Next Tuesday is the election. My prediction is that Donald Trump will win.
North Carolina has been listed as a toss-up by the pollsters throughout this election, and I don’t see it. North Carolina has consistently voted for the Republican candidate for the past 40 years, with the exception of President Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. Hillary Clinton is no Barack Obama.
But I think Trump will win nationally because presidential elections are about momentum as much as anything else. Trump has been consistently improving in the polls and I see that trend continuing.
Also, in the primaries, Trump consistently outperformed the polls. The polls that have in the past been the most reliable have shown the race within the margin of error for some time. If Trump outperforms the polls by five points, as he did in the primaries, then he wins.
The recent announcement that the FBI is reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private home-brew email server is a huge reminder to people that if Hillary Clinton is elected there will be scandals and investigations for the next four years and, it’s likely, an impeachment.
Hillary Clinton believes that the laws of the land don’t apply to her, and behaves accordingly. Others think the laws do apply to her and some of those others have the power to investigate and prove that she violated the laws. In the case of the email investigation, the FBI reported that she did violate the laws concerning classified documents, and repeatedly lied about it, even though that she wasn’t going to be prosecuted. Not being prosecuted is not the same as being innocent.
The current email investigation is so sordid that it is reminiscent of Bill Clinton. The new emails came to light because Hillary Clinton’s longtime top aide and confidant Huma Abedin is married to a sexual deviant who is accused of sending sexually explicit messages to a teenaged girl. Certainly that has to bother some voters.
Hillary Clinton’s lies and behavior are coming home to roost, and I don’t think that the American people are going to vote for four years of investigations and charges.
*****
Everybody has a theory on why FBI Director James Comey put himself right in the middle of the presidential race less than two weeks from Election Day.
Here’s one I like: Comey did it because he is what everybody says he is, a true patriot, straight as an arrow and not concerned about politics but concerned about what is best for his country.
The reason he stepped into the middle of a political controversy knowing that he would be blasted is because he knows what’s on some of those 650,000 emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. He knows what’s on there, and he knows that it will cause Hillary Clinton to be impeached or be forced to resign from office if she is elected.
Because the FBI didn’t have a warrant to search for evidence in the Hillary Clinton email case, the information itself could not be made public, so he did what he could do to alert the American people that they do not want to elect Hillary Clinton as president.
I have no idea if there is any truth there, but it is a plausible explanation for why Comey would put his reputation at such risk.
The FBI is a huge bureaucracy inside an even more massive bureaucracy. You don’t get to be head of the FBI without being politically savvy. Comey is a Republican who got appointed by a Democratic president. Again, that wouldn’t happen if Comey wasn’t very good at politics.
People act like Comey doesn’t know what he’s doing. But what if he knows exactly what he is doing and doesn’t want to see the country thrown into a constitutional crisis?
FBI agents had the computer and had a warrant to search it. Do you think they averted their eyes if the name Hillary Clinton appeared on an email? I doubt it.
The FBI criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton is not going to go away if she wins next Tuesday. What it will mean if she wins (and I don’t think she will) is that, for the first time, the American people will have elected a candidate who is under criminal investigation for committing serious crimes and, if she manages to stay in office, that the country would be facing either the impeachment and removal of a president, which also has never happened, or long drawn out investigations that will keep the focus in Washington off doing anything for the country.
The Clintons are actually predictable. If Hillary Clinton wins while she is under investigation, once she is inaugurated you can expect her to go to war somewhere in an attempt to take the focus off her crimes. Bill Clinton did it during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. Hillary Clinton will have her choice of wars that she will suddenly decide require ground troops.
The choice for the American voter appears to be four years of investigations, charges, wars and most likely an impeachment, or Trump. For some folks that will be a tough decision.
*****
People say that Trump doesn’t have the temperament to be president and that it scares them to think about him having all of that power.
Think about this: When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she didn’t want anyone to know what she was doing and didn’t want the government to have a record of what she was doing.
Hillary Clinton in her private life can be as secretive as she wants. It is her right. But as a government official working for the people of the United States, she had a responsibility to let us know what she was doing, who she was meeting with and who she was emailing on official State Department business.
Not only did she have a responsibility to operate in an open and above board manner, she was also required to by law. There are laws that make government communications, those that are not confidential or classified, public. Anyone can ask for those records and the government is supposed to provide them.
Because all of Hillary Clinton’s emails were on her private server, they were neither accessible to the public nor the government. A number of lawsuits came about because, under a Freedom of Information Act request put in for some of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the State Department said they didn’t have them. Initially people thought the State Department was lying. It turned out the State Department was telling the truth. They didn’t have Hillary Clinton’s emails because this government-owned information was on a server in the basement of Hillary Clinton’s house.
Early in all of this, Hillary Clinton said the server was protected because her house was guarded by the Secret Service. It doesn’t seem possible that she could actually be that dumb about technology, but maybe she is. It would also explain why she insisted on taking her BlackBerry with her everywhere, even in countries with known cyber warfare capabilities like Russia and China. No wonder they destroyed so many of her BlackBerries; they had probably been hacked so many times they didn’t work.
*****
I’m not convinced that Trump can make America great again, but I am convinced that none of those other knuckleheads can do it.
The federal government is out of control at every level, but mainly it boils down to money. During the Obama administration the federal government has averaged spending over $1 trillion more a year than it takes in.
The federal budget is roughly $3 trillion, give or take $500 billion or so. But what that means is about one-third of the money spent is borrowed. Anyone who talks about balancing the budget is out of their mind. The government would have to cut spending by over 30 percent to balance the budget.
But what is even more insane is to state, as Hillary Clinton has, that what we need are more taxes. Do you think the American people and American industry can handle a 30 percent tax increase? Tax hikes do affect the economy, and if Hillary Clinton’s tax hikes cause the economy to dip, and even more industry to flee overseas, it will bring in less revenue, not more.
*****
The first time the American people invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to live in our house, the White House, when they left after eight years they stole the furniture. This is not some myth dreamed up by right-wing crazies. They were forced to return some furniture and to pay for some, but they had simply loaded furniture that belonged to the American people on to a truck and taken it with them.
Most of the time when you steal the furniture you don’t get invited back, and it looks like Hillary Clinton might not be. Lying is one thing. All politicians lie, but what’s more all people lie. But stealing is another. Stealing from the American people is even worse.
*****
Hillary Clinton is angry about the announcement that the FBI has reopened its investigation into the use of her home-brew email server for State Department business.
She should be angry, and if she were even slightly self-reflective, she would be angry at herself because she has no one else to blame. No one made her ignore the laws governing the treatment of classified information or the regulations regarding public records.
Instead of obeying the law concerning public records and classified documents, she chose to set up her own email server and ignore the laws and regulations because it was more convenient for her.
Hillary Clinton clearly violated the law, but after her husband, Bill Clinton, met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the FBI was convinced to ignore the evidence it had collected during a year of investigation and let Hillary Clinton go scot-free.
Now she is paying for her decision to violate numerous laws regarding how official government business is to be conducted, and the investigation has been re-launched. This time the FBI reportedly has 650,000 emails to go through.
Perhaps copies of the 33,000 that Hillary Clinton had deleted from her server are among those on Weiner’s computer. It turned out that the emails she had deleted were not all about yoga and her daughter’s wedding, as she had claimed. Some were classified documents that never should have been on the email server in her basement in the first place.
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When the tapes of Trump making inappropriate comments about women were released, there was a lot of chatter in the mainstream media about Trump stepping down from the Republican nomination and letting someone else take his place.
Now that it has been announced that Hillary Clinton is once again under criminal investigation by the FBI, where are the calls for her to step aside?
What happens if Hillary Clinton wins and this investigation results in her indictment? President Obama could pardon her before she is sworn into office. But with a Republican House and Senate, impeachment proceedings would likely start as soon as she took office. The country would be thrown into a constitutional crisis. Imagine the question about her ability to serve winds up before the Supreme Court, which is evenly divided along political lines, with four Democrats and four Republicans. Who breaks the tie?
Having a presidential candidate under FBI investigation for crimes concerning national security is unprecedented. Does the Democratic Party really want to put the nation through the possible turmoil?
If the investigation is completed and does not result in any indictments, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton and her staff obviously violated the law, then you would have half the country convinced that the investigation was rigged, as the last one was.
*****
I hope Comey has an FBI swat team surrounding him at all times. People who take on the Clinton machine have a strange habit of ending up dead.
I know that it is just a coincidence that so many people who could have caused problems for the Clintons have died strange and violent deaths, like the young Democratic National Committee (DNC) worker in Washington who was shot walking down the street in a relatively safe part of town, and he wasn’t robbed.
Let’s see, all these DNC emails are causing huge problems for the Clintons and someone who could have leaked them winds up shot in the back while walking down the street. Maybe it was just a random act of violence. Maybe it wasn’t a random act of violence. Who is going to investigate it?
*****
The corruption of the Clintons is truly astounding. Imagine if any other couple in Washington were discovered doing what the Clintons freely admit to doing.
What if it was discovered that while Colin Powell was secretary of state, his wife had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by foreign sources to make speeches? People would be up in arms, particularly if it turned out that these foreign sources had issues pending before the State Department.
What if it was discovered that when Robert Gates was secretary of defense, his wife had been making speeches to defense contractors at $500,000 a pop, and those happened to be the contractors that got most of the government contracts? And what if Gates didn’t deny that his wife gave the speeches or that she was paid exorbitant sums of money, but Gates said that it was just a coincidence that the companies who hired his wife to speak got the big contracts and there was no quid pro quo? Would anybody believe that? Or would they most likely both be in jail?
One of the things about the Clintons is that they are so open about their corruption. It reminds me of a master shoplifter I read about. He said if you stuff a pair of socks in your pocket, you’re likely to get caught. But if you go into a store, put a canoe over your shoulders and walk out, everyone assumes that you paid for it.
The Clintons were right out in the open selling favors to foreign companies and governments. It was blatant, but just because it was blatant doesn’t mean it isn’t against the law. There is certainly enough evidence to prosecute them. Obama is never going to prosecute them, but perhaps if Trump gets elected he will do what he said he would do and appoint a special prosecutor.
The idea that they have to find a signed letter on secretary of state letterhead that says, “If you pay my husband $500,000 for a speech you will get special trading status,” is absurd. All that has to be proven is a pattern of payments and favors.
The very fact that over half of the Americans Hillary Clinton met with as secretary of state had made sizable donations to the Clinton Foundation is evidence that they were buying favors with donations.
And then there is the fact that the Clinton Foundation is a foundation in name only. It does hardly any charitable work. Most of the money raised is used to pay the army of Clinton friends and hangers-on who need six figure incomes.
*****
Politics is amazing. When Hillary Clinton was treated differently from everyone else who handles classified information and not indicted for being “extremely careless,” although many others have been, that was great work. Now that the FBI announced that it is reopening the investigation, that is horrible.
The regulations on handling classified information are strict and are strictly enforced. A young navy seaman who carelessly took photos with his smart phone of classified parts of a nuclear submarine is going to prison. There was no indication that he planned to release the information to anyone. He is young and made a careless mistake. The government didn’t attempt to prove any intent. All the government had to do was prove he had the photos on an unsecure phone and the phone could have, but didn’t, fall into enemy hands.
Hillary Clinton, in violation of federal law, sent and received classified information on an unsecure home-brew server in her basement. After that, the server was at a company where the personnel who managed it, and had access to all its contents, didn’t have clearance for classified information.
She committed a far more serious crime than the naval seaman, but he gets a felony conviction and time in prison and she may wind up in the White House.
Anybody who thinks that there is nothing of note on Weiner’s laptop is naive. If Comey wasn’t certain that he now had information that was going to blow the case wide open, he would have never made the announcement to Congress. The FBI is extremely meticulous in its investigations, but the preliminary report on what they have found must be a blockbuster for Comey to go out on a limb like that.
*****
Here’s an interesting point. Many Republican elected officials have distanced themselves from Donald Trump. The Bush family, Gov. John Kasich, Speaker Paul Ryan on some days, and many more.
How many Democratic leaders have distanced themselves from Hillary Clinton because of the email scandal and the clear pay-to-play relationship between the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state? I haven’t heard of any.
Wouldn’t you think that some Democrats would be troubled by the extreme carelessness shown by Hillary Clinton when dealing with classified information, or maybe one or two Democrats would be concerned about the fact that she lied about the whole email deal from beginning to end?
*****
With the FBI re-opening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails again, people are asking what in the world is going on. We’ll probably never know what went on behind the scenes, but there are a couple of likely scenarios.
One is that after Attorney General Lynch met with Bill Clinton and was convinced that it would not be in her best interest to indict Hillary Clinton, even though the evidence that she committed serious crimes was overwhelming, Lynch met with Comey. At that meeting Lynch convinced Comey that he was going to have to be the fall guy and could not indict Hillary Clinton. Comey agreed, but told her that if any more evidence turned up or he found that any of the Clinton people were lying to him that all bets were off and he was going to do his job.
When the FBI agents investigating Weiner for sexting teenagers, they discovered thousands of emails on Weiner’s computer and Comey had his ticket back to respectability.
*****
Obama has started rewriting the history of his eight years in office before it’s over. Maybe he can get whoever wrote Dreams from My Father to help him, because whoever wrote that book can really write and doesn’t care much about accuracy.
Obama said, “We have not had a major scandal in my administration.” Maybe he meant to add “today” at the end of that sentence.
Some of us would consider Benghazi a major scandal. For the first time in 40 years a US ambassador was killed in the line of duty. Three other Americans were also killed by terrorists that day, during a 13-hour attack on the State Department and CIA compounds in Benghazi. Obama did nothing to help the Americans under attack and then claimed that there was no terrorist attack but that the deaths were the result of a spontaneous mob that had formed because they were upset over a YouTube video.
The investigation of how that all unfolded led to the discovery that Obama’s secretary of state at the time, Hillary Clinton, was using a home-brew server in her basement to do all her State Department business, including sending and receiving some highly classified documents on her unprotected server.
Some people consider that a major scandal, and since it might cost Hillary Clinton another trip to the White House, even Hillary Clinton might agree.
Then there was the scandal where it was discovered that the IRS was targeting conservative groups for special treatment. IRS officials repeatedly lied about having the computer files and having backups for the computers that were destroyed before the investigators could look at them.
Maybe that was only a scandal for conservatives because they were the ones getting the fifth degree from the IRS.
The fact that veterans were dying before they could see a doctor at veterans administration facilities was a big scandal to the families of the veterans who died.
Fast and Furious was one of my favorite scandals. But evidently Obama doesn’t consider providing guns to Mexican drug running gangs who used those guns to kill Americans much of a scandal.
Some consider all the lies told to sell Obamacare to the American people a scandal, and now that rates – which Obama promised would go down – are increasing, in some cases by over 100 percent, it’s even more of a scandal.
Feel free to add your own, but that’s a good start.
*****
Huma Abedin is Hillary Clinton’s closest aide. It doesn’t matter what title they give her, how many salaries from how many consulting firms, government departments and foundations they pay her, Huma Abedin has constantly been at Hillary Clinton’s side, ever since Hillary Clinton was first lady. So what does all this say about Hillary Clinton, that her closest aide and apparently dearest friend is married to a very trouble man, Anthony Weiner.
Why haven’t they gotten some help for the poor guy? Weiner is pitiful. He was already the laughing stock of New York because he had to resign from Congress after he was caught sending a sexually explicit tweet. Then he ran for mayor of New York and got in trouble again. Now he has upset an entire presidential campaign (not that I’m upset about that), but this man has absolutely no control over himself.
*****
I have two problems with House Speaker Paul Ryan.
The first is that, as the highest ranking Republican elected official, he has a responsibility to the Republican Party. The Republican Party nominated Trump, who was not Ryan’s choice. That’s politics. As an individual and a congressman, Ryan is free to support whomever he wants, but if he is not willing to support the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, he needs to distance himself from the Republican Party, which means resigning as speaker.
If he is not supporting Trump, he is supporting Hillary Clinton. Those are the only two people in the country that have a reasonable chance of being elected president. If the Republican speaker is supporting the Democratic nominee then he should not be the Republican speaker.
The second problem is, where does Ryan stand? As the speaker he is supposed to provide leadership for the party. What he is supplying is wishy-washy, change every news cycle, finger in the wind, who he talked to last, back and forth, not for him-not against him indecision.
It appears that Ryan doesn’t want to be the leader of the Republican Party, he wants to be part of the herd running back and forth with all the other sheep every time there is a noise or something shiny appears on the horizon.
There is plenty of room in the middle of the herd, if that’s where Ryan wants to be. But if that is his ambition he needs to back off from the front and dive back into the middle of the pack.
*****
Nobody will know how this election is going to come out until the votes are counted on Tuesday night, but some things we do know are that the same mainstream media pundits who, as late as Election Day 2014 were saying the Republicans wouldn’t win control of the Senate, are now saying that the Republicans may lose control of the Senate.
The mainstream media have been way off in predicting elections here, and in Great Britain, where they predicted that Brexit wouldn’t pass and didn’t believe it when it did.
In 2014, these pundits were talking about what was going to happen if the Senate was split 50/50 and how that would give control to the Democrats since the vice president votes in the case of a tie. But when the night was over, the Republicans had a 54-to-46 advantage – something none of the mainstream media critics had predicted.
