If the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) takes over elections in the US, any semblance of free elections is gone and we become a banana republic – a very large banana republic, but a banana republic nonetheless.
If the DHS had run the last presidential election, President Barack Hussein Obama, who appointed Jeh Johnson as secretary of Homeland Security, would have won with 90 percent of the vote, or if he were feeling generous, maybe 75 percent of the vote.
One of the beauties of our election system is that it is so diverse. You don’t have one federal agency overseeing elections, you have thousands of local jurisdictions running elections. It is still possible to have crooked elections, but manipulating the outcome when you have over 9,000 local bodies controlling the vote is nearly impossible.
It’s a crazy system, but it works. To affect the outcome of a presidential race, the election has to be incredibly close so that some local official, by allowing cemetery residents and such to vote, can make a difference.
Look at what Obama did with the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS audited conservative nonprofits and refused to grant nonprofit status to conservative organizations. What happened? Did anyone go to jail? No, nothing really happened. A couple of folks lost their jobs and that is all.
Consider what DHS is doing on our southern border. It is ignoring the law and allowing people to enter the country illegally because the president wants open borders despite the law. Do we want the president to have that kind of control over elections?
Here is another thought: Do we want the agency that is in charge of the ridiculously inefficient and extremely annoying airport security system in charge of elections?
Imagine if the same level of incompetency that exists in the Transportation Security Administration existed in the Elections Security Administration. It would be complete chaos at the polls.
Forget about voter identification laws. Under the current administration there would probably be two lines at the polls. One would be for Democrats, where people sailed through and were allowed to vote even if they had just crossed the border from Mexico that morning, had no identification, didn’t speak a word of English and had no idea who was running.
The line for Republicans would snake out the door and around the block, moving at a snail’s pace. Republicans would be allowed to vote after they had waited in line for six hours, were strip-searched, had seven forms of identification and passed a long lengthy test on the Constitution.
Of course, any Republican who had a dangerous object on their person, like a fingernail clipper or a bottle of water larger than three ounces, would be detained as a suspected terrorist. They, of course, would be released as soon as the polls closed and there was no way that they could vote.
This may be the very worst idea to be floated out there by the Obama administration, and that is saying a lot.
Fortunately, Obama only has five months left in office and it is doubtful, even by executive order, that he can change things that quickly, but the very idea that it is being considered is terrifying.
*****
Hillary Clinton hasn’t held a press conference in over 270 days. It is unheard of for the presidential candidate of a major political party not to hold press conferences. But she is getting away with it because the press worships her.
Remember her press conference about the emails that was held at the United Nations, where most national reporters covering the campaign didn’t have access? The result was what appeared to be a press conference, but she was standing in front of a group of mainly foreign reporters who had limited knowledge or interest in the email system that a former US secretary of state used. She skated through that by telling a bunch of obvious lies, but she didn’t suffer the grilling she would have received if it had been a real press conference in front of American reporters who knew the issue.
Hillary Clinton can’t win a debate against Donald Trump. She’s not a good speaker, amazingly slow on her feet and, when unscripted, makes statements that her campaign starts walking back while she is still on the stage. There is a reason that Hillary Clinton usually makes prepared remarks in front of carefully screened groups.
But the Clintons are nothing if not clever. Knowing that debating Trump, who destroyed his 16 Republican opponents in debate after debate, is a recipe for disaster, what are the Clinton campaign’s options?
She could claim to have laryngitis to get out of one debate, but she can’t claim to have laryngitis three times.
What if all these health issues that the conservative media are reporting on, but the mainstream media are not, are a smoke screen. How about just before the first debate Hillary Clinton collapses and they discover that, as a lingering effect from her fall, she has some medical condition that is not life threatening but requires surgery and bed rest for two months. The doctors say that she will completely recover, but she will be unable to campaign for two months.
Could they sell that to the American people? No one else could, but Hillary Clinton does have the unwavering support of the mainstream media. The New York Times would run long articles quoting the leading doctors in the field about how recovery from this surgery is 100 percent. They would report that it is not serious if taken care of immediately and that there are no lingering effects, but it does require two months of bed rest. By the time of the inauguration she should be 100 percent.
After it is no longer possible to schedule a debate, Hillary Clinton can have a remarkable recovery and get back on the campaign trail. The doctors will report how strong and healthy she is and that she fully recovered in half the time they predicted. She will count on the sympathy vote and it will be difficult for Trump to attack someone recovering from surgery in a hospital bed.
It’s farfetched, but consider the alternative: Hillary Clinton three times walks on the stage with Donald Trump and is reduced to blathering. The moderators will treat Hillary Clinton with kid gloves, but Trump won’t and the crowd won’t be 100 percent behind Hillary Clinton as she is used to. She will get jeered. Trump will be magnanimous and ask them to quiet down. Hillary Clinton, who is the most protected candidate to ever run for president, will be rattled.
Once they walk on to the stage, she is in Trump’s world.
If the campaign were going to go through with the debates, Hillary Clinton should be holding a press conference every day to get used to being asked questions and thinking on her feet. She should be speaking impromptu to crowds that aren’t necessarily all her supporters.
Instead, Hillary Clinton has all but withdrawn from campaigning personally. She is making about one appearance a week and the press is kept as far away from her as possible.
Could this bizarre scenario happen? In this election anything could happen. A year ago was anyone predicting that a billionaire reality TV star would be running for president or that Hillary Clinton would have to fight off a strong challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic nomination?
Nothing about this election so far has followed the normal course of events; there is no reason to think that the debates will be any different.
*****
Hillary Clinton said that her attorneys looked over all 60,000 emails on her server from the time she was secretary of state.
We know that isn’t true because FBI Director James Comey said it wasn’t true. He said they did keyword searches, which is an entirely different thing, and it could explain how some of the 15,000 emails about state department business were missed.
But it can’t explain how or why 30 emails about Benghazi were missed. The congressional committee investigating Benghazi was one of the reasons the emails were ever released.
If Clinton’s people were doing a keyword search for emails that needed to be turned over to the Benghazi committee, doesn’t it seem like Benghazi would be one of the key words you would search for?
It hardly seems likely that Benghazi would be mentioned in an email about her daughter’s wedding, her mother’s funeral or yoga.
Of course, Hillary Clinton could have sent an email to Chelsea, “Whatever you do, don’t honeymoon in Benghazi.” Or, “Isn’t it sad my mother never got to visit Benghazi. It was on her bucket list.” Or, “Wow wouldn’t it be fun to do yoga in Benghazi with terrorists firing their weapons all around you. I mean with spontaneous protestors firing heavy machine guns and mortars all around you.”
Somehow none of those emails seem very likely.
But we know from Hillary Clinton’s own mouth that all the emails that might have anything to do with State Department business were released, so where did this additional 15,000 come from? It can only be from the same vast right-wing conspiracy that created all that fuss about Bill Clinton having an affair with Monica Lewinsky when she was an unpaid White House intern.
The good news is that the federal judges hearing presiding over cases concerning the release of State Department documents are growing tired of waiting. The information being released is a result of lawsuits because neither the State Department nor Hillary Clinton seem to recognize the Freedom of Information Act as law.
One thing Hillary Clinton will bring, if she is elected, is the most secretive White House in modern times. The Hillary Clinton White House will make the Obama White House look like a glass house.
*****
Because of the release of more emails and, after three years, the release of Hillary Clinton’s calendar while she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton can no longer deny that over half the people she met with had donated to the Clinton Foundation. She also cannot deny that her constant aide Huma Abedin was the conduit through which requests from the Clinton Foundation were made.
The Hillary Clinton campaign’s current fallback position is that there is no quid pro quo. Meaning that no one has been able to prove that she met with people because they donated to the Clinton Foundation and can’t prove that she did favors for them as secretary of state because they made large donations to the Clinton Foundation or paid Bill Clinton enormous speaking fees.
But there is quid pro quo. Simply meeting with or talking on the phone to the secretary of state is of huge value, in particular it is of huge value to foreign nationals.
If you are trying to convince someone to make a big investment in your company and you can drop into the conversation, “Yesterday, when I was meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton …”, that raises your chances of being taken seriously tremendously.
The secretary of state is the person the US sends to meet with heads of state. It is no small thing to have access.
Also, you don’t have to have a written statement that says, “If you pay my husband $500,000 plus expenses for a speech, the State Department will grant you special trading status with Iran.”
The fact that the payment was made and the special privilege granted is enough to prove that there is a connection. Particularly when it happens over and over again, and those who don’t pay don’t get special favors.
It also isn’t like a campaign contribution. A campaign contribution, first, is a public record, and, second, it can only be used for campaign expenses. The Clinton Foundation money is used to support the Clintons’ extremely extravagant lifestyle, and to hand out money to their friends.
It is nearly impossible to figure out all the different organizations that make up the Clinton Foundation, how they relate to each other and how the money flows. But only about 10 percent of the billions of dollars donated to the foundation has ever been used for charitable work. Most of the money has gone to staff, consultants, meetings, offices, private jets and the Clintons.
So far the emails and the calendar are damning evidence, but Wikileaks says it has more.
It doesn’t seem like Hillary Clinton would be dumb enough to put anything like, “if you pay, I’ll do this” down in writing, but evidently she thought no one would ever see the emails on her private server. It is certainly possible that Hillary Clinton has so little understanding of the internet and how it works that she thought wiping her server clean would destroy all the evidence.
If it were not for a number of lawsuits by conservative organizations, and the demands of the House Benghazi committee, the American people would know nothing about any of this.
*****
Hillary Clinton may be the most politically tone deaf politician to run for president since Walter Mondale, who thought telling people he was going to raise their taxes would win him votes. It didn’t. He suffered the worst defeat in the history of modern presidential elections.
Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state to pad her resume for her presidential run in 2016. She was offered the job largely because Obama wanted her out of the country as much as possible so he wouldn’t have to worry about a challenge from her in the 2012 Democratic primary. It was obvious that once she lost the Democratic primary in 2008, she planned to run again.
So Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state to kill time while she waited her turn to be president. Considering that, look at her record as secretary of state. If you were planning on running for president in four years, wouldn’t you as secretary of state try to have one major accomplishment? The first time she was asked what she accomplished, even she didn’t have an answer, as if that were a trick question.
Maybe she planned for her major accomplishment to be “resetting” the relationship with Russia, but she mucked that up from the beginning. The idea of having a reset button is corny beyond words, but if you are going to have a red reset button like in the Staples commercial, at least check with someone that speaks Russian to make sure you spell “reset” right.
But after the relationship with Russia was reset by Clinton, then Russia invaded Crimea and took it over and attacked eastern Ukraine in a battle that is still ongoing.
She can’t claim any credit in the Middle East, since things in Syria, Libya, and Iraq are worse then ever. Besides, she doesn’t want to mention Libya or the Middle East because that will remind people of Benghazi, which may or may not have been her biggest foreign policy disaster.
Who do you want to get the call at 3 a.m.? Not Hillary Clinton, who will say: Call me back in the morning and tell me what happened.
Americans fought for 13 hours with no help from the State Department. Since it started with an attack on a State Department compound, you would expect the secretary of state to be on the phone all night demanding that every military asset possible be used to rescue her people. But Hillary Clinton did nothing.
It appears she made it a point not to do anything while secretary of state except fly around the world at government expense. It’s really not a terrible plan from a political standpoint. If you don’t do anything you don’t make any mistakes.
She tried to reset relations with Russia and that failed. Her efforts in Libya were a disaster that got four Americans killed, including the first American ambassador killed in the line of duty since Jimmy Carter was president. Then, to top it off, she kept all her emails on a private server in her basement.
Is Hillary Clinton really dimwitted? Did she think that in today’s world she would be able to get away with that? If you consider the fact that she knew she was going to run for president that was simply dumb.
Then there is the entire Clinton Foundation scandal. Hillary Clinton should have insisted that no donations from foreign governments, foreign corporations or foreign nationals be accepted while she was secretary of state simply because of the possibility that it might look bad.
Even if you are the most ardent Clinton supporter, you have to admit that it looks bad to have over half of your meetings be with people who made big donations to a foundation run by your husband.
*****
The steady drip, drip, drip of the release of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails cannot be ignored.
Last week, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, was told that not only could he not see the recent emails released that were discovered by the FBI that had been erased from Hillary Clinton’s private, unprotected homebrew server, but that he could not even be told which government agency was restricting access to those emails. They were considered too top secret to reveal any information about them, including the agency that rated them top secret.
So the chairman of the House Oversight Committee doesn’t have the necessary clearance to receive any information at all about these emails, much less view the emails themselves – emails that no doubt Russia, China, North Korea, Israel and probably every other country involved in cyber espionage has, including our allies. No doubt Wikileaks also has these emails and Wikileaks, unlike the federal government, has no restrictions on what they can and will release.
*****
Hillary Clinton is totally against building a wall on the southern border. Or she is now that Trump is in favor of a wall. Back when her husband was president, he started building a wall and Hillary Clinton was totally in favor of protecting our borders.
If Hillary Clinton ever held a press conference, a reporter could ask her what made her change her mind and if she believes the wall that Bill Clinton had built, which is 20 feet tall in some places, should be torn down. If Hillary Clinton believes in open borders, it doesn’t make sense to have a wall protecting California from illegal immigrants crossing the border but not protecting Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
*****
The left is caught between a rock and hard place with the recent revelations about the connection between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
Left-wing groups are demanding that if Hillary Clinton is elected president that the Clinton family cut all ties to the Clinton Foundation. But how can a rational person make the argument that it is wrong for the president’s family to be raising money all over the world for a foundation and it is not wrong for the secretary of state’s family to be doing the same thing?
The idea that the family would cut all ties is pretty funny. Does anyone believe that if Huma Abedin is involved with the Clinton Foundation that the family is not? Or Cheryl Mills or Douglas Band or George Stephanopoulos for that matter? The Clinton cartel is huge and they have been feeding at the Clinton trough for years. If anyone associated with the Clintons is in charge of the foundation then Bill Clinton will simply be running it by proxy.
Since no one can figure out where all the money that has been raised through the foundation has gone, there is no reason to believe that the money flow would stop just because Bill Clinton has publicly stepped down.
It would be like the Mafia bosses who continue to run their operations while in prison.
The left keeps saying that there is no smoking gun, but there are smoking guns all over the place. The fact that over half the people Hillary Clinton met with as secretary of state had made donations to the Clinton Foundation is a smoking gun. The fact that the revenue raised by the foundation increased significantly when Hillary Clinton was appointed secretary of state and then dropped significantly when she stepped down is a smoking gun. How many times has Bill Clinton received speaking fees of $500,000 or more since Hillary Clinton left her job as secretary of state?
The Associated Press did a great story on the appointments that Hillary Clinton had while secretary of state with Clinton Foundation donors. Now it needs to follow up with the percentage of Clinton Foundation donors Secretary of State John Kerry has met with while he has been in office.
If it turns out that Kerry’s appointment book shows that over half of the non-government people he has met with made donations to the Clinton Foundation then perhaps Hillary Clinton had no conflict of interest. But if it turns out, as one would expect, that only a small number of Kerry’s non-government appointments were with Clinton Foundation donors, then you have good evidence that Hillary Clinton gave preferential treatment to Clinton Foundation donors.
Kerry is married to Teresa Heinz, the heir to the Heinz fortune, so it would seem pertinent to see how many of Kerry’s appointments were with people who made donations to the Heinz Endowments.
The AP or some other news organization could also take a look at how many of Hillary Clinton’s appointments had made donations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or the Ford Foundation or the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
If it turns out that a similar number have made donations to any of those foundations then there is no smoking gun, but if it turns out that the percentage who met with her and donated to those foundations is minimal, then you’ve got a smoking gun.
*****
OK, so maybe Hillary Clinton is healthy as a horse; in that case why does she need a step stool to get into her SUV?
I was talking to a relatively healthy 68-year-old recently who still plays in an adult baseball league; he doesn’t need help getting into or out of the dugout.
Hillary Clinton does not behave like a healthy 69-year-old. Perhaps her health problems have nothing to do with her fall, which according to Bill Clinton took her six months of hard work to get over. Maybe, like a lot of folks her age, she needs new knees or hips. But whatever it is, the American people have a right to know what kind of health problems she is battling.
If Trump were led out to the podium, held on to it like a drowning man hanging on to a piece of wood and was then led away from the podium by aides, you can bet the mainstream media would be all over it.
The mainstream media can see that Hillary Clinton is not behaving like a person who is in good health, but are doing everything in their power to help the campaign cover up whatever health problems she is having.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt couldn’t walk unassisted, and the media also hid that from the people. But that was in the 1930s and 1940s. You would expect more from the media today, but we aren’t getting more.
*****
I told someone recently that if I believed what I read about Donald Trump in the mainstream media, I wouldn’t vote for him either. I have never seen such slanted coverage.
Anyone who is considering voting in this election needs to watch a Trump speech and a Hillary Clinton speech. Watch them in their entirety and don’t listen to the commentary afterwards. Sit back and decide for yourself what they said.
Trump does probably play to the crowd too much, but he is not the wild raving lunatic portrayed in the media.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t play to the crowd, isn’t a good speaker and makes outrageous statements about what she plans to do. One thing the American people don’t need is more taxes.
*****
Just like the media blamed Trump for protestors at his rallies and also blamed Trump for protestors at Hillary Clinton rallies, Trump is now being blamed because white supremacists support him. Trump cannot control who supports him, and certainly just because white supremacists support him doesn’t make him one of them, anymore than having black voters support Hillary Clinton makes her black.
And there is KKK leader in California who is supporting Hillary Clinton. The news media doesn’t believe him, but isn’t it interesting that the news media doesn’t question whether KKK leaders actually support Trump, but the media does raise all these doubts about the veracity of the KKK leader who supports Hillary Clinton?
By the way, Hillary Clinton should be really concerned about the inroads that Trump is making into the black vote. If Trump can get his percentage of support from black voters in the 20 percent range, it’s going to be nearly impossible for Hillary Clinton to beat him.
*****
Huma Abedin has reportedly left her husband, evidently because he cannot stop taking his clothes off, taking selfies and sending them to women.
You have to wonder what Hillary Clinton – who Abedin has worked for in some capacity or other her whole adult life – thinks of this. Weiner’s behavior is pretty mild compared to Bill Clinton’s behavior over the years.
Weiner just sends women photos of his manhood; Bill Clinton does it live and in living color. Weiner, as far as I know, has never been accused of rape or sexual assault; Bill Clinton has been accused of both.
Weiner reportedly has not had an affair with the babysitter, but Bill Clinton had an extremely well-publicized affair with unpaid White House intern Monica Lewinsky, an affair so public that her name, Lewinsky has slipped into the vernacular.
So maybe Hillary Clinton will get the idea from Abedin that it makes sense to leave a really bad husband.
*****
Words do have meanings, and using a different word doesn’t change reality.
The Obama State Department now says that the $400 million in cash was not a ransom to release the four American prisoners but that the $400 million was used as leverage to get the release, and the timing of the payment of $400 million in foreign currencies and the release of the four Americans was not a coincidence.
The coincidence story had been floated out there and the American people were not going to accept it. The leverage story is better, but it doesn’t make any difference what you call paying someone to release hostages. You can call it water, but it won’t quench your thirst if you try to drink it. Obama paid a $400 million ransom for four Americans. If the White House wants to call it leverage, nobody can stop them.
Why shouldn’t the US pay ransoms? Because that endangers the lives of all Americans overseas. If the US government paid $400 million to ransom four Americans, how much would the government pay for 10 Americans? What about a child?
It is incredibly naive to pay ransoms, but it is the world that Obama lives in. In that world, if you are nice to bloodthirsty radical Islamic terrorists they will be nice to you.
In Obama’s world, if you politely ask terrorists and drug dealers not to cross the border into the US then they won’t; only honest, hardworking people will cross illegally into the country. If you call attacks by radical Islamic terrorist workforce violence then the attacks will stop.
Secretary of State John Kerry offered further proof of this. He said that the media should stop reporting on terrorists attacks because then people wouldn’t know about them.
It makes me believe that at night Kerry pulls the covers up over his head so the monsters in the closet can’t see him.
*****
As if the Middle East needed any more fighting and confusion, now the Turks are attacking the Kurds. The US is supporting both. The Kurds have been the most successful force fighting against ISIS. Now the Turks are getting involved in fighting ISIS, but they also want the territory that the Kurds have taken from ISIS, so they are fighting the Kurds as well.
It seems like Obama can’t get things in the Middle East anymore confused or have anymore groups fighting against each other, but he still has five more months in office, so there is no telling what he might do.
Trump is right: It is the policies of Obama and Hillary Clinton that allowed ISIS to become what it is today, a far reaching terrorist group headquartered in Syria and Iraq. If Obama and Hillary Clinton had not had the Pollyanna attitude that if you are nice to people they will be nice to you, ISIS could have been stopped dead in its tracks, back when it really was the jayvee team.
It’s too bad that Obama wasn’t raised on the Southside of Chicago instead of Hawaii. Maybe in Hawaii everybody loves everybody, but in Chicago he would have learned something about gangs, and what happens if you appear weak to a gang.
