ad by the SoHo camera crew,” Hammond wrote in a Sept. 16 email, according to a copy WikiLeaks published.
But the plot thickens. ToddandClare.com is a very suspicious entity that has connections to Clinton and her campaign. The main stream media, of course, would never investigate those connections, but in our digital world, crowd-sourced investigation at Reddit has begun and it's uncovering very interesting facts. The entire thread, here, is long and very complex (the Clintons always hide their criminality in complexity), but definitely worth a read.  Private tech-savvy citizens are doing what the media refuses to do: investigate. As you'll see, the perpetrators, now that they have been discovered, are already deleting entire websites and twitter feeds to hide their tracks. In addition, the web of Clinton connections that comes out of this is absolutely fascinating.

When you read the Reddit thread, recognize that information presented has not been vetted and may be incorrect at the margins, but the overall thrust is that Clinton is doing what she always does—trying to impugn legitimate facts and criticism by destroying the people who present the legitimate facts and criticism. The criminality and corruption of the next four years has already begun.

UPDATE #1:
-----------------------

The Reddit thread continues to grow with "coincidences" and suspicious Clinton connections growing apace. One of the contributors in the thread writes:
"Did we just tie Hillary Clinton to an attempt to destroy the reputation of Julian Assange with pedophilia accusations? Isn't this a criminal conspiracy involving many individuals and a number of front companies, and thus falling under RICO?"
Heh. That is what it appears to be!

UPDATE #2:
------------------------

Deep in the thread another commenter writes: "These people can't even control their sick sense of humor. Todd and Clare. Tod und klar. Dead and clear." Just another coincidence, right?

UPDATE#3
-------------------------

Deep into the Reddit thread (you'll have to hit 'show more comments' a few times) there's a cogent counter argument that has merit and suggests that this might be "conspiracy Jiu Jitsu" in the sense that the perpetrators of the Assange attack were awfully sloppy in hiding their tracks (after crowd sourced investigation uncovered them). There is some merit to this argument, but consider the arrogance of the Clinton machine. The Clintons and their cronies have been enormously sloppy in the past (think: private email server) and have paid no price for it—none at all. That leads to a feeling that they are bullet-proof.

Is this just crazy conspiracy stuff? That's always the Clinton's meme. But past history indicates that the "conspiracies" always cited by the Clintons turn out to be something very different indeed—a path to the truth.

R.I.P.

In response to accusations of blatant media bias, someone named Jim Roberts, an ex-NYT reporter, tweeted: "Yes. The media is biased. Biased against hatred, sexism, racism, incompetence, belligerence, inequality, To name a few." I think Roberts' insipid moral preening represents the position of the vast majority of "journalists" who have worked tirelessly to destroy every GOP candidate since the turn of the century and supported every Democrat candidate including Hillary Clinton.

David Harsanyi considers the current campaign and summarizes nicely:
Donald Trump has been such a political and moral calamity for conservatives that liberals have been free to ignore the failings of their own mendacious, corrupt candidate and the significant role they played in destroying trust in American institutions.

So forgive me if I don’t take liberal concern-trolling about the GOP’s wicked presidential choice too seriously. After all, even if Republicans had nominated the most qualified, competent, and chaste moderate in the existence of the republic, there still would be no #NeverHillary movement within the Democratic Party. No matter how many scandals were uncovered. No matter how many lies she told. What they’ve done is normalize Hillary’s behavior. Because Trump.

Actually, many of these same people treated a competent and ethically upright moderate like Mitt Romney just like they treat Trump. And even the most sexist-sensitive liberal would likely support a lecherous Bill Clinton over a virtuous Republican nominee. Because state power is the virtue. So spare us.

It’s been something to watch the media engage in this smug, self-satisfying, feigned outrage — much of it aimed at real Trump scandals, and plenty of it hyper-parsing and overreactions — after giving him nearly unlimited and uncritical airtime during the primaries to ensure his nomination for the ratings and to help Hillary.
In addition to the bias itself, it's the complete lack of a "NeverHillary movement that bothers me. It seems as if Democrats are perfectly willing to forget and forgive blatant dishonesty, unambiguous corruption, and proven incompetence because ... well ... Hillary Clinton is a Democrat and Donald trump is just a "horrible" person.

Liberal opinion writer Chris Cillizza has the unmitigated gall to suggest that media is a victim in all of this and that Trump's bashing of it will hurt our democratic processes. Really?

So it's okay to blatantly advocate for one candidate in the news pages of The Washington Post (Cillizza's paper) and the vast majority of other MSM sources, to select only stories that hurt that candidate's opponent, to bury news that might injure that candidate (think: Wikileaksor Project Veritas) and to do this every single day? In the fevered imagination of Cillizza, that's all okay because Trump represents a true threat to his elitist world view. He whines (ahh, it's nice to use Barack Obama's favorite word):
Many Trump supporters think that the mainstream media are so crooked — to borrow a favorite word from the Trump vocabulary — that they not only can't be trusted but need to be eliminated.

That is deeply dangerous. I have no illusion that people are going to suddenly like the media any time soon. But, there's a big difference between liking the media (or agreeing with the media) and believing they are a necessary part of a healthy and functioning democracy. I take no issue with anyone who doesn't like me or even “capital-J” Journalism. That's fine. But the increasing willingness to declare journalism dead and celebrate that fact is a very bad thing.
The kind of biased and dishonest journalism practiced by Cillizza and his many colleagues throughout the MSM is very much alive and well. A blatantly biased media, and not Trump's reaction to it, is deeply dangerous to a functioning democracy.

It's the ethical, honest, unbiased, and objective journalism that we all should expect that has died. R.I.P.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Dangerous Place

Thankfully, the last presidential debate is now over. The pro-Clinton main stream media has gotten the vapors because Donald Trump would not commit unequivocally to accepting the results of the upcoming election. Mind you, he didn't say he wouldn't accept the result, but almost every media outlet lead with that headline, just to ensure that every reader, viewer or listener realize how "un-American" Trump is. They conveniently forget Al Gore in 2000 who, with some justification at the time, refused to accept the result and asked for a recount. But Gore was a Democrat and therefore on the side of angels. Trump? He is evil incarnate, if you were to believe Clinton-trained media hamsters.

The debate itself was a push. Clinton wiggled and squirmed, but the format has never been designed to force a candidate to answer tough questions. She didn't. Trump is simply not a debater. His arguments were muddled, he is not quick on his feet, he doesn't think 2 or 3 points ahead. It's mildly satisfying to hear Trump describe Hillary accurately, but it serves no useful purpose unless he can present his argument cogently. He cannot.

No matter who wins the presidential election, we'll be left in either a bad or crazy place. If Hillary Clinton prevails (a high probability) we'll be left with a dishonest politician who is demonstrably corrupt and at the same time, incompetent. We'll be in a bad place. If Donald Trump prevails (a much lower probability) well have a crude, egomaniac with little policy depth and highly questionable interpersonal/diplomatic skills. We'll be in a crazy place.

Luckily, the U.S. Constitution provides a remedy for either the bad or the crazy place—impeachment. Andrew McCarthy comments:
... besides the ballot box, the most vital limitations on presidential power are Congress’s powers to control spending and impeach. These were thought sufficiently strong checks that, for over 160 years, the president was not even term-limited (i.e., until the 22nd Amendment in 1951). This confidence owed to the principle that members of Congress had a solemn duty to defend their institutional authority and the constitutional framework. In essence, the president can act as a rogue only if Congress allows that to happen.
During the tenure of Barack Obama, the Congress has ceded most of its power and virtually all of its checks and balances to the executive branch. Obama now creates "laws" via executive action, regulation and subterfuge. He creates "treaties" without Congress's approval. The presidency is becoming dangerously imperial, and there's little likelihood that either Clinton or Trump would voluntarily return to it to its constitutionally defined role.

McCarthy continues:
As I argued in Faithless Execution, while Congress’s powers to thwart abuse of presidential power are dispositive, there are, really, only two of them. If Congress refuses to use its authority to limit or cut off funding, the only remaining limitation is impeachment. If, in addition, Congress takes impeachment off the table, there is nothing left but a rogue president’s subjective sense of what he (or she) can get away with politically. The same, obviously, is true of the president’s subordinates: If, despite their lawlessness or incompetence, Congress maintains (or increases) their budgets and shrinks from impeaching them, then they are limited only by the whims of the rogue president they serve.

This is why our system no longer works. The Congress is AWOL: an increasingly irrelevant institution that: (a) does not see itself (either individually or collectively) as obliged to defend the Constitution; (b) delegates its legislative tasks to the sprawling bureaucracy, over which the president has far more influence; (c) punts tough calls to the judiciary, simultaneously refusing to exploit its constitutional authority over the courts’ jurisdiction in order to prevent or reverse judicial imperialism; and (d) is incompetent to perform basic tasks, such as imposing “regular order” on the appropriations process and compelling presidents to submit international agreements to the Constitution’s treaty process.

The power of the purse is now a toothless check. In the last century, the federal government’s most basic role has been transitioned from national security to social welfare, wealth redistribution, and economic regulation (including transfer payments to industries and research institutions based on political favoritism, not market forces). Congress is paralyzed by fear that any cutting off of funds will be portrayed as a denial of someone’s entitlement or other transfer payments.
Because Congress refuses to perform its constitutionally defined role, we'll be unable to escape from the bad or crazy place that we find ourselves in. We have no remedy for a rogue President Clinton or President Trump, and that in itself puts every citizen in a really dangerous place.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Persistent

How many times have you seen this on mainstream TV news: An intrepid "reporter" approaches a Republican luminary (e.g., a sitting governor, a congressman or a senator) and asks, "How do you respond to the accusations about Donald Trump groping women?" The luminary, depending on whether he or she is #nevertrump will try his/her best to defend the Donald, suggesting that the allegations are alleged and not proven, or will lambast him. The reporter will press, asking how any decent man/woman could support Trump? Then press again—each question intended to demonstrate to the public just how bad Donald Trump really is. Not one question addressing any substantive policy or issue. The GOP luminary will respond accordingly, but the responses aren't nearly as important as the questions. The questions indict, and that's their intent. You've seen this play out dozens (check that—hundreds) of times over the past few months.

How many times have you seen this on mainstream TV news: An intrepid "reporter" approaches a Democrat luminary (e.g., the sitting president, or a governor, a congressman or a senator) and asks, "How do you respond to hard facts disclosed in hacked emails that Hillary Clinton tried to subvert an FBI investigation, provided favors to foreign investors in a pay-for-play scheme, threatened national security with her private email server? Do you think its okay to tell the voters one thing but have a 'private position' that they don't know about? That's what she said she does, after all. Do you think that should cause voters some concern?"

Wait! You rarely, if ever, have seen the second encounter. In fact, I'll bet you've never seen it, but if you have, you'll note that there's never a follow-up question—never. The Dem luminary is allowed to defend his candidate, not matter how dishonest the defense is.

The media is shaping the election to favor their candidate—Hillary Clinton. They accomplish this through the tone of their "reporting," through the frequency with which they address specific issues, through the questions they ask and the innuendo those questions carry, through simple omission of important stories that hurt their candidate and unwarranted emphasis on stories that hurt her opponent. Editors allow opinion to creep into "news" stories, cherry pick subjects that will be friendly to Clinton and damaging to Trump. They cut off interviews that begin to damage Clinton. They ask follow-up questions and then follow-up the follow-up when Trump is under fire, but almost never ask a follow up when Clinton or one of her surrogates tells an obvious lie.

Because the voting public has become exhausted by the media and Clinton campaign's never-ending allegations that Trump is a serial sexual abuser, unhinged and/or otherwise unfit for the presidency (can you say, racist or bigot or misogynist or xenophobe?), they have created a new meme (voiced by Barack Obama in a news conference today): any suggestion that the election is "rigged" is unprecedented and un-American, irresponsible and otherwise just plain evil. It's also whining. Looks like for the next week or so, "rigged" and "whining" will be the Democrat watchwords.

Donald Trump's claims that the election is "rigged," In his ham-handed style, Trump doesn't enunciate his complaint well, but when Trump calls the election "rigged," what he actually means (whether he realizes it or not) is that he is up against a competent, well organized and highly effective propaganda machine. The Clinton campaign aided and abetted by a complicit media have become masters of limiting the discussion to those topics that they want the voters to hear, of repeating the same meme over and over and over again until their claims become the public's reality. The Clinton campaign has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on TV commercials hammering at the same memes while the media supports those memes with its one-sided reporting. Everything else simply vanishes.

One of history's truly evil men once said: “But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.”

Say what you will—Hillary Clinton and her trained hamsters in the media are nothing if not persistent.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Sunk Cost Fallacy

On the one hand, Hillary Clinton would have us believe that she will carry on the "legacy" of Barack Obama's presidency—would, in fact, become Obama 3.0. On the other hand, when confronted with the many serious failures of his presidency, she states that "you can't just throw it [Obama's work] away, you have to fix it." She was referring to an imploding Obamacare system but in reality, it's what she has advocated for all of Obama's domestic and foreign policy disasters. After all, her supporters tell us repeatedly that she has both the "experience" and the "temperament" to do just that.

Richard Fernandez comments:
From Aleppo to Mosul, Yemen to Libya; from the Ukraine to Iran; from Japan to the Philippines the number of places that need fixing keeps growing. Domestically the situation is similar: the next four years must be devoted to repairing what last 8 years destroyed. At every step Hillary will cite her familiarity with the problems as reason for putting her in charge and inveigh against throwing away the gigantic investments of the past. The dictum "we can't just rip it up and throw it away" is psychologically convincing. It applies to a wide variety of situations, from the trillion dollar Obamacare debacle to the hundreds of billions spent trying to ingratiate the US with Iran.

However economists call this the sunk cost fallacy. It is "used by economists and behavioral scientists to describe the phenomenon where people justify increased investment of money, time, lives, etc. in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment ("sunk costs"), despite new evidence suggesting that the cost, beginning immediately, of continuing the decision outweighs the expected benefit." The sunk cost fallacy explains why people continue to eat rancid food in a restaurant because they've already paid for it. It also explains why a Third Obama term is necessary. Somebody's got to fix the effects of the last two.
Stated more succinctly, it's a lot like the old saying, "You're throwing good money after bad."

A Democrat president made monumentally bad decisions (e.g., Libya and Syria), established monumentally bad policies (e.g., Obamacare), sucked up to monumentally bad people (e.g., the Mullahs of Iran) and now (to quote his long time mentor) the chickens have come home to roost. His bad decisions haunt both domestic and foreign policy. But no worries, another Democrat—Hillary Clinton—will fix all of this, not by rooting out the bad but simply by tweaking it just a little bit—the sunken cost fallacy.

Some of the damage done by the Obama presidency cannot be undone. Hillary can't do it and neither can the Donald. But much of Obama "legacy" (e.g., Obamacare and the Iran "deal") needs to be uprooted, not tweaked—uprooted. New ideas and new policies—simpler, less intrusive, more focused, more efficienct and effective, and less hyper-partisan—must be implemented to replace the failed policies and practices that currently exist. There's no chance of getting that done under Obama 3.0. None. At. All.

Monday, October 17, 2016

Common Ground

During the Obama years, the Left came out of the closet, using the UN as a shield to foist their own deeply anti-Israel (and subtly anti-Semitic) sentiment. They championed the palestinians and Hamas—an oppressive, murderous  Islamic terror cult that is anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-diversity, anti-democratic, and anti-free speech. At its core, the palestinians and Hamas are totalitarian. Maybe that's why the Left makes common cause with them.

Barack Obama joined the Left's anti-Israel chorus as often as he could, trying hard to moderate his personal anti-Israel bias with the need to mollify clueless Jewish donors. After all, the money had to keep rolling in.

In an article aptly entitled, "The United Nations Is Run By A Bunch Of Depraved Totalitarians, Villainous Barbarians, And Anti-Semitic Scum: Just a Friendly Reminder," (read the whole thing) David Harsanyi writes:
The United Nations (UNESCO, to be specific) recently adopted an anti-Israel resolution that disregarded the Jewish connection to the faith’s two holiest sites, the Temple Mount and Western Wall. The motion was supported by 24 nations, including Russia and China. Only six countries opposed it.

Now, the UN is too impotent to make history, much less redraft it. Still, it’s never a waste of time to remind people of its long record of empowering cheerleaders and perpetrators of violence against Jews.

It’s not merely that UN organizations like the “human rights commission” or UNESCO are often led by Islamic supremacists, but that the majority of first-world nations have — with few exceptions, like the United States and the United Kingdom — been enablers of anti-Semitism for over 50 years.

This new motion, which claims freedom of worship has been curtailed by “escalating aggressions and illegal measures,” was submitted by the Palestinians and backed by various other twelfth-century strongholds like Morocco (where it’s illegal to possess a Bible written in Arabic), Algeria (where Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men and insulting Muhammad is punishable by death), Iran (with restrictions too long to list), Pakistan (where the death penalty or life in prison is mandated for apostasy), and Sudan (where converting to Christianity is punishable by death.)

Did I mention UNESCO is an organization that claims it encourages “international peace and universal respect for human rights”? Why would the United States lend its credibility to such a sham?
When the United States under Barack Obama refused to acknowledge that Jerusalem, irrefutably a Jewish city for most of recorded history, is not part of Israel, the main stream media yawned. After all, they wouldn't want to upset Jewish Democrats at this crucial time in the election cycle. Hillary Clinton is not asked to clarify her position on this issue, after all, her trained hamsters in the media wouldn't want to make her uncomfortable, would they? Clinton has to keep the Left happy, but she's also all about donor's money and votes. If asked, she'd lie (what else is new), but in reality I suspect her presidency will follow the Obama mold with schizophrenic positions on Israel month by month.

Come to think of it, Hillary and Hamas should be able to reach common ground. After all, the palestinians (who elected Hamas to represent them) are as dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent as the likely future President of the United States. At least Hillary isn't as murderous, and that's a plus in her favor.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Joke

The polls indicate the Donald Trump is tanking. His own stupid moves along with a relentless series of "October surprise" attacks by the mainstream media have had their affect. He's will likely lose the election. But before you convince yourself that everything you've heard about Trump is true and that the loss is justified, let's step back for a moment.

First, you have every right to hate Donald Trump because he often acts like an a##hole. I get it, and I tend to agree. But there's more:
  • You can jettison critical thinking and buy into the narrative that he is a racist, a bigot, and a misogynist, although real evidence (except cherry-picked sound bytes) for those positions is scant. 
  • You can fall into PC-thinking and argue he is Islamophobic, although his position on Muslim immigration is supported by over 70 percent of all Americans.
  • You can argue that he is attacking freedom of religion, but he has never suggested that a Muslim-American citizens cannot practice their religion; he has, however, suggested that Islam bears some of the responsibility for Islamic terror attacks on our soil. He is not wrong.
  • You can posit that he "lacks judgment," but is his judgment any worse than the judgment of a person who ran an unapproved, insecure private email server that put national secrets at risk?
  • You can suggest that he is "unhinged" or "lacks temperament" because he uses twitter to attack his political enemies, although maybe it's just the fact that he punches back hard when attacked by the Dem and GOP elites that really troubles you.
  • You can jettison rational thought and agree that he wants to start a nuclear war, or a religious war, or a war with Mexico, although he has been anti-war in many instances for many years.
  • You can even suggest, despite his clearly moderate politics over the years, that he is a right-wing extremist.
After all, Hillary Clinton has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to tell you these things in thousands upon thousands of TV commercials, on the stump, and at the debates. I understand. You're going to believe what you want to believe.

But here's the thing. It's not just Hillary—an inveterate liar—who promoted the narrative that has shaped your view of Trump—it's a media that is now so far into the tank for Clinton that it makes no attempt to hide its hatred of Trump. Michael Goodwin writes about The New York Times, but in reality, he's talking about almost every major media outlet including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Univision, MSNBC, the NYT, The Boston Globe, the LAT, and Yahoo News, along with many, many others when he writes:
Opinions, all uniformly anti-Trump, now ooze from the paper’s every pore, with headlines on front-page “news” articles indistinguishable from daily denunciations on the editorial and op-ed pages.

This is not a mere continuation of the old liberal bias that infected the Times, the Washington Post and the broadcast networks for years. This is a malignant strain of conformity that strips away any pretense of fairness in favor of strident partisanship.

The signal that the Times abandoned its traditional church-state separation of news and opinion came in an article by the paper’s media reporter two months ago. In his August piece, Jim Rutenberg declared that most reporters saw Trump “as an abnormal and potentially dangerous candidate,” and concluded they had a duty to be “true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment.”
As the media rant against Trump using "facts" that are force fit to support their narrative, they judiciously avoid any news or comment that might reflect badly on his opponent. And therein lies the rub. The main stream media is now actively supporting the Democrat candidate—not only in their opinion pages—but in the way they deliver the "news." They bury the many negative news stories about Clinton or simply refuse to report those stories at all. Just a few nights ago, the MSM spent a collective 23 minutes during the evening news half hour talking about claims of "sexual abuse" against Trump and less than 1 minute talking about the many important policy questions raised by Clinton campaign email leaks—including her positions on open borders, global trade, Wall Street connections, and the statement that she maintains "public and private positions" on most important policy matters. 23:1. Hmmm.

The media will likely succeed in its effort to elect Hillary Clinton to the presidency. And because she is their candidate, the media will work very, very hard to protect her once she is in office. It will disregard the many scandals that will emerge over the next four years and downplay the many failures that will be part of Obama 3.0 policies and decisions.

But the media's victory will be shallow, because public trust in the media, already at the lowest levels in history, will drop even further. The "malignant strain of conformity that strips away any pretense of fairness in favor of strident partisanship" has angered a lot of people, including yours truly, and it may very well shape the votes of many citizens. The media and the principles of ethical journalism it purports to practice is now viewed as a joke. There's only one problem—the joke is on all of us, and it isn't funny at all.

UPDATE:
---------------

David Gelernter calls Donald Trump an "infantile vulgarian" and yet, he intends to vote for Trump because the alternative is worse. He suggests the Hillary Clinton's dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence are perfectly acceptable to all Democrats because most refuse to look at the real Hillary honestly. He also notes that her dishonesty, corruption and incompetence are acceptable to the elites of both parties because they often exhibit toned down forms of the same dishonesty, corruption and incompetence. He then writes:
Impeachment is Trump-voters’ ace in the hole. It’s an abnormal measure, but this is an abnormal year. Impeachment has temporarily dropped out of sight because of special circumstances. Republicans impeached Bill Clinton but got burned in the process; Mr. Obama, as the first black president, was impeachment-proof. Any other president would have encountered serious impeachment talk on several occasions, especially when he ignored Congress and the Constitution and made his own personal treaty-in-all-but-name with Iran.

But Mr. Trump will not have Mr. Obama’s advantages—to say the least. Mr. Trump will be impeachment bait ...

Nothing can stop Mr. Trump from shooting off his mouth, but that’s all right. I want America’s enemies off-balance and guessing. For eight years it’s been Humiliate America season—buzz our ships, capture and embarrass our men, murder an American ambassador—a resoundingly successful attempt to spit in our faces and tell each one of us to drop dead. Thanks, Mr. President. Enough is enough. You know that Hillary is Obama Part III. We can’t let that happen. Parts I and II have brought us close enough to catastrophe.

That is the problem for those whose integrity or nobility won’t allow them to vote for Mr. Trump despite their dislike of Mrs. Clinton. There is only one way to take part in protecting this nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump. A vote for anyone else or for no one might be an honest, admirable gesture in principle, but we don’t need conscientious objectors in this war for the country’s international standing and hence for the safety of the world and the American way of life. It’s too bad one has to vote for Mr. Trump. It will be an unhappy moment at best. Some people will feel dirty, or pained, or outright disgraced.

But when all is said and done, it’s no big deal of a sacrifice for your country. I can think of bigger ones.
There's one more thing—a vote for Trump is a hard poke in the eye to a media that has become viciously biased. Wouldn't it be fun to see media heads explode at ABC, CBS, NPR, CNN or MSNBC, at the NYT, the LAT, or the Boston Globe? It sure would! Won't happen, but during these dark days as Clinton prepares to run the table, it's really something amusing to think about.