If the mainstream media want to write about fake news, they need to write about the fake news they have been printing for weeks about how the Donald Trump electors were not going to vote for Trump and he wouldn’t be elected president.

It turns out that was purely fake news; it had no basis in reality.

Two electors in Texas didn’t vote for Trump, the other 304 did. So where is their story? Who were their sources who said electors weren’t going to vote for Trump?

The truth is that more Hillary Clinton electors didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton than Trump electors didn’t vote for Trump. Hillary Clinton lost five and Trump only lost two out of his 306.

It is incredible the lengths the mainstream media will go to denigrate the president-elect of the United States. It appears it hasn’t sunk in yet that on Jan. 20, 2017, Donald Trump is going to be the president and there is nothing they can do about it.

I think Trump should ban the mainstream media from the White House. There is no reason for the media to be given pricey White House office space; make the White House press corps wait on the sidewalk out front. When somebody has an announcement they can come out and talk to them. If the weather is bad they can put up a tent.

The mainstream media have done everything in their power to stop Trump. They ridiculed him early in the campaign. Once he won a couple of debates they said he’d never win a primary. Once he won a primary they said he would never win the nomination. Once he won the nomination they said his delegates wouldn’t vote for him so he wouldn’t get the nomination. Once he won the nomination they said there was no way he could be elected. Once he was elected they said his electors wouldn’t vote for him and he still wouldn’t be elected.

They have been wrong every time, but it looks like they have run out of predictions.

By the way, if the vote of the Electoral College had been inconclusive, then the election would have gone to the House.

Who do you think the Republican-dominated House would have elected president, Hillary Clinton or Trump? There is no doubt, which is why the elector story was such a stupid story, yet it got played up by the major media. It was just dumb.

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I hate to say it, but I think the Democrats are poor losers.

I was not at all pleased when President Barack Hussein Obama was elected president in 2008. I thought he didn’t have the experience or the temperament to be a good president and I thought our country would suffer. But I didn’t claim that Obama didn’t win. I didn’t harass the electors from North Carolina who elected to vote for Obama. I didn’t claim the system was rigged or that the Russians got Obama elected.

Obama ran a much better campaign than Sen. John McCain, and that in the end is what counts. Trump ran a far better campaign than Hillary Clinton. The only message Hillary Clinton could come up with during the campaign was, “I’m not Donald Trump.” It turned out to be a pretty good message, but not quite good enough. Perhaps if Hillary Clinton had gotten out and campaigned more.

Perhaps it would have helped if when she campaigned, and went to shake hands, she didn’t look like she was counting because her staff had promised that after 50 handshakes should could get away from the unwashed masses and get back in her custom limousine. It may have been why she didn’t campaign more, that her campaign staff decided she would do better if she were seen less.

You can’t fault the campaign; they took an extremely flawed candidate and came within 100,000 votes or so of getting her elected president. That’s an incredible feat.

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The faithless elector story was almost as dumb as the story that Russia tampered with the US presidential election, thereby invalidating it.

It is no surprise that Russia tried to tamper with the election; we do the same thing during elections in other countries. Obama very publicly tried to get Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defeated. So what?

The news media reported news about Trump that wasn’t true. He didn’t, for instance, make fun of a reporter for being handicapped. He did criticize a reporter who happened to be handicapped for something the reporter wrote and it was blown all out of proportion by the media.

But so what if the Russians released real or fake news during the presidential election? It happens all the time by all kinds of different people. You don’t hold a new election because somebody lied to the people before they voted. If the standard were complete honesty, we would never have an election.

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Consumer confidence is a term that is commonly used in talking about the country’s economic situation.

If consumer confidence is high that means people go out and buy things that they may not need, pile up a little more debt than is probably a good idea and provide the grease to move the economy along.

Most people work in small businesses, and small business confidence is a term you don’t hear much, but it has been lacking since 2008.

When the Great Recession started, small businesses all over the country got clobbered. The ones who managed to stay in business mostly have been scared that the other shoe was going to drop. They haven’t expanded as much as they could, or hired new people in the hope of creating the new business to pay for them. For eight years small business owners have been holding on to what they have.

Reports are that the election of Trump is causing small business confidence, and if that turns out to be true, that alone may be enough to get the economy booming.

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Trump continues to drive the mainstream media insane by going right over their heads and tweeting anything he thinks is important to the people. Tweeting helped him get to the White House and it is going to make him more popular while he is there.

Even the tweets that everyone said were mistakes weren’t, if you look at an overall strategy of communicating with the people. Sending out tweets that everyone knew would never have been sent by a campaign, and that clearly would have been vetoed by any campaign manager, chairman or anyone associated with the campaign, proved that Trump himself was sending out all these tweets. He didn’t have a team coming up with “cute” tweets and then having a conference call on how to sign them so that people would think they were actually written by Hillary Clinton, or at least read by Hillary Clinton before being sent.

After some of the more outrageous tweets, there was no doubt that Trump was the only one who would send such a message out to the world. The mainstream media may have thought the tweets were a disaster, but in fact they were brilliant and all part of a strategy that defeated Hillary Clinton.

The Clinton supporters and Hillary Clinton can talk all they want about winning the popular vote, and that’s fine – congratulations for winning the popular vote. But Trump’s goal was not to win the popular vote, he clearly didn’t give two hoots about the popular vote; his goal was to be elected president, and you don’t get elected president by winning the popular vote.

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The Republicans big problem is that they don’t have enough professional protestors. Students who don’t have much to do and people on welfare who don’t have to work are generally Democrats, and that gives the Democrats a big pool of people who they can get to protest at the drop of a hat.

I know when I was a student that if I had been given a choice between marching around with a sign at the legislative building or going to class, I would have chosen marching around with a sign, and then after I’d been marching around for a while I might have even read the sign.

When I was in college we had a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor. The Democratic legislature took so much power away from the governor at state functions, he couldn’t leave to go to the bathroom unless he raised his hand and got permission from the president pro tem of the state Senate.

That is a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. Jim Holshouser was the first Republican governor elected in the 20th century, and the Democratic legislature took what was already a weak office and made it much weaker.

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It’s a hoot that Facebook announced it was going to have PolitiFact check for fake news. Here’s a better idea – have the Democratic National Committee check for fake news.

The whole fact-checking operation is simply a scam by the mainstream media to promote its own point of view. Here’s how the fact checking works: First they check the political party affiliation of the person making the statement, and if the person is a Democrat they assume the statement is correct and look for ways to prove that it is correct. If the person is a Republican they assume the statement is false and then look for proof that it is false.

PolitiFact determined that the statement made by Trump that Hillary Clinton was in favor of open borders was false despite the fact that there is a recording of her saying that she is in favor of open borders.

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According to the mainstream media, science is done by consensus. A bunch of scientists get together and whatever they agree on is a scientific fact. It’s kind of a strange way for science to operate, and I sure don’t want my physician subscribing to that form of science. I prefer the science they use on me to have been tested and proven by scientific methods, not by taking a poll.

Here is what appears to be a scientific fact: The earth is gradually getting warmer and has been doing so since the last ice age 10,000 years ago or so. It is also a fact that man is burning a lot more stuff than he did 10,000 years ago, which adds carbon to the atmosphere. What isn’t proven is that the second fact caused the first.

The earth is getting warmer but the global warming folks can’t give evidence that, say, 10 percent more carbon in the atmosphere raises the temperature 1 degree. Or 90 percent more carbon in the air would raise the world temperature by 5 degrees, or whatever.

What they do say is that putting more carbon in the atmosphere has caused the earth’s temperature to rise faster than it would have, but since nobody knows how fast the temperature would have risen it is impossible to prove that it is either true or false. So you can believe it if you want or not, but it isn’t science no matter how many people believe it.

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Hillary Clinton can blame Russian hackers or anyone else she wants for her loss, but the reality is that she ran a terrible campaign. She thought she was unbeatable and she ran her campaign based on that belief.

What presidential candidate takes a week off from campaigning to prepare for a debate?

She took more time off from the campaign trail than she spent on it. Maybe that was because she wasn’t connecting with voters and she was having a hard time filling venues. Maybe her campaign staff was worried she would collapse again.

Some candidates love campaigning. Bill Clinton would be one of those folks who just loves to get out and wade into crowds. You can watch him and tell that he loves it.

By the same token you can see that Hillary Clinton hates it. It may be that she was so convinced she was going to win and hates to campaign so much that she refused to get out and campaign more.

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Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, and some of her supporters are suggesting that if the election had been by popular vote instead of by the Electoral College that Hillary Clinton would have won.

There is no way to know that, and actually it doesn’t seem likely that it is true. Because the election is not by popular vote but is an election in each state and the District of Columbia, Trump campaigned knowing that the popular vote didn’t matter. He spent a lot of time in North Carolina because it was considered a battleground state. It the election had been by popular vote it is unlikely he would have visited North Carolina at all because the state doesn’t have the population density to be worthwhile in a national election.

Trump would have spent a lot more time in California and no doubt would have done better in that state, but because it was obvious that Trump was not going to win California he ignored it, which was a smart move under the Electoral College system but would have been insane if the election had been by popular vote.

Arguing that Hillary Clinton would have won if the election had been by popular vote is like arguing that your team would have won a basketball game if the three-point rule had not been in place. It’s silly because the game would have been entirely different if the players didn’t get a bonus point for making a shot past the three-point line.

It’s the same for Hillary Clinton. She lost according to the rules in place when she was running. If she didn’t like the rules she should have tried to have them changed when her husband was president, or when she was in the Senate. She made no such effort.

Perhaps if she had tried hiring the best people available to run her campaign, instead of sycophants who worship her, she would have done a little better.

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I knew there wasn’t much mettle to Hillary Clinton. She adopted her husband’s political philosophy – say whatever you need to say to get elected and then do what you want in office. I believe they called it triangulating.

But I have to admit I didn’t know what a spoiled brat she was. She has been the heir apparent to the presidency twice, and only one thing has even gotten in her way – the voters don’t like her very much.

Obama beat her like a drum in 2008. Hillary Clinton was so sure she was going to win the primary that she had lost before she knew that Obama was a serious contender. It’s astounding what arrogance can do to a political campaign.

If the Democratic National Committee had not stepped in to help her out, she might not have won the Democratic nomination this time around. But once she did, and her opponent was Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton retired to Chappaqua, apparently believing the mainstream media that there was no way she could lose. What Hillary Clinton didn’t do was get out and campaign like she was 10 points down.

There are a couple of people she can blame for losing. One is herself. Another is John Podesta, who should have forced her to get out and campaign. And another is Huma Abedin, who should have also forced her boss to campaign and should have divorced her sexually perverted husband years ago.

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I don’t know how many articles I’ve read and news reports I’ve heard about Aleppo, and the ceasefire to try and get people out so they won’t be massacred, but in none of those news reports have the journalists mentioned that the people who lost, the people who are being evacuated, are the people that the US supported.

It’s tough to say exactly who the US supports or supported in Syria. It seems to change on a day-to-day basis. But the US in Syria is supporting moderate rebel groups who were fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It is Assad and the Russians who are winning in Aleppo and the US and the rebels who are losing.

It seems like this is a vital part of the story, but it makes Obama look bad to mention that the rebel groups that he kind of, sort of chose to support are the ones who are losing.

One reason they are losing is the kind of support that Obama was willing to give didn’t amount to much. We wouldn’t supply them with much of the advanced weaponry available because of the fear that it would fall into the hands of ISIS.

Of course, since Iraq managed to supply ISIS with untold riches in weapons when the Iraqi army ran helter-skelter from ISIS soldiers, it doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal whether ISIS got more weapons or not.

But that was the excuse given. Russia evidently has no such problems in supplying the Syrian government troops.

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It appears that it is not going to be enough for the liberals for Trump to step away from running his business while he is president, because if he continues to own the company then he could benefit from decisions that he makes as president.

Although that is certainly true, I can’t think of another president who has been forced to divest himself of all investments before taking the oath of office.

With some of our recent presidents it wasn’t a problem because they didn’t own much of anything. Obama would be an example of that. The Clintons didn’t even own a house when Bill Clinton was elected president.

George W. Bush had made some money in the oil business, as had his father. I don’t remember either one of them having to divest themselves of all their investments and keep their money in cash.

Certainly the Kennedy family had a family business when John Kennedy was elected president, and his father Joe Kennedy continued to run it.

Going back a couple of years, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both farmers. They weren’t forced to sell their farms while they served as president.

It seems in this and in so many other ways Trump is being held to a completely different standard from every previous president. But, fortunately, Trump pays no attention to the mainstream media and is going to do whatever he wants.

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With everything else going on in the world, the Chinese stealing an unmanned underwater drone from a US Navy research vessel seems to have fallen by the wayside. But it is just one more indication that Obama is getting out the door just in the nick of time.

The US cannot allow another country to steal out naval vessels right from under our noses. This was not a large vessel but it belongs to the US Navy and the US cannot allow any country that wishes to steal our property. There was no response from the US government except to say, “Pretty please with sugar on top, give us our drone back.”

There are a lot of possible responses, but certainly a destroyer should have been sent to talk to the boat that stole the US drone.

But responses don’t have to be blatant. A whole slew of visas for a Chinese trade group could have been lost or misplaced. Chinese ships could find their paperwork to get out of port not in order. The US could round up a bunch of Chinese spies and send them home. Chinese students in the US could find that their student visa paperwork was not done properly and their visas are being revoked.

This kind of thing happens all the time, and somehow when the bigger issues are settled all the little stuff goes away.