According to emails now released by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign thought it was going to be a huge scandal that President Barack Hussein Obama said on television that he found out about Hillary Clinton’s private email server at the same time as everyone else by reading about it in the paper.

For a man who is supposed to be briefed every day on national security issues, Obama finds out about a lot by reading the newspaper.

But the fact that Obama lied about when he knew about his secretary of state using her own email server turned out to be a nonstory because the mainstream media didn’t find it interesting that Obama would lie about what has turned into a huge story.

Obama had to know about Hillary Clinton’s private email server before the rest of us because he sent emails to her private account.

Obama’s press secretary came out and made some lame excuse and told the White House press it wasn’t really newsworthy. The White House press corps accepted it, like they accept everything they are told by the White House as the gospel truth. The Hillary Clinton campaign evidently didn’t realize how tightly Obama has the White House press tied around his little finger.

*****

Hillary Clinton and her team are big believers in coincidences.

It was just a coincidence that over half the Americans she met with while secretary of state had donated to the Clinton Foundation. It was just a coincidence that countries that made significant donations to the Clinton Foundation received special favors from the State Department. It was just a coincidence that countries and companies that paid Bill Clinton up to $750,000 for a speech received special consideration from the State Department.

It was just a coincidence that the Clinton staff who went through Hillary Clinton’s email server missed thousands of State Department emails and deleted them from the server. It is probably also a coincidence that even though deleting State Department emails is a crime, since the FBI was handing out immunity like it was candy at Halloween, there have been no indictments.

It was just a coincidence that Bill Clinton held a secret meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch days before an announcement on whether to indict Hillary Clinton for clearly illegal activity with her email server.   If you’re wondering about how protective the national press is of the Clintons, that meeting would have been kept secret except a local reporter who was not part of the Clinton cabal found out about it. The national press was willing to keep the secret, but the local guy didn’t know any better and did his job reporting the news.

It is just a coincidence that the wife of the deputy director of the FBI received almost $500,000 in campaign funds from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton friend and operative. Certainly, no one would be influenced by a mere $500,000 – that’s less than Bill Clinton receives for some speeches. Or less than he did receive when his wife was secretary of state. It’s just another coincidence that when Hillary Clinton left the State Department that Bill Clinton’s speaking fees dropped by a couple hundred thousand dollars.

But imagine what Bill Clinton will get for a speech if his wife is president of the United States. Qatar paid $1 million for a five minute meeting with Bill Clinton. The sky is the limit if Hillary Clinton is president.

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Hillary Clinton and her State Department team continued to use their smart phones and BlackBerries when they were in countries like China and Russia that are known to have robust cyber warfare operations.

You may be thinking that as long as they were careful about what they said over the phone, what difference does it make?

I’m sure there is more to this, but one simple explanation is that cell phones have microphones that can be turned on when the phone is off. You can buy software online to do it. What that does is turn the cellphone into a listening device that picks up all the conversations within hearing. So when Hillary Clinton was negotiating with the Russians, the Chinese or anyone else for that matter, if she had her ever-present BlackBerry with her, the people she was negotiating with could know exactly what Clinton’s aides were telling her and what she was telling them.

So it’s no wonder Hillary Clinton wasn’t able to negotiate much of anything as secretary of state. The people she was negotiating with knew exactly what she was going to say before she said it.

Another reason is that it gives a hacker a doorway into the system and the server. In this case, since Hillary Clinton’s server was a homebrew unprotected server in the basement of her house, hacking into that would have been a piece of cake.

It is not surprising that the hackers didn’t leave any evidence behind that they had been there. Why would they? It’s kind of like a thief breaking into your home. If the doors and windows are locked, the thief is likely going to leave some evidence in a broken lock or busted window. But if you leave the door standing wide open, the thief will only leave evidence if he wants to. If he plans to come back and see if you have some better stuff later, he’s probably not going to leave any evidence behind.

Hillary Clinton had an unprotected server. Why leave evidence behind that you have been there? And by the time the FBI got to the server it had been wiped clean. The emails that she kept were stored on another device, so saying that there is no evidence that it was ever hacked is pretty tenuous.

*****

Donald Trump must not have said anything that the liberal mainstream media could use to beat him over the head with because what it picked as the most controversial statement in the final debate isn’t controversial at all.

Admittedly, it could have been answered better by Trump, who still has a bad habit of talking in shorthand.

Will you accept the results of the election? Trump said he couldn’t say.

It’s actually the only answer that makes sense. Al Gore did not accept the results of the election in 2000. He took George W. Bush to court to challenge the election results. Remember the election officials in Florida going over the votes and looking for “hanging chad” and then “pregnant chad” – anything they could find to give Gore a few more votes.

Gore didn’t accept the results of the election and some Democrats, Hillary Clinton would be one, claimed the election was stolen from Gore.

Back in 2000, Gore actually conceded and then took that concession back and challenged the results of the election that led to recounts and lawsuits that ended up before the Supreme Court, which said the results of the election would stand.

If Gore and the Democrats didn’t accept the results of the election after it was over, why should Trump say that he is going to accept the results when the voting has barely started and no votes have been counted?

There are elections every year in the US that have the results challenged.

Sen. John McCain, who really is a Democrat with an R by his name, had to get his two cents in and say he accepted the results of the 2008 presidential election that he lost in a near landslide.

Of course McCain didn’t challenge the election. Even if he had proven massive voter fraud and had millions of votes for Obama thrown out, McCain still would have lost. He lost by over 10 million votes and only received 173 Electoral College votes when 270 are needed to win. McCain ran one of the worst presidential campaigns in decades. He conceded because he was glad it was over.

The people who say that since the founding of the US, candidates have accepted the will of the voters have forgotten about Gore, but have also forgotten about the election of John Quincy Adams as the sixth president in 1824.

Andrew Jackson had the most popular votes and the most votes in the Electoral College, but he failed to win a majority because it was a four-way race and William Crawford and Speaker of the House Henry Clay each received about 10 percent of the vote.

The election was thrown to the House of Representatives where Adams was selected. Adams wasn’t selected because he was so well liked. Clay negotiated his victory because he hated Jackson. So Adams was selected as the lesser of two evils, which sounds amazingly like this election 192 years later.

*****

The mainstream media working with the Hillary Clinton campaign have been able to shift the focus of the campaign from political issues and the political corruption of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation to the personal behavior of Donald Trump.

If you look at political leaders, from our founding fathers to modern times, the leaders of this country have often had personal lifestyles that were not admirable. Ben Franklin supposedly fathered a great many children out of wedlock. John Kennedy not only had a lot of affairs but, according to numerous sources, had Secret Service agents go out and hire prostitutes for him.

But you don’t have to go back that far in history. Look for a moment at former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton says that he was a great president. But we know that while he was president he often went to the Oval Office at night, not to work but so that a White House intern could perform oral sex.

According to Monica Lewinsky’s memoirs, Clinton and Lewinsky had a relationship that was far more like the relationship between a man and a female prostitute than two people having an affair. Bill Clinton would contact her, Lewinsky would meet him in the Oval Office, she would service him and her payment was that she got to hang out in the Oval Office with the most powerful man in the world.

There was rarely any mutual sexual gratification. She was called to perform a service, which she did because she was young and thought Bill Clinton actually cared about her.

This, according to Hillary Clinton, didn’t mean that Bill Clinton wasn’t a great president. Nor did the fact that he had to pay Paula Corbin Jones $850,000, or that he had to surrender his law license and admit to committing perjury.

According to Hillary Clinton, you can do all those things and be a great president, but if you make off color remarks about women you don’t deserve to be president.

*****

Is anyone in the country surprised that among the emails that Hillary Clinton had deleted from her server are classified documents?

Perhaps the State Department decided to classify the type of cake that was served at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding or Hillary Clinton’s yoga schedule, which is what she said the deleted emails were about, but that seems unlikely.

It’s much like when she talks to the press on her campaign plane. She is fine with the press until someone asks her a real question then she abruptly leaves.

Imagine if Donald Trump did the same thing; it would be the lead story all over the mainstream media that he was dodging questions. But with Hillary Clinton, the adoring media are swooning because they actually get to speak to her and they probably attack the reporter who had the audacity to ask her a question she didn’t want to answer.

*****

I love the left’s view of economics because it is so simple. Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and those at the lowest rung of the employment ladder will all make more money. If they are currently making minimum wage, it will be a raise of more than 100 percent. Wow, that’s great! The problem of poverty is solved and it was so easy.

It would be if businesses were the government and had an unlimited source of revenue. If businesses could operate like the federal government and borrow as much money every year as they wanted with no plan of ever paying it back, this plan would work like a charm. But that isn’t how businesses work.

To stay in business a company has to make a profit. Competition is such that most small businesses run on a pretty tight margin. If they double the salaries of their lowest paid workers, they have to raise prices to make a profit, and that could put them out of business. Or, what is much more likely, is that they will lay off a bunch of workers because they can’t afford to pay them.

And you can’t simply raise the salaries of the lowest paid workers. You have to raise the salary of their supervisor so the supervisor is making more than the people being supervised. Then you have to raise the salary of the supervisor’s supervisor and on up the line. The Democrats are talking about a salary increase of over 100 percent, and that goes right up the hierarchy.

If the Democrats ever get their way and more than double the minimum wage, it’s going to force small businesses to reduce the number of employees they have to stay in business and force others to go out of business. The result will be higher unemployment among those who need jobs the most and a lot fewer options because it will force so many small employers out of business.

*****

I read a piece in The Washington Post about how the media aren’t biased.   The media are so arrogant that the writer didn’t even bother to offer any proof. So the media is not biased because the media say that they aren’t? The comments following the article must have shocked the writer because they were overwhelming that the media is biased to the point that it can’t be trusted.

Not only has the mainstream media become a propaganda machine for the liberal candidates, at least The Washington Post writer and his editors believe that people are so stupid that if you tell them the media are not biased they’ll believe it.

What’s sad is that there was a time when if Walter Cronkite had said the moon really is made of green cheese, the next day in school I would have learned about this startling new discovery about the moon. None of my teachers would have considered doubting something that Walter Cronkite said.

Wouldn’t it have been interesting if the writer had explained why Hillary Clinton’s campaign was allowed to approve articles and quotes? Or why forum questions were leaked from the media to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Or why so-called journalists were seeking approval for what they did from the Hillary Clinton campaign?

If he had bothered to explain why that doesn’t make the mainstream media a propaganda machine, that would have been an interesting article.

Or the writer could have explained why so many members of this unbiased media had donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The ratio is 96 percent of the donations were to Hillary Clinton and 4 percent to Trump. And this is from the mainstream media that the writer says are unbiased.

“Because I said so” wasn’t an argument I accepted in third grade and it’s not one that I will accept 55 years later.

*****

Here is something to think about. Hillary Clinton says that Donald Trump doesn’t have the temperament to be president. But think about Hillary Clinton and her entire campaign.

We knew before, but now with WikiLeaks we know for certain, that Hillary Clinton doesn’t utter a word in public that hasn’t been run through focus groups to make sure it’s popular.

She needs the questions of events beforehand so that she can give answers carefully crafted by a team of speechwriters and then polled to make sure the American people like them.

Her concern about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she helped write, was not what was best for the country but about how she could take a position that wouldn’t lose her votes. Nobody seemed to give a hoot about whether it was a good policy or not.

What happens when Russian President Vladimir Putin calls at 3 a.m. and needs an immediate answer to a question? There is no time for focus groups, no time to assemble speechwriters, no teleprompters. If Hillary Clinton is elected it will just be Hillary Clinton and the phone. How on earth will she know what to do or what to say? We know from Benghazi that when faced with a decision where American lives are dependent on that decision, Hillary Clinton wavers and in the end does nothing.

*****

Polls are theoretically scientific, kind of like the weather forecasters who predict an epic blizzard that turns into three flakes of snow are scientific. But with some polls showing Trump up by 2 points and others showing Hillary Clinton up by 12 points, there must be some explanation.

Looking at sites that grade pollsters, I found the same prejudice that you find in the mainstream media. For example, in 2014 the Republicans did much better than the polls predicted. But according to one site, the polls that predicted the Democrats would do better were more accurate than the ones that accurately predicted the outcome.

It’s stunning that even when Republicans are right, the liberal media says they are wrong. The correct polls evidently following this twisted logic were the ones that inaccurately predicted Democratic victories because the Republicans outperformed the polling by Democratic leaning sites.

The whole purpose of these election polls is to predict the outcome of the election, but if you predict a Republican victory and Republicans win, according to the liberal media you are wrong.

There can be no other explanation than to affect the outcome of the election for the mainstream media to concentrate on the polls that show Hillary Clinton with a big lead and ignore the polls that show the race even or Trump with a slight lead.

As I’ve stated before, I don’t know anything about the national polls other than what I read in the media, but I read both the mainstream media and the more conservative sites to try and get some balance.

However, I do know something about the voters in North Carolina. I don’t see how Hillary Clinton wins North Carolina despite what the media says.

Mitt Romney won North Carolina in 2012. Romney had some of the same problems that Trump has, for different reasons. The evangelical Christians who have been a consistent voting block for Republicans didn’t throw their support behind Romney because he is a Mormon. The evangelical Christians aren’t all out supporting Trump because he is so secular, has been married three times, makes offensive statements about women and they aren’t sure they can trust him.

Polls (if you can believe them) indicate that Trump is going to do better with black voters than Romney. Some polls indicate Trump will do remarkably better, some marginally better, but the polls do indicate that he will do better.

The demographics of the state haven’t changed dramatically since 2012. In 2008, Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina since 1976. Obama won because of significantly increased black voter turnout. There is no way that Hillary Clinton is going to get that increased turnout.

North Carolina elected Jesse Helms to the Senate five times. Helms beat former Gov. Jim Hunt, who, according to the mainstream media, is the most popular North Carolina politician of his generation. That should give people something to think about. If Hunt was in fact the most popular politician of his generation and Helms beat him, logically wouldn’t that make Helms the most popular North Carolina politician? Unfortunately for Hunt, he believed the mainstream media and their polls and thought he was going to win. Hunt was still bitter about losing years later.

Since I don’t see any way that Hillary Clinton wins North Carolina, it makes me wonder about the other toss up states. The media is doing everything in its power to get Hillary Clinton in the White House and are convinced that making it appear she has won is helpful.

It may backfire because Hillary Clinton has very weak support. If people who are going to the polls to vote against Trump think Trump has already lost, then there isn’t much reason to get up off the couch and vote against him. However, a lot of Trump supporters are wild about Trump. You can’t keep them from getting to the polls to vote for their man even if the media says he has already lost.

It’s definitely a campaign strategy to show that Hillary Clinton has already won, but it may not be a winning strategy.

*****

One of the reasons the mainstream media gave for Obama winning both presidential elections was that he did a much better job using social media.

Has any candidate ever used social media more effectively than Trump? He has millions of Twitter followers and he personally communicates with them frequently, maybe too frequently, but I think the mainstream media are ignoring the fact that for millions of people to get regular tweets from the man who may be president is a huge deal.

Everybody already knew it, but it has been proven now, from the leaked emails, that Hillary Clinton’s staff sends out her tweets and they even discuss how to sign her name to make it appear more legitimate.

So Trump is sending out tweets, some at 3 a.m. that cause his staff extreme heartburn, and Hillary Clinton is pretending to send out tweets that everybody knows are written by a team of writers and Hillary Clinton may or may not ever see them.

If social media is the key to modern campaigns, and Trump is the king of social media, that may make a huge difference.

*****

It may be hard for some people to believe, but the Rhino Times has much higher journalistic standards than The New York Times or Politico. It’s not as hard to believe, but we also have higher standards than CNBC. We don’t run our stories past the campaigns of candidates to make sure we wrote what they wanted us to write.

But The New York Times has already told its readers that in this case it’s OK to do everything in its power to help Hillary Clinton because Trump is such a bad man.

The problem The New York Times is going to have is that it’s really hard to close that door once it’s been opened.

People know that the Hillary Clinton campaign was given veto power over unfavorable articles or passages in articles. How are they going to explain to other Democrats that they don’t get the same treatment?

It goes without saying that no Republican would receive that treatment, but what happens when the Democratic candidate for mayor or governor asks for the same courtesy. The New York Times can’t say, “We don’t do that” or “That’s bad journalism.”

*****

There is a scene in Seinfeld were Jerry and George are trying to get a network to agree to produce their show about “nothing.” The network executive asked why people will watch it, and George says, because it’s on TV. The network executive says, “not yet.”

The news is the same way. The WikiLeaks emails appear to many of us to be huge stories about corruption, as well as collusion between the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign, not to mention that Hillary Clinton said she wanted open borders for the entire hemisphere.

But the mainstream media decide what’s news and the mainstream media have determined that the information released by WikiLeaks is not really news. There have been a few stories here and there, but nothing like the front page, wall-to-wall coverage of what Trump said to some B-grade television personality about grabbing women. The news media could have decided that what two huge male egos said to each other when they thought they were in private wasn’t really news, just like the news media decided that all of Bill Clinton’s affairs weren’t news until the legal entanglements got to the point they couldn’t be ignored.

The good news out of this is that the public is catching on. People no longer trust the media, or they say they don’t. What is amazing is that when people hear something over and over again, even if they know it isn’t true, somehow it creeps into their psyche and they start repeating it.

*****

Obamacare has turned out to be the disaster that opponents said it would be. In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield is the only provider in 95 of the 100 counties, and the news gets worse. It has been announced that premiums will increase by over 25 percent next year. And in Arizona premiums will increase for some by 116 percent.

Remember all those things that the American people were told? Like you could keep your doctor? And the big lie that Obamacare was going to make health care more affordable? The name the Democrats used was the Affordable Care Act.   The system is, as Republicans predicted, collapsing of its own accord.

Hillary Clinton says it can be saved, Trump says throw it out and start over.

*****

It’s probably not fair to compare the Sen. Tim Kaine rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he attracted 30 people, to the Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, which over 20,000 attended. But it does seem fair to compare the Kaine rally with the Gov. Mike Pence rally in Greensboro, where Pence attracted about 1,000 people.

I heard a Hillary Clinton supporter posing as a journalist say that she didn’t think the large crowds at Trump rallies meant anything. Isn’t it interesting that when Obama was running in 2008 and attracting overflow crowds everywhere he went it meant the American people were behind him? When Trump attracts huge crowds, evidently, according to the mainstream media, it means a lot of people have nothing better to do than attend a rally and scream their lungs out for a candidate.