In the past week, a Wyoming Republican Party office was set on fire and a Republican congressional candidate in California was attacked by a man with a knife. Is it possible that the violent rhetoric of Democratic leaders is leading to violence by their followers?

If the tables were turned and it was a Democratic Party office and the Democratic candidate attacked, the mainstream media would be blaming it on inflammatory rhetoric by President Donald Trump. But then again, the mainstream media blame pretty much everything bad on Trump and write about the booming economy as little as possible.

If the economy were posting the kind of numbers under President Barack Obama that it is now – unemployment at 3.9 percent and more than 3 percent growth in the overall economy – the mainstream media would be full of that news. But since it is Trump, they report the numbers but seem to find some number that is lagging and focus on that. They certainly don’t focus on black unemployment, which is at its lowest level since the government has been keeping records.

A celebrity photographed with the severed head of the president, loudmouth television talk show hosts saying Trump is worse than the 9/11 terrorists and the constant barrage of virulent insults and attacks from all across the left are designed to inflame people. You hope they are trying to inflame people to vote, but it can get out of hand.

It would seem that when one leftist set out on his own to kill as many Republican congressmen as possible and was only prevented from doing so because House Majority Whip Steve Scalise had armed police officers protecting him, that the left might have toned down its violent rhetoric, but it didn’t.

Scalise, who was shot in that incident, has recovered from his wounds, but he hasn’t forgotten about the shooting or how close he and his fellow members of the Republican congressional baseball team came to being killed.

Political disagreements are part of a free society. If everyone agreed we wouldn’t need political parties or even a government; a couple of folks could be hired to run government services and that would be it.

But there are serious political disagreements about how the government should be run, how much power it should have and who should be making those decisions.

As a nation we solve these disagreements with elections. Usually the political rhetoric dies down after a presidential election. The winners celebrate and the losers lick their wounds and start planning for the next election.

That didn’t happen in 2016. The Democrats accused the Republicans of cheating and, without any evidence to prove it despite two years of investigations, continue to accuse the Republicans of cheating.

They have called Trump an illegitimate president. Congressional leaders talk about impeachment although they have no evidence that Trump has committed any high crimes or misdemeanors. Being Trump is not yet a high crime or a misdemeanor, although if the Democrats win control of Congress in 2018, it may become one.

The left in this case disagrees with Trump’s policies, which is to be expected; but they are also quite vocal about hating the man himself.

One can only hope that the violence on the left, including the increasingly violent protests, will inflame the voters on the right.

Midterm elections are always about who goes to the polls, and if the Republicans and Trump supporters stay home, the Democrats will win. It’s the only way they can win.

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The US House of Representatives is supposed to be a legislative body, not an investigative agency. But it seems Republican members of the House keep uncovering evidence of wrongdoing by the FBI and the Justice Department during the 2016 campaign and the beginning of the Trump administration.

The fact that FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and the agent in charge of both the Hillary Clinton email and the Trump Russian collusion investigations, Peter Strzok, have all been fired is proof that this wasn’t one rogue agent. In fact, the evidence is piling up that the FBI and the Justice Department were actively working to affect the outcome of the 2016 election and then to undermine the Trump administration.

An active attorney general would be demanding answers, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions can’t even get his department to turn over documents to the congressional oversight committees and can’t get documents released to the public in any reasonable form.

Some of the redactions by the Justice Department remind me of Capt. John Yossarian in Catch-22, redacting letters when he would declare war on articles and redact all the articles in a letter or, better yet, when he redacted an entire letter except for the salutation and signature.

The documents coming from the FBI and the Justice Department, however, are not being redacted randomly as a form of entertainment for a bored man, they are redacted to protect the guilty, not to protect confidential information. We know this from when they have been forced to release unredacted versions of the same documents.

Despite the lack of cooperation from Sessions’ Justice Department, there is a growing body of evidence that the FBI and the Justice Department were following orders from the White House.

If the actions of the FBI and the Justice Department can be linked to the White House, then you have a president using his power as president to try and affect the outcome of an election.

While president, Obama was actively campaigning for Hillary Clinton, which was certainly his right. But if he was using the FBI and Justice Department to try and undermine the Trump campaign, that is a serious abuse of power.

Rather than having a special prosecutor investigating everyone involved in the Trump campaign and prosecuting a former Trump campaign chair, Paul Manafort, for crimes he committed long before Trump was ever a candidate, the country would be far better served to have a full blown investigation of what the FBI, the Justice Department and the White House were doing to ensure that Hillary Clinton would win.

Strzok promised his lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, that Trump would never be president because, “We’ll stop him.” He also texted Page about an “insurance policy” that would prevent Trump from ever being president. These are serious allegations by the man in charge of investigating both Hillary Clinton and Trump.

Some explanation needs to be given of the investigation of the Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. It took the FBI over a year to investigate 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton turned over to them from her homebrew server. So how did the FBI then investigate 694,000 emails found on Weiner’s laptop in one night?

And even in that cursory investigation the FBI found classified Hillary Clinton emails that had not previously been provided to the FBI, but there was no investigation of why the FBI was seeing these emails for the first time, or if these emails – some of which had to do with Israel – had compromised US security.

Also, since the 694,000 emails appeared to include all of Hillary Clinton’s emails while she was secretary of state, why had these emails not been provided to the FBI during the investigation?

One has to assume that Hillary Clinton’s top aide, best buddy and constant companion Huma Abedin, who was married to Weiner, had the emails automatically forwarded to his laptop. So why, in the exhaustive FBI investigation of those 30,000 emails, didn’t the FBI discover that all her emails were being forwarded to a separate account?

Of course, one big reason the FBI would not want to actually investigate the emails is that it appeared that Hillary Clinton’s lost emails from her first months in office were on the laptop. These would include Hillary Clinton’s emails about setting up the private server for her government work and could prove intent and knowledge that what she was doing was illegal. The FBI wouldn’t want to find that evidence because it would prove they were wrong in not bringing charges.

Is it possible that during the FBI investigation the FBI never asked Abedin any questions about the lost emails or about having any Hillary Clinton emails in her possession?

Did they even bother to ask Weiner how all those emails got on his computer? At the time, Weiner was under investigation for sexting with a 15-year-old girl, a crime for which he has been convicted and is serving time in prison. The FBI would have had a tremendous amount of leverage to get answers out of Weiner before his conviction.

That’s the way federal law enforcement operates, charging a low level criminal and working their way up the ladder. But if you don’t want to indict the woman you want to be president, you don’t ask any questions; and since the entire investigation of the 694,000 emails took a week, it doesn’t appear those questions were asked.

So why hasn’t Sessions launched an all out investigation of how that particular part of the Hillary Clinton investigation was handled? It would be a great place to start unraveling the whole nest of corruption.

It appears from her communications that Page isn’t interested in going to jail and also that because of her job and her lover she knew what was happening. Congress has had Page testify, but has not she been brought before a grand jury to tell her story.

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Evidence of wrongdoing by the FBI during the election and the beginning of the Trump administration keeps popping up.

North Carolina Congressman Mark Meadows has sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stating that recently released documents raise grave concerns about high-ranking officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice leaking information about ongoing investigations.

The information came from newly released text messages between Strzok and Page indicating there was a concerted effort to release information to the media to spin the media reports against Trump.

Andrew Weissmann, who was then with the Justice Department and is now part of special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s team, was also involved according to Meadows’ letter.

If Weissmann was involved in leaking information about investigations to sully Trump and is now investigating the alleged collusion between Trump and Russia, isn’t that a conflict of interest?

If past behavior is any indication of future action, Rosenstein will wait 30 to 60 days and then respond that he is unable to provide the requested documents because his dog ate them or some equally unconvincing excuse.

The refusal of the Sessions Justice Department to provide documents to Congress is more than enough reason for Trump to fire Sessions. They are all supposed to be on the same team.

Rosenstein in this case will no doubt try to run the clock out, hoping that the Democrats take control of the House in the 2018 elections and then he won’t have to worry about these pesky requests for documents anymore.

If the Democrats do win control of the House, then all these investigations by the House oversight committees will come to a screeching halt.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh were all about television and media coverage.

Everyone knew before Kavanaugh sat down how the votes were going to be cast. All the Republicans were going to vote in favor of Kavanaugh, and, even if Kavanaugh had brought a few loaves and fishes and fed everyone in the room and the crowd outside, all the Democrats were going to vote against him.

There was absolutely nothing Kavanaugh could have said to win a single Democratic vote. The die was cast when he was nominated by Trump. In fact, if Trump gets another Supreme Court appointment, which is likely since even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg can’t live forever, the results will be the same. The Democrats have chosen to oppose everything Trump does.

The Democrats had materials written up to oppose Trump’s nomination before he announced it. The only thing missing from the handouts was the name of the nominee.

Now the Kavanaugh nomination will go through a similar process in the full Senate with the Democrats doing everything in their power to delay the vote, but the Republicans still have a majority in the Senate, so the results should be the same with the Democrats howling and whining and the Republicans plowing on ahead.

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The anonymous New York Times op-ed makes some serious allegations against Trump. One of the more bizarre is that he is not a good conservative.

This is news? Trump went all over the country in 2015 and 2016 talking about what he would do if he were elected. Much of what he talked about was not good conservative causes. He talked about building a wall and stopping illegal immigration.

One of the reasons illegal immigration has gotten out of hand is that the conservative business owners like it because it provides them with lots of cheap labor.

The Democrats want to allow the illegal immigrants in because illegal immigrants living here have children who are US citizens and will vote for Democrats. The Democrats are also working hard to get illegal immigrants rights that lead to the right to vote. If all the illegal immigrants in the US were allowed to vote, the 2018 elections would be a Democratic sweep.

So the establishment of both parties had their own reasons for looking the other way when people crossed the border illegally.

Here comes Trump who upsets the apple cart by saying he is going to put a stop to it. This, more than anything else Trump said, resonated with the American people, in many cases people who saw illegal immigrants as competitors for jobs. Whether they actually are competitors for jobs doesn’t matter; it is the perception that they are competitors for jobs that matters.

Trump also said he was against the current system of free trade because it wasn’t free and the US was getting the short end of the stick. He was against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he said were bad for the US.

Trump also talked about tax cuts and deregulation, two things that are traditional Republican issues.

The Republican establishment didn’t support Trump and has fought Trump tooth and nail on the wall, but he managed to wrest free enough money to get it started and eventually Trump will wear down the Republican establishment and get the wall funded.

Trump has thrown NAFTA and TPP out the window. He has also worked out a deal with the European Union to get more favorable trade terms for the US.

China has been more of a problem, but the Chinese economy is already suffering and the US economy is booming. The Chinese in the end will do what is best for China, which is trade with the US under conditions that are not so lopsided in favor of China.

Trump also pledged to clean out the swamp. He hasn’t done nearly as well at this as he could have if he were not faced with an investigation by the special prosecutor.

Trump was naive in the ways of Washington. He was accustomed to the cutthroat world of real estate development, where someone who opposed him bitterly on one job might be his partner on the next.

In real estate development people cut each other’s throats, in the swamp they wait patiently in the muck rise up out of nowhere and stab you in the back. Trump is learning to watch his back, but it has taken time.

Jobs have come back; median income has increased. Trump is doing what he promised he would do if elected and doing it despite the opposition from both parties because Trump has something both parties covet – the support of the people.

Along the way Trump has made huge mistakes. The biggest so far was in appointing Sessions as attorney general. The second biggest was not firing Sessions as soon as he recused himself. The third was not ordering Sessions to clean out the Justice Department of Obama and Hillary Clinton supporters. The fourth was in making Comey the director of the FBI.

Trump is not a conservative. He is a populist. I would imagine that his meetings are all over the place because his speeches and interviews are. He moves on to new topics when he is tired, bored or an idea pops into his head.

I have never been in a meeting with Trump but I have been in hundreds of government meetings where they beat a dead horse until you think they can’t possibly find enough left to beat and then they beat it some more. I would imagine that Trump doesn’t allow the same thing to be said 20 times in a meeting, so that everyone gets their say. Probably, most people sitting there have long ago tuned it all out and are thinking about what they are going to order for lunch; what their spouse meant when he or she said, “I won’t be here when you get home”; or a thousand other things.

Trump is the president. He doesn’t have to do that. It makes sense that a longtime government bureaucrat would find holding meetings where actual ideas and not long meaningless government reports, were discussed.

But the bottom line is that they are Trump’s meetings and he can hold them any way he likes. President Lyndon Johnson liked to talk to aides while he was sitting on the toilet. Prime Minister Winston Churchill dictated while he took baths.

World leaders are not normal people. If they were, they wouldn’t be world leaders. Trump has a unique style, but it has gotten him where he is today and it isn’t likely to change.

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One thing the anonymous op-ed has done is prove that those of us who believe in the deep state are not crazy conspiracy theorists. It’s hard to imagine better proof that the deep state exists. Here is someone claiming to be a senior level administration official who brags about working against rather than for the president.

It’s the deep state by definition – longtime federal employees who at least think they run the government and act as if they do.

No one should work for the president who can’t support his agenda. It is wrong for Trump to allow them to have a job, and it thwarts the will of the American people as expressed in the last election.

The anonymous writer clearly believes he or she knows what is best for the country and Trump doesn’t. That’s all well and good and we have a ready-made solution for that – the anonymous writer could run for office. If enough people in his district, state or in the nation agree that person could get elected and have legitimate power.

What this person has now is illegitimate power. They aren’t doing the job that the American people are paying them to do. They are doing the job they want to do, which is opposed to the wishes of the American people who elected Trump president.

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The recent confrontation between Sen. Marco Rubio and Alex Jones of Infowars is classic. Rubio makes the perfect move to combat Jones. He says, “I don’t know who you are.” And when he asks another reporter trying to interview him, “Who is this guy?”, it appears genuine.

What is clear is that Jones is a legend in his own mind. He has a following of a few million in a country of 300 million. I would hazard a guess that far more people don’t know who Jones is than do.

The truth is that he is a nutcase. Anyone who would claim that the Newtown shooting was a hoax has a screw loose and Jones has more than one.

In his mind there is a conspiracy around every corner and under every rock, and a lot of the conspiracies are against him.

In the attempted interview, Jones acts like it is all about him. Actually, the other reporters were there to interview Rubio, and Jones, by constantly interrupting, was putting a stop to it.

Jones is upset because he has been banned from Twitter, and banned or suspended from Facebook, YouTube and Apple.

He is claiming that his right to free speech is being denied, but those are private companies. There is no requirement that private companies allow everyone to use their services. Jones doesn’t allow anyone who wants to be on Infowars on the show. I don’t see why, because they are popular, the companies that own them should give up the right to control the content.

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Everyone talks about election strategy, recruiting candidates, raising money, attack ads and all the rest. It all matters, but what matters most in national elections is the economy, and the Republicans need to turn this election into a national election.

If the economy had been booming like the Democrats said it was in 2016 under President Obama, then Hillary Clinton would be president. But the economy was teetering along on the verge of recession, but not quite there. The Democrats claimed the economy was great, but the people out looking for jobs, or hoping for a raise, knew from their pocketbooks that it wasn’t.

Today the economy is booming. Job growth is holding steady this year at about 200,000 per month. Unemployment is at 3.9 percent and wages are going up. Consumer confidence is at a record high.

The Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, so they can take full credit for the economy. It was improving before the tax cuts went into effect and the tax cuts gave it some punch.

The Democrats are claiming that this is simply a result of the policies that Obama put in place, and some diehard Democrats may actually believe that, but regular folks of both parties know that this isn’t Obama’s economy. Numbers started going up as soon as Trump was elected because people thought having a businessman in the White House would make a difference, and it has.

Trump and the Republicans in Congress have eliminated some of the most burdensome Obama-era regulations and are continuing to eliminate more so that businesses can function. One of the biggest impediments to business growth is excessive regulations.

Right now another is finding employees, which is a great problem for the economy to be having. As employees get harder to find, wages go up, more people are making more money and spending it, which keeps the economy improving.

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The Daily Caller printed a list of four senior White House staffers who could be the author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed piece. If the Daily Caller is accurate, Trump should fire them all because they do not believe in what Trump is attempting to do.

But the anonymous piece gives Trump the opportunity to do what he should have done a year and a half ago.

He should assemble some White House staffers who he trusts and believes are loyal to the presidency and have them come up with a list of names who could be the op-ed writer, or who they believe agree with the op-ed writer. Then Trump should offer them all the chance to resign to spend more time with their families and if they don’t they should be fired. Trump himself doesn’t need to fire them or even convene the meeting. It should be done by those who believe in what Trump is doing for America.

But it doesn’t seem likely that the anonymous op-ed writer would have the nerve to write such an article if they didn’t believe that there were enough like-minded people in the administration to give them cover, and that is sad. Trump has more than enough issues without having people who are supposed to be working for him undermining him.

Imagine if the exact same letter had been written during the Obama administration. The mainstream media would have been outraged that someone was working against the elected president. The writer would have been called racist, un-American and a traitor. But because it is Trump in the White House and not Obama, the mainstream media are celebrating this subversive.

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If you think for an instant that it is some kind of coincidence that The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed stating the same kinds of things that Bob Woodward says in his book that is being released this week, think again.

This is a coordinated effort. Maybe one of Woodward’s sources for the book is the one who wrote the op-ed. Maybe Woodward himself wrote it. But it is not an accident that the anti-Trump forces are marshaling their forces just before the midterm elections.

Another factor that is driving this offense is the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The Democrats can’t beat Kavanaugh through the normal legislative route, but if they can delegitimize the person who nominated him enough they are hoping to pick up a Republican vote or two. It doesn’t appear to be working, but there are some really weak Republicans in the Senate who might relish a little more cover to do what they are tempted to do and vote against the nomination of someone who is extremely well qualified to be on the Supreme Court.

The job the Senate is supposed to do is to make certain the person nominated is qualified, not make sure that the nominee agrees with them on political issues.

The Republicans are actually better at doing this than the Democrats. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was confirmed with 67 votes, which means Republicans put aside their ideological differences and voted for Kagan because she was qualified.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor won confirmation with 68 yes votes, including nine Republican senators. They didn’t agree with her political beliefs, but they found her to be well qualified. It’s what the Senate used to do and it’s a shame that the Senate can’t at least do its job.

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Trump is doing more to raise wages than the Democrats have ever done with their demands that minimum wage be raised to $15 an hour. The way Trump is raising wages is by creating jobs.

As long as unemployment is high, wages can remain low because people are desperate for work at any salary.

When the country gets in the position it is now or soon will be, with more jobs available than people looking for work, the whole dynamic changes.

Businesses, to keep costs down, pay wages as low as they can pay and still hire people. If they can’t find enough people to work at $10 an hour to get the job done, they’ll try $11 and then $12 and on up the scale. But if the economy is doing so well that there are lots of unfilled jobs, it means businesses should be making money, which will allow them to pay a higher wage.

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It’s hard not to pay attention to the polls that are everywhere, and the mainstream media pick the polls that make Republicans look like losers and Democrats like winners.

But one thing we know from polls from 2016 and 2014 is that they aren’t accurate in today’s world. The only people being polled these days are people who want to be polled.

Look at 2016. How many polls predicted that Trump would win? Was there one?

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Senior Trump administration officials who are quoted in Woodward’s new book, Fear, about the Trump White House have denied ever saying the quotes in the book.

Since Woodward didn’t interview them for the book, in a normal world Woodward would be accused of misquoting them. But this is Woodward, who, since Watergate, has written whatever he wanted and been worshipped by the left.

When Woodward supposedly held an interview with former CIA Director William Casey, who was in a coma and had guards outside the door, it was acceptable. Even though Woodward got the details of the interview wrong, like the position of the bed in the room, details that if correct would have lent credence to his report, but the fact that the details are wrong doesn’t bother the left, because Woodward writes what they want him to write.

One might expect White House staffers to deny the quotes in the book since, if they didn’t, they might be fired. But former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also denies the quotes attributed to him by Woodward.

Christie has also stated publicly that Woodward never called him to check out the quotes. Christie is not a hard man to find. He has a checkered history with Trump and it appears he’s always willing to talk to the media. So if Woodward were attempting to be accurate, why wouldn’t he call Christie?

The whole idea of these books by Woodward is off kilter. Everyone knows he wasn’t there and didn’t hear the quotes himself. Many of the quotes are sourced, not from someone who was in the room, but from someone who talked to someone who said they were in the room. This is not even close to being acceptable in journalism, but if Woodward writes it then it is considered gospel by the leftist mainstream media.