This is it! If you haven’t already early voted, get out there and do so!
Some quick and dirty voting day links:
This is it! If you haven’t already early voted, get out there and do so!
Some quick and dirty voting day links:
The election is tomorrow, so let’s just combine the Clinton Corruption update with the election news update:
When the Clintons left the White House in 2001, pilfering over $190,000 worth of china, flatware, rugs, and furniture as they cleared out, they claimed they were flat broke. Their net worth today is now in excess of $150 million, accumulated not by traditional means of work and investment, but rather by pay-for-play influence peddling through speeches and Clinton Foundation fundraising — with the tacit understanding that the Clintons would be in a position to return favors to donors after Hillary won the 2016 presidential election.
The Clintons symbolize the institutionalization of corruption in Washington, which now permeates almost all the government agencies. Even the so-called independent Federal Reserve has been corrupted by politicians whose profligate deficit spending puts pressure on the Fed to maintain a zero-interest policy that artificially masks the real cost and risk of a growing unsustainable level of debt.
For the better part of eight years of the Obama administration, polls have consistently shown that nearly 70% of Americans believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Separately, a recent MSNBC poll shows “liar” is the most common word that comes to mind when voters think of Hillary Clinton. Another recent NBC poll shows that only 11% think of Hillary as honest and trustworthy. Even if one doubts the accuracy of these polls, how is it possible for a majority to think the country can get on a better track by electing as the next U.S. President a liar who embodies the corrupt status quo?
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Don’t agree with all of it, but I think it’s very effective at targeting potential Trump voters:
Scott Adams calls it “a masterpiece. It’s a full-body experience. Best I’ve ever seen. Deeply persuasive. He made you wait. Magnificent bastard.”
Thoughts?
The latest Los Angeles Times poll has Donald Trump up over Hillary Clinton by 5.4 points. That’s the largest lead Trump had since the “Clinton collapse” story broke.
Polls are screwy this year, and Trump has a way of defying all conventional wisdom, but given the in-the-tank media loudly proclaiming “No, Hillary’s polls are just fine, I tell you! Just fine!” in the wake of the FBI and Wikileaks revelations, the LA Times poll seems significant.
(Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
So the big Wikileak topic today, the Friday before the election, is a John Podesta email which mentions “spirit cooking,” which involves “blood, sperm and breastmilk.”
(Blink. Blink.)
Cue Scott Adams:
Do any Clinton scandals NOT involve sperm? #SpiritCooking
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) November 4, 2016
Caveat: This is one of those stories where this tiny little email is being spun out into “sex cult” and “Satanist” headlines. I find it hard to believe that Clinton’s inner circle are dabbling in Neo-Satanism, because that would mean worshiping something other than money and power. But maybe Podesta might want to break his silence on this one email because what the hell, dude?
Now for some slightly less icky Clinton Corruption news:
There are a lot of angles to these Clinton scandals, but the thing that transcends all of it is the rank stupidity of the people involved. There were safer and more secure ways to establish clandestine communications. Even with their setup, a modest amount of discipline would have prevented most of this from happening. All they had to do was limit mail going out of the system. When the time came to burn it down, they only had to destroy the server entirely and no one would be able to prove anything.
The argument from Team Trump in the closing days of the election is that Hillary Clinton is too corrupt to rule. He’s painting her as the face of the larger problem, which is the metastasizing corruption of the ruling class. It’s a good closing argument and it resonates, but the reason Hillary should not rule is she is dangerously incompetent and she surrounds herself with outlandishly stupid people. A society can survive crooked rulers, but it cannot survive stupid ones. Hillary Clinton is too stupid to rule.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Believe it or not, there is some non-Presidential race news. But yeah, I’m starting with that:
Trump will win because:
- The polls pervasively understate his support (the “shy Trump voter”).
- Enthusiasm for Clinton is low, enthusiasm for Trump is high. Early voting is showing a pattern closer to 2008 than 2012 (high turnout). Given the enthusiasm gap, this is bad news for Clinton and supports the Shy Trump Voter hypothesis.
- This (like 2008) is a “Change Election”. Three quarters or more of voters think that the country is on the wrong track. Clinton is the insider, Trump is the outsider. Advantage: Trump.
- The Clinton camp is paralyzed by the emerging scandals. It’s been 5 days [post is from 11/2 – LP] and there’s no coherent reply to the FBI reopening the email investigation. The paralysis says that Clinton’s inner circle is divided on what to do, and she has poor leadership skills – and so the campaign twists in the wind. This is a very, very bad sign for her.
- The Marc Rich announcement today is almost inexplicable. There’s no reason that a FOIA request announcement couldn’t wait until after the election. Instead, it came out 4 days after the previous FBI announcement. My take is that Obama has polling showing that she’s going to lose, and lose big. It’s no secret that the Obamas and the Clintons despise each other – this is his chance to dismantle the Clinton machine in the Democratic party (and hill the resulting power vacuum with his people).
- The UK betting markets are showing the same pattern as before the Brexit vote – a few big money bets on Clinton (as with Remain), but a huge number of small bets on Trump (Leave).
- Independents are leaving Gary Johnson and breaking hard for Trump. The latest poll from North Carolina has Johnson down 5 and Trump up 5. This feels like more confirmation of the Shy Trump Voter hypothesis.
- There is very little or no equivalent data pointing to a strengthening by Clinton. If she were actually as far ahead as we’ve been told, there would be evidence dropping from the trees. There isn’t.
As part of their ongoing Clinton-related FOIA document dump, the FBI has released the Vince Foster investigation files. Team Clinton must be jumping out of their skin about now.
1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.
2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.
3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.
4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.
5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it.
Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.
Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said.
Snip.
Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.
In other words: Agents had jobs to do, and senior officials had Democrats to protect. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A small law firm that has given money to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Harry Reid, President Obama and many others is accused of improperly funneling millions of dollars into Democratic Party coffers. The program was exposed by the Center for Responsive Politics and the same team of Boston Globe investigative reporters featured in the movie “Spotlight.”
The Thornton Law Firm has just 10 partners, but dollar for dollar, it’s one of the nation’s biggest political donors, reports CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil.
But according to the firm’s own documents – leaked by a whistleblower — days or even hours after making these donations, partners received bonuses matching the amount they gave.
If a Republican were benefiting, this would receive wall-to-wall network coverage, but it doesn’t even make Hillary Clinton’s top 10 scandals list. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
EmailGate is deadly for the Clintons because it reminds so many Americans of so many things they’ve disliked about Bill and Hillary for so long. The overweening sense of entitlement. The compulsive lies and dissimulations. The blame-shifting and scapegoating rather than taking responsibility. The personal profiteering while posing as upright public servants. Above all, the overpowering belief that laws are for lesser people, never for Clintons and their privileged coterie. Bill and Hillary have gotten away with this for decades, turning the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their own aggrandizement, but trying to publicly pin EmailGate on the FBI—rather than on Hillary Clinton herself—may be one step too far.
(Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)
Then came the Wikileaks. And Project Veritas. And the FBI’s latest announcement about the emails on Weiner’s computer. We watched Clinton physically collapse in public. Individually, none of that news was big enough to make a difference. But collectively it framed Clinton as a drinker in dubious health, who hired bullies to start violence at Trump rallies, and runs a Mafia-like shadow-government called The Clinton Foundation, funded in part by companies that benefit from war. Add that to Clinton’s confrontational language about Russia, and suddenly Clinton looks as dangerous as Trump. The fear persuasion was approaching a tie.
Snip.
In summary, Clinton’s message this closing week is that Trump is politically incorrect, offensive to many people, and sexually aggressive beyond the point of appropriate social behavior. That’s all the stuff you already assumed about Trump a year ago. And it doesn’t scare you, no matter how badly it offends you.
Meanwhile, the current news cycle along with Trump’s supporters have framed Clinton as a low-stamina liar with a drinking problem who is running a criminal enterprise (The Clinton Foundation) that sells influence to foreign countries and companies that are more interested in war than peace. While she trash-talks Putin. That stuff could get all of us killed.
To many who knew the Clintons behind closed doors, it is unimaginable that she may be elected to the highest office in the land. There is a good chance she will actually become the most powerful person on the planet. John Adams must be spinning in his grave at the mere thought. One thing is true: Many have tried to hold them accountable. All have been thwarted at every turn.
Today’s big Clinton corruption news is the FBI dropping a lot of Clinton-related documents.
The weird thing is, the report about the Clinton Foundation investigation is more than 90% redacted, while the first Hillary EmailGate report seems less than 10% redacted.
Other Clinton corruption links:
According to The Wall Street Journal, the New York agents notified FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe of their blockbuster findings on October 3.
But they couldn’t access the emails they found because searching through them wasn’t covered under their existing warrant for Weiner.
They needed a new warrant. So what did McCabe do?
Nothing. He sat on his hands. He never requested one. And nothing happened for weeks.
Why is this so important?
Well, McCabe is the FBI official who oversaw the initial Clinton email investigation.
He’s come under fire recently because his wife received $500,000 while running for the Virginia state senate from the political action committee (PAC) of longtime Clinton ally and current Virginia governor Terry McAullife.
Clinton herself headlined a major fundraiser for that same PAC shortly before the group steered the cash to McCabe’s wife.
So Mrs. McCabe received a huge sum of money from a close Clinton ally around the same time Mrs. Clinton was under an investigation led by Mr. McCabe.
The whole episode smells awful.
It’s therefore no shock to anyone who hasn’t had a full-frontal lobotomy why McCabe was in no rush to request a warrant for access to emails that may derail Clinton’s ambitions before Election Day.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the only reason why a warrant to was eventually requested in recent days was because “a member of the [Justice] department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant.”
Look, Comey’s not stupid. The Washington Post reported that he was only notified of the discovery of these new emails last Thursday.
He knew the guy running the Clinton investigation was likely dragging his feet until after election.
He also knew that if he did nothing given this new discovery and it turned up damning evidence against Clinton, Republicans would rake him over the coals for taking part in a conspiracy.
So he did what any bureaucrat would do in that situation: He covered his you know what. He notified Congress of the new discovery, which let the cat out of the bag.
The Clintons suffer from greed, as defined by Aristotle: endless acquisition solely for the benefit of self. With their insatiable appetites, they resented the limits that multimillionaire status put on them, boundaries they could bypass only by accumulating ever greater riches. The billion-dollar foundation squared the circle of progressive politicians profiting from the public purse by offering a veneer of “doing good” while offering free luxury travel commensurate with the style of the global rich, by offering sinecures for their loyal but otherwise unemployable cronies, and by spinning off lobbying and speaking fees (the original font of their $100-million-plus personal fortune and the likely reason for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to put all her communications, mercantile included, on a private server safe from government scrutiny). Acquiring money to the extent that money would become superfluous was certainly a Clinton telos — and the subtext of the entire Podesta trove and the disclosures about the Clinton Foundation.
Snip.
As in the quest for lucre, the Clintons’ appetite for high-profile authority is endless. Just as $150 million seemed as nothing compared with the billions and billions raked in by their friends and associates, so too eight years in the White House, tenure as governor, senator, or secretary of state were never enough. In between such tenures, the Clintons suffered droughts when they were not on center stage and in no position to wield absolute power, as they watched less deserving folk (the Obamas perhaps in particular) gain inordinate attention. A Hillary presidency would give the Clintons unprecedented Peronist-like power, in a manner unlike any couple in American history.
Of course, the Clintons are not only corrupt but cynical as well. They accept that the progressive media, the foundations, the universities, the bureaucracies, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley honor power more than trendy left-wing politics; they well understand that their fans will, for them, make the necessary adjustments to contextualize Clinton criminality or amorality. Sexual predations, the demonization of women, graft, and unequal protection under the law are also of no consequence to the inbred, conflicted, and morally challenged media – who will always check in with the Clinton team, like errant dogs who scratch the backdoor of their master after a periodic runaway.
The Clintons have contempt for the media precisely because the media are so obsequious. They smile, that, like themselves, the media are easily manipulated and compromised — to the extent of offering their articles, before publication, for Clinton approval (as the New York Times’ Mark Leibovich did; leaking debate questions to the Clinton campaign (as Donna Brazile did); or saying (as Politico’s chief political correspondent did), “I have become a hack. . . . Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f**ked up anything.” The Clintons view such sycophants not with affection, but with disdain, given that they are moochers no better than the Clintons, with the same base desires, albeit better camouflaged by their pretense of objectivity.
Read the whole thing…assuming NRO’s ad blocker blocker allows you to do so.
Time to post this, as I’m sure another ton of Clinton Corruption revelations are coming down the pike…
Obviously there’s too big a flood of Clinton corruption news to do this weekly, so this might be a daily feature (or pretty close to it) until the election, which is (finally!) just a week away.
Hey @FBI, isn't this the guy in charge of the Huma Abedin emails? Isn't this a DIRECT CONFLICT OF INTEREST?!?!?!!? WTF?#PodestaEmails25 pic.twitter.com/EBj7Ak9cK5
— prince hubris (@ShawnMichaelR) November 1, 2016
OK, I’ve got to go ahead and put this up before another giant wave of Clinton Corruption news breaks…
There are commentators who take it as a given that Trump is going to lose the black vote by a larger margin than Republican Presidential candidates usually do.
I doubt it.
First and foremost, Obama is no longer on the ballot, and it is deeply unlikely that Hillary Clinton get as many black votes as the real first black president.
Second, if you consider Trump not as a standard Republican, but as a celebrity candidate (which he most obviously is), his chances among black voters begin to look a lot better. Take, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The former body-builder, former Kennedy-in-law, was up for re-election in 2006 in one of the bluest states in the country. He was re-elected by a huge 17-point margin and won 27% of the Black vote in California. Schwarzenegger also won 39% of the Hispanic vote and a huge 62% of the Asian vote and 63% of the White Vote.”
Trump may not get 27% of the black vote (though I think that’s far more likely than Clinton getting the 96% of the black vote Obama got in 2008), but he doesn’t have to. Getting somewhere between that and the 10% of the black vote Republicans have historically garnered in Presidential elections will be enough to doom Clinton in several swing states.
And there are some signs that might be happening:
Third, Trump seems to be putting some effort into wooing black voters.
There are also some signs that Trump’s economic message is resonating with at least some parts of the black community the same way it has blue collar white voters.
Chicago attorney Brunell Donald-Kyei, a former Bernie Sanders supporter and Barack Obama voter, believes that Donald Trump’s economic message is resonating in American’s urban centers and elsewhere as well.
Donald-Kyei is now the vice chair of the Trump campaign’s diversity outreach coalition and has been making media appearances on behalf of the Republican presidential nominee during the campaign season. The lifelong Democrat who once ran for Illinois lieutenant governor explained in a previous interview that “I was a Bernie Sanders girl. Once… I saw how we were treated at the Democratic National Convention, I knew that I would not vote for Hillary Clinton, and the Trump Train just kept calling my name.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s real enthusiasm for Trump in some quarters of the black community, enthusiasm that simply wasn’t there for previous Republican Presidential candidates.
While Hillary racked up overwhelming support among black Democratic primary voters, enthusiasm about her in the black community at large has been noticably lacking. “Clinton and her entire campaign don’t care about black people unless their bodies are lifeless and cold, donating to her foundation, or paying them to give speeches…Nothing about this woman is genuine. Nothing.” Indeed, Democrats themselves are fretting about an enthusiasm gap among black voters for Clinton, and talk that the Clinton campaign is in panic mode over lack of black voter enthusiasm in Florida.
The entirety of the George Soros-funded #BlackLivesMatter seems to be a desperate attempt to keep the black community riled up about an imaginary epidemic of police brutality in order to get them to vote for Hillary. Whether it will work, or whether it can more than offset the white voters and police officers turned off by the tactic remains to be seen.
Finally, Trump has garnered some black celebrity Support. Some of those might strike you as pretty crappy black celebrities (like Mike Tyson), but the fact that there are some willing to publicly support him despite the relentless demonization of Trump by the mainstream media, and that many of them (Tyson, Herschel Walker) have worked with Trump, have to be encouraging signs for Team Trump.
As has been proven many, many times in this campaign, Donald Trump is such an unusual candidate that many of the usual rules simply don’t apply to him. “Blacks never vote for Republicans in Presidential races” may be one of those rules.