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This from an old friend and fellow memo reader: "The Donald had a good week, focusing on issues and slamming the failures of his opponents. Next on the agenda should be an address on the origin and the threat of our enormous national debt, how Obama made it so vast and how Hillary will make it worse. He needs to explain how this debt could cripple us in the near future. Then, he needs to show how Obama and his minions have lied about the rate of unemployment in this country. We need a detailed explanation. Then, he needs to explain how we can pay down the debt and how we can get people back to work. He must give us detailed explanations of what he will do. Hillary plans to tax us into the ground and then waste the money like Obama did by funding pork projects for his supporters. Never again!"
Trump has actually begun what he said he would, ie. he will turn into a candidate that appears and sounds presidential and we will get bored.
I suspect Donald will not become boring and might force the anti-Trumpers to have second thoughts about their willingness to allow Hillary to rule the waves.
Of course many have dug a hole for themselves and are too stubborn to acknowledge they might have been premature but some may be intellectually honest enough to give Donald a second hearing and look.
Donald is beginning to talk to us as if we were adults. He is beginning to talk about matters that matter.
Maybe he will even force the press and media to treat him with the objective respect he is due as he speaks to us like a mensch.
Can he capture the imagination of those who have been turned off by his senseless personal attacks and prior acts of buffoonery? Time will tell but at least he is proving to be a worthy candidate and he is doing so virtually all alone and for this I give him a great deal of credit. He is proving he is willing and knows how to fight, that he will not be deterred because he is the underdog,and is being out spent and is up against the press and media who are compelled to protect their saviour Hillary.
What Trump is saying should be challenging to blacks and Hispanics. Are they willing to be objective and break away from the clutches of the Democrats who, for decades, have been selling them down the river their current president chose to visit only after Donald came to see them Cajuns?.
Trump is urging us to protect our borders, call terrorists what they are, rebuild our military, take back our health care, protect our free speech and right to possess arms, and the list of repairing the damage wrought by Obama's hope and change is endless.
Stay tuned because things are gonna get exciting.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=
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Just another day in Hillaryville and her latest ad set to music: https://www.youtube.com/ embed/tzgRw6V252s
A confident Hillary is now planning for her presidency. (See 1 below.)
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Putin continues to press forward on his new relationship with Turkey. His goal is to wean Turkey from NATO.
Obama's closest and most trustworthy friend, Erdowan, has begun to play footsy with Russia to the point that Doofus is being sent to Turkey to find out what is going on between Turkey and Russia.
Just one more lousy judgement call reached by Obama in thinking Erdowan was a friend of the West.(See 2 below.)
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Objective American journalism is fast disappearing. (See 3 and 3a below.)
Were this Israel the world's press and media would be going bananas. (See 3b below.)
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Dick
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1)With a comfortable lead, Clinton begins laying plans for her White House agenda
By Anne Gearan, John Wagner and Dan Balz
Hillary Clinton’s increasingly confident campaign has begun crafting a detailed agenda for her possible presidency, with plans to focus on measures aimed at creating jobs, boosting infrastructure spending and enacting immigration reform if current polling holds and she is easily elected to the White House in November.
In recent weeks, as her leads over GOP nominee Donald Trump have expanded, Clinton has started ramping up for a presidency defined by marquee legislation she has promised to seek immediately. The pace and scale of the planning reflect growing expectations among Democrats that she will win and take office in January alongside a new Democratic majority in the Senate.
While careful not to sound as if she is measuring the draperies quite yet, Clinton now describes what she calls improved odds for passage of an overhaul of immigration laws — the first legislative priority she outlined in detail last year — and what could be a bipartisan effort to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, rail system and ports.
She also could be immediately confronted with a choice about a Supreme Court vacancy that could set the tone for her relationship with Congress, and she plans to immediately champion new measures on campaign-finance reform and ending legal immunity for gun manufacturers.
Her campaign’s to-do list includes assembling a Cabinet that has women in roughly equal numbers to men and that otherwise reflects American diversity, and lobbying has intensified for those and scores of other jobs that Clinton would fill in her administration.
Some Clinton boosters remain concerned that, with an election focused so heavily on Trump’s deficiencies, she could enter the White House without a clear mandate. But Clinton’s team is hopeful that a trouncing of her Republican opponent in November could soften the ground for a robust set of proposals that could be implemented both with and without congressional action.
“There’s nothing like winning to change minds,” Clinton said this month.
How she builds relationships on Capitol Hill, especially with Republicans, will be one key measure of success in the first year or so, Democrats said. A second crucial element will be how effectively she organizes a White House staff to keep the focus on her policy priorities and minimize the controversies that long have dogged Clinton and her husband.
The most significant unknown — and one that would determine to a great extent her ability to govern successfully — is how poisonous the political climate might be after a defeat of Trump, who has already begun complaining that the election system is “rigged” against him.
“Her greatest challenge will be the environment in which she comes to office,” said a former Obama administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid view. “I don’t think any president has come to office underwater on their favorable image. This would be uncharted waters coming to office as an unpopular person. You don’t have a wellspring of goodwill to draw on, even in the first 100 days.”
Clinton named a five-member transition planning team last week — headed by former interior secretary Ken Salazar and including other familiar names in Democratic circles — that would eventually oversee the selection of Cabinet secretaries and thousands of lower-level officials. She also moved some top policy advisers over from her campaign to her transition team, a move that reinforced the notion that she is getting ready to govern.
Trump, who also has a transition team at work, trails by double digits in some national polls. No candidate in more than 60 years has come back to win after being so far behind at this point in the general-election campaign. Trump also is losing in surveys taken in battleground states where he is staking his campaign. Among those states is Virginia, where he has a 14-point deficit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll published in the past week.
Clinton has lately been telling Democratic audiences about her growing support among Republicans and touting what she says is a record of successfully working across the aisle to get things done. Her campaign regularly trumpets Republican endorsements and GOP disavowals of Trump.
It was a subject she treated gingerly during the toughest months of her primary contest against Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who challenged her from the left. Still, some liberal voters who backed Sanders in the primaries eye Clinton’s legislative priorities with a mixture of suspicion and high expectations.
If Clinton wins, she will be “under great pressure from the left to move on a whole host of issues. The pressure is going to be enormous, more so than on President Obama,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic consultant who was a senior aide to Sen. Harry M. Reid (Nev.) when Reid was Senate majority leader.
Manley said he is highly skeptical that Clinton will be able to get some of her more liberal proposals — such as raising taxes on millionaires — through Congress, even under the rosiest of election scenarios for Democrats. That tax is key to paying for the massive jobs-and-infrastructure package at the heart of Clinton’s promise to help rebuild the American middle class.
Manley is also less bullish about immigration reform — Clinton’s other signature issue — which has repeatedly failed in Congress. And he cautions that if Clinton seeks to implement her immigration agenda through executive action, as Obama has sought to do, she could immediately sour relations with Republicans in Congress.
Clinton has predicted that Democrats will retake the Senate and narrow the Republican majority in the House, a result that would potentially ease but not guarantee passage of some Democratic initiatives.
Democrats are unlikely to retake enough seats to amass a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate, meaning Clinton would need Republican votes for nearly any important achievement.
Clinton has pledged to tackle an overhaul of what she calls a broken immigration system within her first 100 days in office and also has promised that the fix would include a means for illegal immigrants to gain U.S. citizenship.
“I’m hoping that the outcome of the election, which I am working hard to ensure [is] a victory, will send a clear message to our Republican friends that it’s time for them to quit standing in the way of immigration reform,” she said at a gathering this month of Hispanic and black journalists in Washington.
She also has promised to seek a multibillion-dollar package of infrastructure investments combined with various jobs incentives in the same time frame. Also on the 100-day list is introduction of a constitutional amendment that would seek to reinstate campaign finance rules swept away by the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. And Clinton has said she would seek legislation to end legal immunity for gun manufacturers right away — in what would be another immediate test of overcoming Republican resistance on the Hill.
“She has put out fairly detailed proposals, so in that sense, she has been very direct with the voters about what she could accomplish,” campaign press secretary Brian Fallon said. “If she wins, she will be able to point to the fact that she campaigned on a very specific set of policies in order to seek to hit the ground running and enacting as much of that platform as possible.”
But no one is drafting legislation now, Fallon said. “There’s a part of the process that can only come after she wins.”
Among other pledges, Clinton has said she would expand affordable housing, repair schools, rehabilitate failing water systems and connect every household to high-speed Internet by 2020.
She pledges to guarantee equal pay for women and improve affordable child care.
And a big, expensive one: make college tuition free for most families and debt-free for all while refinancing current student loan debt.
If Democrats do retake the Senate, longtime Clinton ally Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) is expected to become majority leader. He shares Clinton’s impulse to seek common ground with Republicans, said a Democratic aide familiar with their past discussions.
2)Kremlin Presses Turkey for Access to NATO's Incirlik Air Base, Home to US
Nukes
Russian officials have reached out to Ankara to request access to the
American-built base as a convenient launch pad for airstrikes in the Syrian
theater, but it remains to be seen whether such cooperation will roil NATO’s
feathers.
Russia has called on Turkey to provide access to NATO’s Incirlik Air Base,
the critical launch pad for US and coalition airstrikes in Syria, in a bid
to expand the country’s influence in the Middle East and to further the goal
of combatting radical jihadist groups, primarily Daesh and al-Nusra, that
threaten peace and stability in Syria.
The base is home to at least 50 US B-61 nuclear warheads each carrying the
potential destructive capacity of 100 times the Hiroshima bomb, a reality
that led to heightened concern among American officials during, and in the
wake of, the failed coup attempt of the Erdogan regime.
Sitting only 65 miles from the Syrian border, defense analysts, including
the former White House arms control official under Bill Clinton, have
cautioned that these weapons are not safe from the Daesh terrorist
organization and other hostile elements who could conceivably breach the
perimeter if Americans are left unaided by Turkish police forces.
That fear likely grew more elevated as Turkey has drifted towards Russia in
the wake of the coup with senior officials, including the Turkish President
himself, insinuating if not outright claiming that the United States played
a hand in the failed attempt to overthrow the government and with a brewing
diplomatic row developing between Washington and Ankara over the State
Department’s refusal to clear the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, who has
been alleged to have been the mastermind of the failed coup.
The brewing situation between the United States and Russia have opened the
door for the reestablishment of relations between Moscow and Ankara
including increased defense and strategic cooperation in Syria.
"It just remains to come to an agreement with Erdogan that we get the NATO
base Incirlik as [our] primary airbase," Senator Igor Morozov, a member of
the upper house’s committee on international affairs said reports the
British newspaper The Times. He explained that the development would enable
the Russian air force to engage in "constant bombing" of Daesh and other
jihadist groups to bring the conflict to a resolution faster.
"You’ll see, the next base will be Incirlik," he told Izvestia after the
Kremlin revealed this week that its bombers had started flying out of Iran
to launch attack on Syria. "This will be one more victory for Putin."
Another Senator, Viktor Ozerov, told RIA Novosti, "It’s not certain that
Russia needs Incirlik, but such a decision would be seen as a real
willingness on Turkey’s part to cooperate with Russia in the war against
terrorism in Syria."
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3)
American journalism is collapsing before our eyes
Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.
The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.
The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.
The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.
Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.
By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.
Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.
I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.
My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”
That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.
Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.
A recent article by its media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, whom I know and like, began this way: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
Whoa, Nellie. The clear assumption is that many reporters see Trump that way, and it is noteworthy that no similar question is raised about Clinton, whose scandals are deserving only of “scrutiny.” Rutenberg approvingly cites a leftist journalist who calls one candidate “normal” and the other “abnormal.”
Clinton is hardly “normal” to the 68 percent of Americans who find her dishonest and untrustworthy, though apparently not a single one of those people writes for the Times. Statistically, that makes the Times “abnormal.”
Also, you don’t need to be a detective to hear echoes in that first paragraph of Clinton speeches and ads, including those featured prominently on the Times’ Web site. In effect, the paper has seamlessly adopted Clinton’s view as its own, then tries to justify its coverage.
It’s an impossible task, and Rutenberg fails because he must. Any reporter who agrees with Clinton about Trump has no business covering either candidate.
It’s pure bias, which the Times fancies itself an expert in detecting in others, but is blissfully tolerant of its own. And with the top political editor quoted in the story as approving the one-sided coverage as necessary and deserving, the prejudice is now official policy.
It’s a historic mistake and a complete break with the paper’s own traditions. Instead of dropping its standards, the Times should bend over backwards to enforce them, even while acknowledging that Trump is a rare breed. That’s the whole point of standards — they are designed to guide decisions not just in easy cases, but in all cases, to preserve trust.
The Times, of course, is not alone in becoming unhinged over Trump, but that’s also the point. It used to be unique because of its adherence to fairness.
Now its only standard is a double standard, one that it proudly confesses. Shame would be more appropriate.
3a)
The Bizarre Media Blackout Of Hacked George Soros Documents
Scandal: Leaked documents released a few days ago provide juicy insider details of how a fabulously rich businessman has been using his money to influence elections in Europe, underwrite an extremist group, target U.S. citizens who disagreed with him, dictate foreign policy, and try to sway a Supreme Court ruling, among other things. Pretty compelling stuff, right?
Not if it involves leftist billionaire George Soros. In this case, the mainstream press couldn't care less.
On Saturday, a group called DC Leaks posted more than 2,500 documents going back to 2008 that it pilfered from Soros' Open Society Foundations' servers. Since then, the mainstream media have shown zero interest in this gold mine of information.
We couldn't find a single story on the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, CBS News or other major news sites that even noted the existence of these leaked documents, let alone reported on what's in them.
Indeed, the only news organization that appears to be diligently sifting through all the documents is the conservative Daily Caller, which as a result has filed a series of eye-opening reports.
So what could possibly explain the mainstream media's disinterest?
Is the problem that the material is too boring or inconsequential? Hardly.
As we noted in this space on Monday, the leaked documents show how Soros' far-flung international organizations attempted to manipulate Europe's 2014 elections. The "List of European Elections 2014 Projects" details over 90 Soros efforts he had under way that year.
The documents reveal that Soros has poured nearly $4 million into anti-Israel groups, with a goal of "challenging Israel's racist and anti-democratic policies."
Here at home, they show that Soros proposed paying the Center for American Politics $200,000 to conduct a smear campaign against conservative activists.
More recently, an October 2015 document came to light showing that Soros' Open Society U.S. Programs had donated $650,000 to "invest in technical assistance and support for the groups at the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement." Since then, several BLM protests have turned violent.
That same document details how this group successfully used its "extensive networks" to pressure the Obama administration into increasing the number of refugees it would take to 100,000, despite concerns that Islamic terrorists could use the refugee program to infiltrate the U.S.
A separate memo details how Soros tried to use his clout to sway Supreme Court justices into approving President Obama's unilateral effort to rewrite immigration law. "Grantees are seeking to influence the Justices (primarily via a sophisticated amicus briefs and media strategy) in hopes of securing a favorable ruling in U.S. v Texas," the memo, dug up by the Daily Caller, states.
Anyone with this much power and influence demands close media scrutiny. Particularly when he has extremely close ties to the would-be next president of the United States.
This year alone, Soros has given $7 million to the Clinton-supporting Priorities USA super-PAC, and a total of $25 million to support Democrats and their causes, according to Politico.
And when Soros speaks, Clinton listens. A separate email released by WikiLeaks shows Soros giving what read like step-by-step instructions to then-Secretary of State Clinton on how to deal with unrest in Albania in early 2011, including a list of people who should be considered as candidates to become an official mediator sent to that country. Days later, the EU dispatched one of the people on Soros' list.
Thomas Lifson, writing in the American Thinker blog, said "Soros got the U.S. and other accomplices to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state…. How is this not huge news?"
How, indeed.
If Soros were a rock-ribbed conservative who supported Republican candidates and causes, you can bet that a swarm of reporters would right now be lustily tearing into these documents determined to expose any and every shred of evidence of influence peddling and misdeeds.
But because Soros is a hard-core leftist, he apparently gets a pass. Shameful.
3b THE BABIES ARE DYING IN ALEPPO
Last month, four newborns in incubators fought for their lives in a small hospital in Aleppo, the besieged Syrian city. Then a bomb hit the hospital and cut off power—and oxygen to the incubators. The babies suffocated. In a joint letter to President Obama this month, fifteen doctors described the infants’ deaths: “Gasping for air, their lives ended before they had really begun.” The doctors are among the last few in the eastern part of Aleppo, the historic former commercial center where a hundred thousand children are now trapped.
“Young children are sometimes brought into our emergency rooms so badly injured that we have to prioritize those with better chances, or simply don’t have the equipment to help them,” the doctors wrote. Only a trickle of food is making it through a land blockade imposed by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. “Whether we live or die seems to be dependent on the ebbs and flows of the battlefield,” the doctors said. “For five years, we have faced death from above”—bombs—“on a daily basis. But we now face death from all around.”
More than a third of all casualties in Aleppo are now kids, according to Save the Children. Among them is Omran Daqneesh, the toddler with the moppish Beatles haircut whose picture captivated the world this week. He was shown covered with blood and dust after being dug from the debris of a bombing in Syria on Thursday. Rescuers placed him, alone, on an orange seat in an ambulance. His stunned, dazed expression mirrored the trauma of a war-ravaged generation. (On Saturday, we learned that Omran’s older brother Ali, who was ten, had died from wounds sustained in the attack.*)
In June, Osama Abo El Ezz, a general surgeon in Aleppo, described a rocket attack on an infant-care ward. “Nine newborns were rushed to the basement of the hospital for safety, their incubators destroyed,” he wrote. “I have been a practicing physician in Aleppo City since 2012 and I am still in awe of the magic of bringing a baby into the world. There is nothing like it—those first breaths, those first cries. The look in a mother’s eyes, having labored to bring this small person into the world. It should be a moment of peace, gratitude and quiet joy—but in Syria today, giving birth is a nightmare.”
On July 23rd, eleven babies were being kept alive in incubators when a government airstrike hit Children’s Hospital, in Aleppo. A second round hit the next day. Three infants died from lack of oxygen and dust inhalation, CNNreported. Ground and air assaults against hospitals have escalated this summer, a trend too common to be considered anything but deliberate. The letter from fifteen Syrian doctors reported forty-two airstrikes on medical facilities in Aleppo in July alone.
The existential plight of Syria’s kids is the worst in the world. “Some 3.7 million Syrian children under the age of five have known nothing but displacement, violence, and uncertainty,” the unicef spokesman Chris Tidey told me on Friday. They have all been born since a popular uprising disintegrated into a civil war in 2011. “The numbers are incredible,” Tidey said. “And unparalleled.”
Altogether, well over eight million kids—more than a third of the population, in a country that had twenty-two million people when the conflict erupted—now depend on humanitarian assistance to survive the day. Roughly 2.5 million children have fled Syria altogether, unicef reports.
As the Pokéman Go craze swept the West last month, the Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office sought to mobilize world attention by distributing pictures of Syrian tots holding up pictures of Pikachu, done in crayon, with the caption “Come save me.”
The plight of these kids reflects the dangers to a postwar future in one of the most strategic countries in the Middle East. A whole generation is being lost, two U.N. agencies told me. Almost three million kids—the equivalent of all the school-age children in New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas combined—are not in school.
This summer, the children of Aleppo have become even more vulnerable, because they no longer have access to safe drinking water, Tidey said. Children have also been among the purported victims of chlorine gas used by the regime this month. Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, told reporters in Geneva that “there is a lot of evidence” that chlorine gas was dropped on eastern Aleppo. De Mistura added, “If it did take place, it is a war crime.”
Since 2012, Aleppo has been divided between the western sector, controlled by the government, and the eastern sector, controlled by various opposition militias. Assad’s forces have been supported by Russian airstrikes. The fighting, which has destroyed much of a city that dates back millennia, has escalated since mid-July. On Friday, Russian forces fired cruise missiles on Aleppo from ships in the Mediterranean for the first time.
For Syria’s kids, fleeing the fighting is no guarantee of survival. The other image that captured Syria’s lost generation was the picture, last September, of Aylan Kurdi, a child whose lifeless body washed up on a beach in Turkey after the family escaped Syria. Relief agencies don’t have exact numbers, but hundreds of Syrian children are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean when their overcrowded boats capsized.
On Thursday, two girls—one five years old, the other eight months—drowned in the Mediterranean when their small wooden boat capsized and sank off the coast of Libya. The body of a five-year-old boy travelling with them was not recovered. Syrian refugees used to try a different, shorter route by sea, from Turkey to the Greek islands, but this year Turkey made it much more difficult to take advantage of that route, so more refugees are attempting the longer and more dangerous trip from North Africa.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are scheduled to meet in Geneva on August 26th to discuss another “cessation of hostilities.” But the last ceasefire, in February, eroded over time as peace talks between the Assad government and the Syrian opposition disintegrated. There is little indication that the rivals in a war that has dragged on for five years are any closer to a political compromise. And even if they should try again, the Islamic State, which rules at least a quarter of Syria, is still waging its own war.
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