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Our Orlando real estate daughter receives an award and recognition: "Dear Mrs. Nelson,
On behalf of the Orlando Regional REALTOR® Association, I am pleased to announce that you have been chosen as one of YPN’s “20 under 40” Rising Star Award recipients!
As a real estate professional, we appreciate the commitment to your personal and professional development, as well as the role you are playing in “raising the bar” on the professionalism of REALTORS®.
It is your hard work and dedication which makes you stand out among others. We are sure if you continue to perform in this manner you will continue to excel as a REALTOR®.
Again, my congratulations to you. This is just the beginning of your bright career. Keep up the good work!
Please plan on attending the “White Party” on October 11 to receive your “20 under 40” Rising Star Award. For your complimentary registration for the event, please contact TashaG@orlandorealtors.org by October 7th.
Please invite your friends, family and co-workers for the celebration. We are asking for a $10 donation per person that will go to The Boys and Girls Club.
Sincerely,
Some Trump facts. (See 1 below.)
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Fearing the packing of The Supreme Court and an imperial president or the end of small and Constitutional government. Which direction will America lunge? (See 2 below.)
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Comey may have fine tuned his holier than thou status but he still comes off as a weasel who flinched. (See 3 below.)
What does America's new elitist crowd have in common with the French Royalty of Hameau? (See 3a below.)
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Both Comey and Johnson's warnings, that Americans should prepare for the Terrorist Diaspora becoming the new norm, have become politically fashionable. (See 4 below.)
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I repeat The Happiest and Healthiest and Best Ever New Years to my Jewish friends and family. Would it be nice if it were one of peace.
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Dick
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1)
See The 5 Facts That Prove Trump Is ACTUALLY Beating Hillary Quite Badly
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Donald Trump has been taking names and not taking prisoners. He is killing Hillary Clinton and has even had to do it by going up against the media’s rigged polls.
The following five statistics that prove that Trump is really winning.
Let’s take a look at the facts that the media completely ignores or covers up. Instead, they have been giving Clinton the lead despite the fact that she can’t get anyone to even show up to her rallies.
Clinton Rally In Omaha where she used mostly High School kids to fill the gym where a lot of her statements were incorrectly read from her teleprompter.
FACT #1: Trump has nearly three times the number of followers on Facebook.
Trump: 12,174,358 likes.
Clinton: 4,385,959 likes.
Clinton: 4,385,959 likes.
Look what Trump’s live stream videos do when compared to Hillary’s.
Trump Live Stream Post — 21 hours ago: 135,000 likes, 18,167 shares, 1.5 million views
Clinton Live Stream Post — 25 hours ago: 9,000 likes, 0 shares, 121,000 views
That does not look good at all for her!
Fact #2: Trump has 18.6 million twitter followers.
Hillary Clinton has only 6.1 million.
The best part is that most of Hillary’s are actually fake. According to the Washington Examiner, 41 percent of Hillary’s “followers” are not even real people.
In contrast, The Daily Caller says that Trump’s followers are 90% real with 90% of them having a previous voting record.
Fact #3: Trump averages 160k viewers per live stream.
Clinton averages 400 viewers per live stream.
Wow. That is bad. Trump also gets 5,000 percent more eyeballs focused on the screen than Clinton. Yep. She really is that boring to the folks.
Fact #4: Instagram.
Trump has 6.2 million followers.
Clinton has 800,000 followers.
Instagram is a platform with mostly all pictures and not much substance – exactly what Hillary supporters love. And still she does very poorly in this medium.
Fact #5: On Reddit.
Trump: 297,696 subscribers
Clinton: 21,429 subscribers
But on Hillary for Prison: she gets 255,228 subscribers.
Clinton: 21,429 subscribers
But on Hillary for Prison: she gets 255,228 subscribers.
Trump has more subscribers than Clinton on every major social media outlet but what is even funnier is that there are nearly 3 times as many people subscribed to “Hillary for Prison” than there are subscribed to the Clinton page.
The best part is that the DNC's leaked emails from WikiLeaks have proven that Clinton pays people to support her online. Trump supporters on the other hand willingly actually like and follow him on Social media.
Trump actually has the support of the people. He is going to win this election come November no matter what the mainstream media would like you to believe.
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2)The Next President Unbound
By Victor Davis Hanson
Donald Trump's supporters see a potential Hillary Clinton victory in November as the end of any conservative chance to restore small government, constitutional protections, fiscal sanity and personal liberty.
Clinton's progressives swear that a Trump victory would spell the implosion of America as they know it, alleging Trump parallels with every dictator from Josef Stalin to Adolf Hitler.
Part of the frenzy over 2016 as a make-or-break election is because a closely divided Senate's future may hinge on the coattails of the presidential winner. An aging Supreme Court may also translate into perhaps three to four court picks for the next president.
Yet such considerations only partly explain the current election frenzy.
The model of the imperial Obama presidency is the greater fear. Over the last eight years, Obama has transformed the powers of presidency in a way not seen in decades.
Congress talks grandly of "comprehensive immigration reform," but Obama, as he promised with his pen and phone, bypassed the House and Senate to virtually open the border with Mexico. He largely ceased deportations of undocumented immigrants. He issued executive-order amnesties. And he allowed entire cities to be exempt from federal immigration law.
The press said nothing about this extraordinary overreach of presidential power, mainly because these largely illegal means were used to achieve the progressive ends favored by many journalists.
The Senate used to ratify treaties. In the past, a president could not unilaterally approve the Treaty of Versailles, enroll the United States in the League of Nations, fight in Vietnam or Iraq without congressional authorization, change existing laws by non-enforcement, or rewrite bankruptcy laws.
Not now. Obama set a precedent that he did not need Senate ratification to make a landmark treaty with Iran on nuclear enrichment.
He picked and chose which elements of the Affordable Care Act would be enforced -- predicated on his 2012 re-election efforts.
Rebuffed by Congress, Obama is now slowly shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention center by insidiously having inmates sent to other countries.
Respective opponents of both Trump and Clinton should be worried.
Either winner could follow the precedent of allowing any sanctuary city or state in the United States to be immune from any federal law found displeasing -- from the liberal Endangered Species Act and federal gun registration laws to conservative abortion restrictions.
Could anyone complain if Trump's secretary of state were investigated by Trump's attorney general for lying about a private email server -- in the manner of Clinton being investigated by Loretta Lynch?
Would anyone object should a President Trump agree to a treaty with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the same way Obama overrode Congress with the Iran deal?
If a President Clinton decides to strike North Korea, would she really need congressional authorization, considering Obama's unauthorized Libyan bombing mission?
What would Americans say if President Trump's IRS -- mirror-imaging Lois Lerner -- hounded the progressive nonprofit organizations of George Soros?
Partisans are shocked that the press does not go after Trump's various inconsistencies and fibs about his supposed initial opposition to the Iraq War, or press him on the details of Trump University.
Conservatives counter that Clinton has never had to come clean about the likely illegal pay-for-play influence peddling of the Clinton Foundation or her serial lies about her private email server.
But why, if elected, should either worry much about media scrutiny?
Obama established the precedent that a president should be given a pass on lying to the American people. Did Americans, as Obama repeatedly promised, really get to keep their doctors and health plans while enjoying lower premiums and deductibles, as the country saved billions through his Affordable Care Act?
More recently, did Obama mean to tell a lie when he swore that he sent cash to the Iranians only because he could not wire them the money -- when in truth the administration had wired money to Iran in the past? Was cash to Iran really not a ransom for American hostages, as the president asserted? Did Obama really, as he insisted, never email Clinton at her private unsecured server?
Can the next president, like Obama, double the national debt and claim to be a deficit hawk?
Congress has proven woefully inept at asserting its constitutional right to check and balance Obama's executive overreach. The courts have often abdicated their own oversight.
But the press is the most blameworthy. White House press conferences now resemble those in the Kremlin, with journalists tossing Putin softball questions about his latest fishing or hunting trip.
One reason Americans are scared about the next president is that they should be.
In 2017, a President Trump or President Clinton will be able to do almost anything he or she wishes without much oversight -- thanks to the precedent of Obama's overreach, abetted by a lapdog press that forgot that the ends never justify the means.
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3)
The Legend of Saint Comey
The FBI chief passes the buck on immunity for Clinton’s aides.
No one has cultivated an image of public virtue better than FBI director James Comey, so he was in high dudgeon Wednesday when mere mortals like elected Member of Congress challenged his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email violations as Secretary of State.
“You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels. We are not weasels,” Mr. Comey declared Wednesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Weasels or not, Mr. Comey did little to rebut the suspicion that he handled the Clinton probe with tender loving political care.
Recall that in July Mr. Comey held a remarkable press conference in which he announced that Mrs. Clinton shouldn’t be prosecuted for mishandling classified information. But it isn’t his job to make prosecutorial decisions. That’s the duty of Justice Department prosecutors. Mr. Comey’s unprecedented declaration had the effect of letting Justice officials off the hook.
Yet there was Mr. Comey on Wednesday passing the buck to the same Justice Department. Republicans wanted to know how and why Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson had been granted immunity from prosecution. Don’t ask Saint Jim.
That was “a decision made by the Department of Justice” and the FBI wasn’t “part of those discussions,” he said. Seriously? The FBI was willing to bug out of a decision on immunity that would be directly relevant to its ability to collect evidence?
Mr. Comey also didn’t have a credible explanation for why immunity was necessary. South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy noted that the lawyer for both women—Beth Wilkinson—stated that “the Justice Department assured us that they believed my clients did nothing wrong.” So why did they need immunity?
Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) noted that the FBI obtained a computer and thumb drive from David Kendall, another of Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers. Mr. Kendall was happy to hand over that data, but Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson demanded immunity before they would turn over their laptops that they had used to sort Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
Mr. Comey repeated that immunity is crucial to helping investigators “build” a case against a target. Yet everyone now knows—based on the FBI notes—that neither Ms. Mills nor Ms. Samuelson offered the FBI any evidence against their boss, beyond laptops that the FBI could have seized without any immunity deal.
Pennsylvania Republican Tom Marino, a former federal prosecutor, asked why the FBI and Justice didn’t go through the standard process of empaneling a grand jury, which could provide the government subpoena and warrant authority necessary to seize evidence? Mr. Comey replied that it was “faster” to work with “informal agreements.” No doubt.
Mr. Comey also ducked and covered on why Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were allowed to represent Mrs. Clinton as her attorneys during her FBI interview. He said the FBI had no control over a subject’s lawyers. Yet as John Ratcliffe (R., Texas) dryly noted, he could think of no “reasonable” prosecutor who would allow two witnesses who might prove “central to the prosecution” to sit in on a target’s interview.
Far be it from us to call Mr. Comey a weasel, but his highly unusual methods in investigating Mrs. Clinton have tarnished the FBI and certainly knocked off his halo.
3a) America’s Versailles Set
By Victor Davis Hanson -
During the last days of the Ancien Régime, French Queen Marie Antoinette frolicked in a fake rural village not far from the Versailles Palace—theHameau de la Reine (“the Queen’s hamlet”). “Peasant” farmers and herdsmen were imported to interact, albeit carefully, with the royal retinue in an idyllic amusement park. The Queen would sometimes dress up as a milkmaid and with her royal train do a few chores on the “farm” to emulate the romanticized masses, but in safe, apartheid seclusion from them.
The French Revolution was already on the horizon and true peasants were shortly to march on Versailles, but the Queen had no desire to visit the real French countryside to learn of the crushing poverty of those who actually milked cows and herded sheep for a living. It is hard to know what motivated the queen to visit the Hameau—was it simply to relax in her own convenient and sanitized Arcadia, or was it some sort of pathetic attempt to better understand the daily lives of the increasing restive French masses?
The American coastal royalty does not build fake farms outside of its estates. But these elites, too, can grow just as bored with their privileged lives as Marie Antoinette did. Instead of hanging out with milk maids in ornamental villages, our progressive elites, at the same safe distance from the peasantry, prefer to show their solidarity with the dispossessed through angry rhetoric.
Take the case of Colin Kaepernick, the back-up quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who makes $19 million a year (or about $20,000 per minute of regular season play). He has been cited by National Football League officials in the past for his use of the N-word, yet he refuses to stand for the pregame singing of the national anthem because he believes that his country is racist and does not warrant his respect. His stunt gained a lot of publicity and he now sees himself as a man of the revolutionary barricades. A number of other NFL athletes, as well as those in other sports, have likewise refused to stand for the national anthem to express solidarity with what they see as modern versions of the oppressed peasantry. But Kaepernick and his peers make more in one month than many Americans make in an entire lifetime. Still, for these members of the twenty-first-century Versailles crowd, the easiest way of understanding the lives of the underclass is expressing empathy for them for no more than a minute or two.
Lately, the entire Clinton clan has created a sort of Hameau de la Reine of the mind. Chelsea Clinton, for example, is married to hedge-fund operator Marc Mezvinsky (whose suspect Greek fund just went broke), and she once made over $600,000 for her part-time job as an NBC correspondent. She serves in a prominent role and is on the board of the non-profit billion-dollar Clinton Foundation, which has been cited for donating an inordinately small amount of its annual budget (often less than 15 percent) to charity work, while providing free jet travel for the Clinton family and offering sinecures for Clinton political operatives in between various Clinton campaigns. Explaining why she works at the Clinton Foundation and for other non-profits, Chelsea confessed, in Marie Antoinette style, that “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” She cared enough, though, to purchase a $10.5 million Manhattan apartment not long ago rather than, say, rent a flat in the Bronx.
Her father, the multimillionaire Bill Clinton, is on the stump raking in huge amounts of campaign cash and reifying his liberal fides with accusations of racism against others. At one recent fundraiser, he claimed that he had found proof of Donald Trump’s encoded racism in the trite campaign slogan “Make America great again.” But the real problem with Trump’s signature catchphrase is not its supposed racism, but its banality—and it was borrowed, almost verbatim, from Bill Clinton’s own populist rhetoric from his previous campaigns. Even Marie Antoinette did not try to avoid the guillotine by crying that others also had followed her example of enjoying a fake peasant village.
At a private fundraiser among New York elites, Hillary Clinton also damned the purported illiberal nature of Trump’s supporters and said they were “not America.” She suggested that half of his supporters were haters of America’s victimized—or that nearly one-quarter of the entire country commits race/class/gender thought crimes: “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” At least Hillary did not tell the “deplorables” to eat proverbial cake.
President Obama from time to time flees to his own Hameau de la Reine. He has developed a chronic tic of channeling easy empathy for The Other—and not by vacationing in the south side of Chicago instead of Martha’s Vineyard, but by issuing serial blanket condemnations of middle-class Americans for their purported insensitivity to the less fortunate. In 2008, for example, before a private group of hip San Francisco millionaires, he famously caricatured the working classes of Pennsylvania who voted against him as clinging to their “guns and religion.” Now, as a lame-duck President, Obama once again feels liberated to return to his rhetorical hamlet where he can act like a champion of the victimized by blasting America’s middle classes for their cultural shortcomings.
After golfing much of the time during his recent Martha’s Vineyard vacation, he went on a tour of Asia. In Laos, Obama immediately unleashed a number of accusations against his fellow Americans. “Typically,” Obama intoned, “when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don’t look like them.” (The adverb “typically” recalls Obama’s use of the word “typical” during the 2008 campaign to describe his own grandmother—who scrimped to send him to Hawaii’s most prestigious prep school—as a “typical white person.”)
Obama went on to delight his foreign audience: “If you’re in the United States, sometimes you can feel lazy and think we’re so big we don’t have to really know anything about other people.” Perhaps Obama sought to compensate for his own sense of insularity about the world, given that he knows no foreign languages and regularly mixes up national and world geography. America, to name a few of his gaffes, does not have 57 states; Hawaii is not in Asia; the Falklands are not the Maldives; and Austrians do not speak Austrian.
Obama’s supporters also play-act in their own hamlets. To walk the streets of downtown Palo Alto and Menlo Park in Silicon Valley is to bump into billionaire thirty-somethings dressed in torn jeans, T-shirts, and flip-flops—our modern version of the bonnets and homespun costumes of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau.
Multimillionaire rappers also feel yearnings to reconnect with the hood to cultivate their grassroots fides. The cover of rapper Kendrick Lamar’s latest album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” displays the corpse of a dead white judge on the White House lawn—with crude crosses scrawled over his eyes—surrounded by young African Americans who are shown displaying wads of cash and toasting his honor’s demise.
President Obama cited Lamar Kendrick, whom he invited to the White House, as his favorite rapper of 2016. By such praise, Obama can channel his street cred and find inner resonance with a romanticized life quite different from his own at the White House. At the same time, he, like Marie Antoinette, does not have to go so far as to visit the inner-city landscapes which inspire such trendy artwork and cheap anti-police lyrics (such as Kendrick’s childish “And we hate po-po.”)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++There’s a key difference between today’s elites and those of the Ancien Régime—and it has nothing to do with money or privilege. Instead, Marie Antoinette’s bunch knew that their periodic stints as peasants were farcical, and, as a result, they did not take themselves too seriously. In contrast, our grim visitors to the American Hameau are a far angrier lot. They are convinced that a few cheap slurs or fuming public gestures will, for a moment or two, make them one with the people—unaware that they are as ridiculous as the French royals, but with far less Gallic style and panache.
4)
DHS Head to America: Brace for More Terror Attacks
BY:
Department of Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson informed Americans on Wednesday that the country is likely to suffer more domestic terror attacks, warning that the department cannot make all threats “a priority” and that the likelihood of an extremist “attack is still there,” despite the department’s best efforts.
Johnson, speaking at the Atlantic magazine ideas forum, admitted that DHS sees a range of threats on the homeland, but “can’t say everything is a priority.” He was unable to provide any firm figure quantifying the number of attacks that could be faced in the upcoming months.
The top homeland security official also lamented that the American press only covers “bad news” and that “the good news in homeland security is often no news.”
DHS does its best to assess the threat landscape, but “you have to prioritize,” Johnson said. “You can’t say it’s all a priority.”
The likelihood that America will face more terror attacks from homegrown violent extremists, also known as HVEs, “is still there and we need to address it,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s remarks come on the heels of multiple deadly terror attacks across America that have been committed by Muslim extremists affiliated with the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.
The DHS leader said he has no good way to determine how many terror attacks could be coming down the pike. The threat of a mass shooting, dirty bomb attack, biological attack, terrorism in the air, or even the poisoning of America’s food supply are all real threats—and not all can be given top priority by the agency.
“If you’re asking how many San Bernardino or Orlando type attacks will we have in the year 2017, no national security, homeland security, or law enforcement expert is in a position to quantify it,” he said. “We haven’t ended the scourge, the threat of homegrown violent extremists.”
“People ask me, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ That is thing number one, the prospect of another home-born violent extremist acquiring a weapon or tool of mass violence and carrying out an attack somewhere here in the homeland,” Johnson said.
“It cannot be quantified. It is difficult to detect given the nature of it.”
Johnson said that Americans should take solace in “all the things we’re doing, the 10 or 12 things we’re doing” to keep the populace safe on a daily basis.
“You cannot eliminate all risk, whether it’s a terrorist attack, or mass shooting, or gang violence,” he said.
Johnson also cited the media for its coverage of only “bad news” stories that gives DHS a bad rap.
“If there’s a successful national political convention from a political standpoint,” or other high profile event, “it’s the result of a lot of hard work and dedication,” Johnson said. “That doesn’t always get reported. Bad news is front page news, but the good news in homeland security is often no news.”
He went on to cite “cyber security” as “priority number one” as rogue nations such as Russia, Iran, and China step up efforts to penetrate secure U.S. government networks.
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