Michael Moore on why Trump will win: “He is the human Molotov Cocktail that they’ve been waiting for; the human hand grande that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.”
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.
Things are getting really, really bad in Turkey. This is not a surprise, and the writing was on the wall when the “coup” failed and Erdogan’s crackdown began. But Erdogan’s purge is even more extensive than I anticipated.
What China learned from the Gulf War. And what they then unlearned: “China did try adding more officers selected for skills rather than loyalty but since 2010 have shifted back to the “loyalty first” model. This was necessary because of problems eliminating the corruption in the military and the realization that the military would more likely be needed to deal with an internal threat rather than an external one.” (Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)
ESPN lost 621,000 cable subscribers in October. “Of we’re very conservative and project that ESPN continues to lose 3 million subscribers a year…within five years ESPN will be bringing in less subscriber revenue than they’ve committed for sports rights.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Kadzik has also made numerous donations to the likes of Clinton, vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, and John Podesta’s daughter Megan Rouse. Oh, and his wife is Amy Weiss, who served as White House deputy assistant and deputy press secretary to Bill Clinton. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
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.
“For twenty years, I worked undercover in the Central Intelligence Agency, recruiting sources, producing intelligence and running operations. I have a pretty concrete understanding of how classified information is handled and how government communications systems work. Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period. Full stop…Anyone else who did such things in the government would long ago have been tried, convicted and sent to jail.”
Leaked emails show that Hillary wants the Clinton Foundation to keep receiving foreign donations even if she gets elected President. Well, of course she does… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Victor Davis Hanson wonders “What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation?”
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.
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.
More on the Podesta-Kadzik relationship. (Hat tip: Hot Air, which asks: “At this point, is there anyone working at the Justice Department who hasn’t been tainted by the stench of Clinton corruption?”)
Hmmmmmmm: “Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has not been on Clinton’s campaign plane for the last three days, CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin reported Monday.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Scott Adams: “Allow me to offer an interpretation of events that casts Comey as more of a patriot and hero than an ass-covering weasel….In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation.”
James Carville melts down, “Asserts FBI, GOP, and KGB in Cahoots.” He may be the first Clinton toady to completely lose it this election cycle, but I doubt he’ll be the last. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
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.
“Trump saw a 16.5 percentage-point increase in backing from African-American voters in a Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California tracking poll, up from 3.1 percent on Sept. 10 to 19.6 percent through Friday. Meanwhile, the same poll showed Clinton’s support among that group plummeting from 90.4 percent on Sept. 10 to 71.4 percent.”
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.
Here’s some quick Twitter reaction to yesterday’s torrent of Clinton Corruption/FBI/Anthony Weiner news. But first let’s look at a prophecy fulfilled from August 31 last year:
Huma Abedin, the top aide to Hillary Clinton and the wife of perv sleazebag Anthony Wiener, was a major security risk as a collector of info
The poll with the best track record over the last three presidential elections gave Donald Trump a 2-percentage-point edge over Hillary Clinton on Saturday.
The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll has Trump with 42.1 percent and Clinton at 39.7 percent.
Thoughts on #NeverTrump: “They are putting a great volume of energy into bringing about a disaster, for which they will not take any ownership.”
No one trusts the media anymore. “Only one in nine Americans believes that Hillary Clinton is ‘honest and trustworthy.’ They don’t trust the media’s cover-up of her misdeeds, and the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
More than anything, I can’t sit idly by and allow these perpetrators of fraud to celebrate and leak tears of joy like they did when they helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. I have to know I weighed in not only in writing but in the voting booth. The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won’t do it, it’s something. Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don’t want me to, and I believe I must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton.
Here’s a New Yorker piece on the failure of the Euro. It provides a good, but incomplete, overview of the Euro’s failure (nowhere does it note that Europe’s cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable, and it fails to note that none of the nations practicing “austerity” in southern Europe have cut outlays to match receipts). And the myopic policy prescription offered is, of course, more central planning. But there are some good bits. Like this:
The U.S. unemployment rate hit ten per cent for a single month in 2009 and is now below five per cent; the eurozone unemployment rate hit ten per cent around the same time, and is still in double digits. In some European countries, youth unemployment is more than forty per cent. America’s economy is bigger than it was when the crisis hit. The eurozone’s is smaller. To take just one example, Italy, the third-largest economy in the eurozone, has a per-capita G.D.P. that’s lower than it was at the end of the last century.
Also this:
Stiglitz observes that if the countries that committed to the single currency in 1992 had known what they know now, and if people had had the chance to vote on the proposal, “it is hard to see how they could have supported it.” That’s a hell of an indictment.
Hey, remember how we were told California’s assisted suicide law would only apply to terminally ill people who wanted to die? Now insurance companies are enouraging suicide rather than pay for life-extending drug treatments.
But if you’re not sure yet what you want to do, then take time to decide before you spend $30,000, $50,000, or $100,000 you don’t have for something you don’t need. In the meantime, start working. You’ll probably only find low-paying, hard-working jobs at first, but guess what? If you go to college, you’ll be working those same jobs when you get out, only you’ll be four years older and fifty grand poorer.
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol. Better idea than corn subsidies…
For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” – a technical term invented to describe the degree of numerical coincidence of a theory. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness because it’s a philosophical criterion, not a scientific one. But on that matter I got the last laugh: Nature, it turns out, doesn’t like to be told what’s presumably natural.
It’s getting to the point that not only can I not keep up with the torrent of email leaks documenting Hillary Clinton corruption, I can’t even keep with the people keeping up with the leaks!
A top State Department official offered a “quid pro quo” to an FBI investigator to declassify an e-mail from Hillary Clinton’s private server in exchange for allowing the bureau to operate in countries where it was banned, stunning new documents revealed Monday.
The FBI documents show that Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy pitched the deal to the unnamed agent, allegedly as part of an effort to back up Clinton’s claim that she did not send or receive classified documents on the server in her Westchester home.
“[Redacted] indicated he had been contacted by [Kennedy], Undersecretary of State, who had asked his assistance in altering the e-mail’s classification in exchange for a ‘quid pro quo,’ ” according to the documents, which summarized interviews the feds conducted in the summer of 2015 while investigating Clinton’s e-mail practices.
“[Redacted] advised that in exchange for marking the e-mail unclassified, STATE would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more Agents in countries where they are presently forbidden,” the document added.
One State Department staffer described feeling “immense pressure” to complete the review quickly and to not label anything as classified.
“This is a textbook case where a grand jury should have convened but was not. That is appalling,” an FBI special agent who has worked public corruption and criminal cases said of the decision. “We talk about it in the office and don’t know how Comey can keep going.”
The agent was also surprised that the bureau did not bother to search Clinton’s house during the investigation.
“We didn’t search their house. We always search the house. The search should not just have been for private electronics, which contained classified material, but even for printouts of such material,” he said.
“There should have been a complete search of their residence,” the agent pointed out. “That the FBI did not seize devices is unbelievable. The FBI even seizes devices that have been set on fire.”
But most serious disclosure in the review was that donors expected a “quid pro quo” in return for their contributions. “Some interviewees reported conflicts of those raising funds or donors, some of whom may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gifts.”
“This was bright line illegal,” Wall Street analyst and philanthropy expert Charles Ortel told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “This is a rogue charity that was out of control for years. And the trustees elected to not correct them. We’re not talking about people with no knowledge of the laws. These are people who can’t claim ignorance.”
The email from Huma Abedin, Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department, was addressed to Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook. Hillary Clinton was a director of the foundation at the time.
Singapore and Hong Kong officials reportedly were also vying to convene the CGI meeting in their countries, but the North African nation ultimately hosted it in a five-star hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 2015. Abedin told Podesta and Mook that Morocco was not CGI’s “first choice.”
The actual meeting was paid for by OCP, the Moroccan-government-owned mining company that has been accused of serious human rights violations. Clinton vigorously supported the Moroccan King when she was Secretary of State and the U.S.-financed Export-Import Bank gave OCP a $92 million loan guarantee during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The mining company also contributed between $5 million to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to the charity’s web site.
“Electing Hillary Clinton will be an endorsement of permanent political corruption and consent for the use of government as an instrument to extinguish dissent.”
Wikileaks also brought back to light a bit of information that was mostly swept under the rug at the time: Eric McFadden, Hillary’s 2008 Catholic community liaison, was arrested in 2009 for running an underage prostitution ring. Just another member of the Clinton Campaign Moral Freakshow…
The list of MSM reporters who take their marching orders from Hillary. On the list: ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (Duh) and Diane Sawyer, New York Times‘s Gail Collins, etc. The only surprise is no one from the Washington Post on that list. Maybe they just assumed they already had marching orders to support Hillary. (Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)
Most evident from their downloads is the unremitting, almost incestual, alliance between elites (read: Democratic Party leadership) and the press, those who are informing us of what we are supposed to think. The myriad emails between New York Times reporter and CNBC anchor John Harwood and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta would approach the risible were they not so disturbing by implication. Presidential debate moderator Harwood, putatively a journalist, actually acts as an advisor to Podesta in them, warning the campaign manager of the dangers of a potential Ben Carson candidacy and even bragging to him about having tripped up Donald Trump at a debate.
But the presidential debate moderator is far from alone in his fealty to the ways and means of the nomenklatura. The New York Times and the Boston Globe—the emails show, as if we hadn’t guessed already—colluded with the Clinton campaign.
But the level of collusion goes much deeper than press and politicians. The Department of Justice itself—the emails also reveal—was in private communication with the Clinton people during the investigation of the Hillary Clinton homebrew server, warning her campaign in advance of a State Department release of emails. Everybody was colluding!
Excerpts from Hillary’s Goldman Sachs speech. In which Hillary declares she has nothing in common with those peons in the middle class, admits that jihadists are coming over among Syrian refugees, and proclaims her love of open borders.
More on the subject: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” Sounds like the EU written large.
Hard to believe it’s been a mere five days since Trump held a press conference with women Bill Clinton sexually assaulted. So much news has come down the pike since…
The long list of women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct. Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Eileen Wellstone, Carolyn Moffet, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Becky Brown, Helen Dowdy, Cristy Zercher… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Scott Adams: “If the new battleground is spousal fidelity, you have to like Trump’s chances.”
New Trump ad hits Hillary on Pay-to-Play corruption:
Nigel Farage on Brexit and Trump: “I believe we are witnessing a popular uprising against failed politics on a global scale. People want to vote for candidates with personality, faults and all. It is the same in the UK, America and much of the rest of Europe. The little people have had enough. They want change.” (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
That NBC poll showing Hillary up 11 points is pure hogwash with biased samples from a company that’s on the Hillary campaign’s payroll. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
So much work to be done on big posts that it’s hard to do a small one today, so instead enjoy some selections from the #ClintonAFilm hashtag off Twitter instead:
No, I didn’t watch it. So here are some reactions from people who did:
Vodka Pundit Stephen Green: “I’ve never seen one candidate come on so week, then reverse course — in his own limited, almost demented fashion — so strongly. I’ve never seen another candidate, so thoroughly programed, act as though her various subroutines had been corrupted by one of those nasty Russian viruses.”
Scott Adams: “Trump won bigly. This one wasn’t close.” Also:
The best quotable moments from the debate are pro-Trump. His comment about putting Clinton in jail has that marvelous visual persuasion quality about it, and it was the laugh of the night, which means it will be repeated endlessly. He also looked like he meant it.
Clinton’s Abe Lincoln defense for two-faced politicking failed as hard as anything can fail. Mrs. Clinton, I knew Abe Lincoln, and you’re no Abe Lincoln. You know that was in your head. Or it will be.
Powerline’s John Hinderaker: “Some of the rats might want to consider returning to the ship. Donald Trump came through pretty well tonight, mainly because the focus was on the issues. As long as issues are being discussed, Trump wins….In short, Trump won. In my opinion, he won big. We will see whether it matters.”