The word this week is that the State Department is going to release the thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton tried to delete but were recovered from her server by the FBI in its investigation.

The question that Hillary Clinton supporters need to answer is, how can there be thousands of State Department emails that were erased from Hillary Clinton’s server when she said that all State Department related emails were turned over to the State Department.

Then she said that she didn’t lie about her server, and she even said that FBI Director James Comey said she was telling the truth. Of course, Comey said no such thing, but then Hillary Clinton explained that she had “short-circuited,” which is why she told another lie. But she has yet to explain her current version of the truth.

I’ve been lied to by enough politicians not to be surprised, but usually, when you catch a politician in a lie, they have some kind of fallback position. Hillary Clinton keeps telling the same lies.

Everyone outside of the mainstream media knew that Hillary Clinton was lying the first time she spoke about her personal server. But now there is absolute proof that she was lying, and yet she is sticking with the same old lies that the FBI – the Obama administration’s FBI – said are lies.

President Barack Hussein Obama is desperate for Hillary Clinton to get elected president because he is certain that his economic policies and foreign relations policies, which have been a complete disaster for eight years, will be an amazing success after 12 years.

About half of Syria’s population has been displaced, Libya is in utter chaos, Iraq is at war and Iran is on its way to having an Obama-approved nuclear bomb. The Middle East has to hope that it doesn’t have to face four more years of Obama policies.

*****

Hillary Clinton has now been over 250 days without holding a press conference. Her last press conference was Dec. 4, 2015. She is running for president and hasn’t held a press conference this year.

It is incredible that even Hillary Clinton could get away without holding a press conference while running for president. But then again, members of the press allowed themselves to be corralled by ropes when covering Hillary Clinton in a parade. It is inconceivable that the so-called journalists would allow that.

Why won’t Hillary Clinton hold a press conference? The answer seems obvious. Hillary Clinton does not do well in situations that she does not control. Sitting down with one reporter, the campaign can control the questions she is asked. We know that the Democrats do this from the emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that have been released. The DNC tells reporters what to do.

But the DNC can’t control an entire room full of reporters. Someone might ask her about Benghazi or her private email server, or how she explains the fact that after large donations were made to the Clinton Foundation, or large speaking fees paid to Bill Clinton, countries got special favors from the US State Department.

Or how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton ended up in Bogota, Columbia, on the same day, meeting with the same people by coincidence.

Or they might ask her the really tough question of what she accomplished as secretary of state or as a US senator.

Shoot, somebody might even ask her for a tip on investing in cattle futures, since it is believed that Hillary Clinton has the all time record for making the highest percentage of profit investing in cattle futures ever.

*****

The mainstream media are making a huge deal out of the current poll numbers where Hillary Clinton is leading. Since in recent years the polls have had major problems accurately forecasting the results of elections, putting too much trust in poll numbers is a mistake. And in addition, Donald Trump, in the primaries, consistently outperformed the polls.

But even if the polls are accurate to three decimal points, there is another factor to consider. Trump isn’t advertising, and advertising works. Hillary Clinton is spending millions of dollars a week on advertising; Trump is spending zero.

If you are Trump supporter who believes that Trump will never advertise then it would make sense to be worried, but Trump is going to advertise.

I don’t have a mole in his campaign or hiding in his hair, but Trump is a successful businessman, and good businessmen don’t waste money. I would imagine that Trump has looked at the poll numbers for the last five or six presidential elections and found that the poll numbers in August don’t mean anything. The numbers show huge swings and are no indication of who is eventually going to win.

My guess is that Trump is waiting to spend his advertising dollars closer to the election, when it is more likely to have an effect on the outcome.

There is only one poll that matters, and that is the poll taken Nov. 8 at polling places all over the country.

*****

Hillary Clinton is running an ad where David Letterman points out that Trump products are all manufactured overseas. The rejoinder to this is obvious: Trump is a businessman, and in order to make a profit on Trump ties and such, they have to be manufactured overseas because the current trade laws make it impossible for US manufactured items to compete in a global market.

Trump says that when he is elected president he is going to change the current laws that will allow businessmen like himself to manufacture products in the US and still make a profit. It’s not Trump’s fault that the policies of previous administrations have forced all manufacturing overseas, but it is a problem that he says he will fix once he is in office.

Trump makes products overseas for the same reason the average American buys products made overseas – the current trade laws make those products much cheaper than the same products manufactured in the US.

Overseas the manufacturers can pay their employees pennies an hour. They don’t have to comply with the same stringent environmental protection laws and don’t have to pay the taxes or comply with the myriad government regulations that federal, state and local governments now place on manufacturers in the US.

Trump is not responsible for any of these policies, regulations or laws; Hillary Clinton is.

If I were Trump, I’d be tempted to run the same ad with the same items. Have Letterman hold up a tie and have the screen read “Manufactured in Communist China $50; to manufacture in the USA under the Clinton/Obama dynasty, $250.” I think it could be an effective ad.

*****

If you want to see what unrestricted socialism does to an economy, look at what has happened to Venezuela, which is sitting on the largest known oil deposit in the world and going bankrupt.

Venezuela has more oil that Saudi Arabia, which is a kingdom – also not the best form of government. But even with the drop in oil prices Saudi Arabia is an extremely wealthy nation and Venezuela is having food riots. People are starving. They have no electricity. They have no gas.

*****

When I read articles about global warming, climate change or whatever the politically correct term is today, it always reminds me of the old joke about the Russian newspaper Pravda reporting on a horse race between a Russian horse and an American horse where the American horse won. The headline in Pravda was, “Russian Horse Finishes Second, American Horse Next to Last.”

Accurate but misleading.

Even the term climate change is misleading, although entirely accurate. Yes, Virginia, the climate is changing, and it always has and always will. The climate, like the weather, is never stagnant. The deserts in the Middle East were once covered with tropical forests and much of North America and Europe were covered with glaciers.

The big bugaboo in the whole climate change debate is that, although it is true that the climate is changing, there is no scientific proof that man’s use of carbon-based fuels is causing that change.

If you read about it, you will read that scientists believe there is a correlation. What scientists believe is really not an issue. Scientists, like everyone else, are free, or at least in this country are free, to believe whatever they want. They can believe that 1,000 angels can dance on the head of a pin, or 100, or none because they don’t believe that angels or pins exist. What they can prove is what matters.

Remember after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, when climate change supporters said that because of climate change the US was going to experience more and bigger hurricanes? They talked about super hurricanes that would be created because of climate change that would wipe out entire cities.

Now we are in the midst of the longest hurricane drought on record. A major hurricane has not hit the US in over 10 years. It is possible that a major hurricane could wipe out South Florida next week, next month, next year or in 2020. But the idea that climate change would start causing super hurricanes and Katrina was the first in what was going to be a regular occurrence has turned out so far to be wrong.

But that’s OK because now the climate change groupies are saying that the lack of major hurricanes is proof that burning fossil fuels is causing the climate to change.   How the two are related is a little sketchy, but we know it is true because the mainstream media are reporting it.

*****

There are many problems with the anti-carbon crowd, but one of the biggest is that they try to convince people that the only factor that causes climate change is the increase in carbon compounds in the atmosphere. It seems absurd.

I didn’t know that Earth’s orbit around the sun wasn’t static, but it is. On a 100,000 year cycle, the amount of energy Earth receives from the sun varies by over 3 percent. So during periods when our planet is moving away from the sun, Earth cools, and when it is moving back toward the sun there is a warming trend.

Why don’t the climate change cultists discuss how Earth’s distant from the sun also effects climate change? The 100,000 year cycle of Earth’s orbit has been known since 1867, so the climate change cultists should have had plenty of time to incorporate it into their theories.

*****

Donald Trump has made some dumb statements in this presidential race, but he didn’t say anything untoward in Wilmington on Tuesday, August 12. This gaffe was totally invented by the media.

Reporters know from recording people all the time that people in speaking often start one sentence, start a second and then go back and finish the first. People do not talk like they write. Record a few conversations if you don’t believe that. It is, by the way, perfectly legal in North Carolina as long as you are part of the conversation.

What Trump said is that people need to defeat Hillary Clinton because of the judges she is going to appoint, and in particular the supporters of the Second Amendment may be able to affect the outcome.

If instead of saying Second Amendment people, he had said Fourth Amendment people, would that have meant that the Fourth Amendment people should shoot Hillary Clinton? It is absurd.

Trump makes more than enough unforced errors, but this wasn’t one.

I watched a video of the speech, and when I read the news reports I thought, “What in the world is the mainstream media talking about now?” Then I found the quote. It is such a stretch that it goes way beyond advocacy journalism all the way to pure propaganda.

Trump is not a linear speaker. He doesn’t follow a clear line of reasoning when he speaks. He is not like Hillary Clinton, where every phrase, sentence and word is run through focus groups before she reads them off a teleprompter.

Trump is a stream of consciousness speaker. He says whatever pops into his head at the moment. Fortunately, he is learning to walk back some of his statements.

For instance, although the mainstream media continue to report that he wants to ban all Muslims from entering the US, Trump is now saying that he wants to restrict immigration from countries that sponsor terrorism and where the people who want to come to the US cannot be properly vetted.

Other candidates are allowed to walk back statements all the time, but Trump is not.

*****

Pollsters, like economists and meteorologists, can be wrong most of the time and for some reason people still listen when they make a prediction.

People keep comparing this presidential election to the 1980 election where Ronald Reagan beat President Jimmy Carter by a huge margin when the pollsters had said the race was too close to call.

But why focus on Reagan versus Carter? Take a look at Carter versus Ford in 1976. According to the polls in August, Carter was winning 54 percent to 32 percent for Ford. In September, Carter was up 51 percent to 40 percent. And in the final polls before the election, Ford was up 49 percent to 48 percent, but in the election Carter won 50 percent to 48 percent.

In 1996, the polls in August showed Clinton with 55 percent leading Sen. Bob Dole with 34 percent. Clinton won 49 percent to 41 percent.

In August 2000, George W. Bush was leading Vice President Al Gore 54 percent to 37 percent. By late August the race had closed to 46 percent for Bush and 45 percent for Gore. Gore won the popular vote with both candidates having 48 percent. Bush won the Electoral College vote.

The point is that polls in August are not a very good indicator of the final tally. It is possible that the polls are entirely accurate and if the vote were held on the day of the polls then the vote would come out exactly as the polls predict, but it is also possible that the polls are highly inaccurate and the vote on any day would come out with the same percentages as they do on Election Day. It is impossible to know because the election is only held once.

All the talk about Trump being out of the race because according to some polls he is down by double digits is a bunch of hogwash, and anyone who has ever bothered to look at historic polling figures knows that.

Although the polls are all over the place, there is one factor that is consistent, and that is the totals tighten on Election Day.

*****

I can understand people who believe nuclear weapons should be abolished from the face of the earth, but the chance of doing that is about the same as abolishing guns from the face of the earth. In other words, the only way it could happen is if civilization as we know it was completely destroyed and humans had to start over using sticks and stones to kill food and protect themselves from wild animals.

Before the invention of agriculture, man was a hunter-gatherer. Some people today want to eliminate the hunter part and see early man as simply gathering fruits and nuts from the forest and living peaceable with wild animals and other groups of people. When two strange groups or tribes ran into each other they, according to this scenario, hugged and kissed and sang a primitive version of kumbaya together. Wild animals were like pets and everything was beautiful.

According to one source, that world existed in the Garden of Eden, but in one generation after Adam and Eve ate the apple, things got bad, Cain killed Abel and humans haven’t stopped killing since.

Was Abel less dead because he wasn’t killed with a gun?

*****

Hillary Clinton supporters hate to talk about Benghazi, Libya and the entire Middle East, where the policies promoted by Hillary Clinton and Obama have brought undeniable chaos.

Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s State Department was so disorganized that she didn’t know a consulate in one of the most violent and troubled parts of the world needed more security. It reflects on what she was doing as secretary of state and indicates that the goal of flying more miles at government expense than any previous secretary of state may not have been the most meaningful.

But the attack on the Benghazi consulate that resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was on Sept. 11, 2011 and should not have been a complete surprise. Even a dolt would know that American diplomats all over the world should be more cautious on Sept. 11, and in particular on Sept. 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers.

If Hillary Clinton was not receiving the pleas from Stevens for more security, she should have sent out an email to all American embassies warning them that Sept. 11 was a dangerous day and they should all take precautions not to be exposed. Locking down the embassies would send the wrong message, but for ambassadors to spend the day in their offices where they have adequate protection would not be unreasonable.

With all the talk of Benghazi, it seems people have forgotten that Chris Stevens disappeared. On Sept. 11, neither Hillary Clinton nor anyone else knew where he was or whether he was dead or alive. It turns out that he made it to the hospital alive, but according to reports there is still some question about who found him and how he got to the hospital. Is it possible that with proper medical care, his life could have been saved? It appears nobody knows.

*****

It will surprise some of you to read that I agree with the federal courts on voter ID laws. I agree completely that people should not have to provide identification to vote because, like the judges, I know in my heart that no American would ever lie about their identity.

If there were American citizens who would lie about their identity in order to illegally vote then certainly requiring voters to identify themselves would be necessary, but we know that there are not and that will make life in the United States much easier.

Since we know that no American would ever lie about who they are, there is certainly no reason why anyone should have to show their driver’s license to prove their identity; their word is good enough. In fact, we don’t even need identification.

Certainly there is no need for anyone to check identification when a person is buying beer or wine. If the buyer says they are 21, we know that Americans never lie, so they must be 21. The same for prescription medicine. No American would claim to be someone else in order, for instance, to pick up a bottle of oxycodone. The pharmacist should simply ask the person who they are and that should be the end of it.

There is certainly no need to check anyone’s identification before they board a flight because we know that Americans never lie about who they are. If someone looks exactly like a known ISIS terrorist on the no fly list, but he says his name is John Smith, we know that it is simply a case of mistaken identity and that John Smith happens to look exactly like the known terrorist, down to the scars on his face.

And since people don’t ever lie, why have all the X-rays of luggage and metal detectors at the airport? All that can be replaced by one person who will simply ask each passenger if they have a bomb or weapon on their person or in their carry on. If they say no, we know that they are telling the truth.

This will also make things like teaching certificates and job references unnecessary. If a person says that they have a Ph.D. from Harvard University, then we know they are telling the truth because people never lie about themselves.

I agree with the courts that people never lie, but I think the no identification to vote needs to be greatly expanded to all aspects of life.