Click here: Can You Trust the Press? | PragerU
Can you trust the Attorney General? https://judiciary.house.gov/
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This from a very dear friend who served as a Marine, is a tennis buddy of mine and fellow memo reader. Semper Fi! (See 1 below.)
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Now that Trump is running and The New York Times hates him, they are twisting the same story they once wrote and which had a positive comeback thrust. Most of the mass media are shills' for the Clinton Campaign. They have sold their souls for influence and power. (See 2 below.)
Is Assange about to do the mass media's job? We may know tomorrow. (See 2a below.)
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Prager probes but Trump cannot stay focused when his ego is bruised. (See 3 below.)
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Double standards? You decide. (See 4 below.)
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More commentary regarding Trump and Bret should be one of Donald's speech writers.. (See 5 and 5a below.)
I do not know whether Trump will ever learn the Clinton's will say and do anything to win. Mostly they love blaming others for what they do and are not shamefaced about doing so. They have no scruples and will stop at nothing. They are truly the lowest of life and until Trump understands this and hammers away, consistently, at what most people care about he cannot overcome the Clinton's lying, the mass media's bias which always favors Democrats and what Democrats are expert at - fraudulent and intimidating voting.
When Trump wanders off the reservation believing he can win a food fight with Hillary he is a damn fool. He always had a big uphill battle but he was able to take advantage of Hillary's unlike-ability and bring himself virtually even but he continue to allow her to slip away and thus, will have no one but himself to blame for losing should that be the case.
The fact that Hillary and The New York Times have sought to destroy him for reporting huge losses which allowed him to make an even bigger recovery is evidence of the type of tactics he is up against. The fact that he is being taken to the wood shed for Twittering at 5 AM is further evidence of the length to which the mass media is willing to go to paint him and his judgement into a corner.
On the other hand when the famous telephone rang at 3 AM, Hillary allowed 4 Americans to die because she wanted to stick with Obama's lie about some trumped up video story but no one in the mass media will tie that knot or connect those dots so Donald you will have to do a better job of rebutting and thinking or you are toast.
Click here: Hillary’s Camp Freaking Out As This Video Goes Viral… ‘No Way To Stop It Now’ | EndingFed News Network
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Judging Obama by his own words. When you do, he flunks! (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)
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2)
Flashback: When the 'New York Times' Called Trump 'the Comeback Kid'
Now that the rabidly partisan New York Times has further disgraced itself by becoming a proud receiver of stolen goods, let us revisit those halcyon days of yore when the same newspaper reported nothing but praise for plucky little Donald's victorious 1995 battle against financial adversity:
Though there are still four years to go in the 90's, business and government leaders in New York honored Donald J. Trump yesterday for pulling off what they called "the comeback of the decade."Mr. Trump, the developer who came to epitomize opulent wealth during the 80's before tumbling into deep financial trouble, has managed to erase much of his debt and is moving ahead with major projects at a time other developers are idling. Judging from the attention showered on him yesterday at the Union League Club, some of New York's civic and business leaders are quite captivated by Mr. Trump, despite the financial uncertainties that still surround some of his properties.
But the operative word at the luncheon was comeback, though Mr. Trump might dispute that he ever went far away. William D. Fugazy, the limousine magnate and chairman of the Forum Club, the group of business and civic leaders that sponsored the luncheon, presented Mr. Trump with a boomerang encased in glass. "You throw it and it always comes back," he said as he handed it over.
That, as they say, was then. And this is now:
Dean Baquet wasn't bluffing. The New York Times executive editor said during a visit to Harvard in September that he would risk jail to publish Donald Trump's tax returns. He made good on his word Saturday night when the Times published Trump tax documents from 1995, which show the Republican presidential nominee claimed losses of $916 million that year — enough to avoid paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years afterward.
Federal law makes it illegal to publish an unauthorized tax return...
Gee, do you think there's the slightest chance that the Times is actively colluding with the Hillary Clinton campaign?
It is unclear whether Baquet was speaking hypothetically at the time or whether his newspaper already was in possession of the documents published Saturday. The Times wrote that "the pages were mailed last month to Susanne Craig, a reporter at the Times who has written about Mr. Trump’s finances. The documents were the first page of a New York state resident income tax return, the first page of a New Jersey nonresident tax return and the first page of a Connecticut nonresident tax return."
Having already abjured good old-fashioned "objectivity," the Times now actively seeks to affect the outcome of the election. Judge them and their reporting accordingly.
2a)WikiLeaks Founder Preps 'October Surprise' Via Video Tuesday
The founder of the leaked emails organization WikiLeaks is reportedly ready to drop a possible "October surprise" Tuesday in a video presentation in Berlin.
It is believed an "October surprise" would be geared toward the presidential election – with Donald Trump supporters suggesting the announcement will hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Fox News reported.
2a)WikiLeaks Founder Preps 'October Surprise' Via Video Tuesday
The founder of the leaked emails organization WikiLeaks is reportedly ready to drop a possible "October surprise" Tuesday in a video presentation in Berlin.
Julian Assange, who canceled a London address, will now give a video presentation instead Tuesday because of "specific information" the group received about Assange's safety, FoxNews.com reported.
It is believed an "October surprise" would be geared toward the presidential election – with Donald Trump supporters suggesting the announcement will hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Fox News reported.
Assange, who has lived in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for five years as officials in Sweden have sought him on criminal charges, has already played a key role in the presidential race. In July, the organization released 20,000 internal emails that indicated the Democratic National Committee appeared to conspire to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. The revelations came just before the Democrats' nominating convention.
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3)
The overwhelming media consensus regarding the first presidential debate -- Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton and Lester Holt -- is that Clinton won.
If she did win it was because Trump, after a strong opening 30 minutes, allowed himself to get baited into emotional and tendentious self-defense.
And because the media have decided to focus on the tendentious, such as the utterly moronic issue of whether, in 1996, Trump called then-Miss Universe Alicia Machado "Miss Piggy," almost all the debate analyses ignored many of the most important things each candidate said.
On those grounds, Clinton did not win. On many truly significant subjects, she said things that were actually frightening, and he said things that were actually important.
Here are some examples.
Clinton explained how she would expand government control over American life: "We also have to make the economy fairer. That starts with raising the national minimum wage and also (guaranteeing), finally, equal pay for women's work. I also want to see more companies do profit-sharing. If you help create the profits, you should be able to share in them, not just the executives at the top."
It's astonishing how little attention this proposal of forcing companies to give a specified share of their earnings to employees received in the post-debate coverage. It's socialism, bordering on communism.
What she will have the government provide for free is "affordable child care and debt-free college."
She will have it paid for "by raising taxes on the wealthy. "I think," she said, "it's time that the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share to support this country."
According to Clinton, a "fair share" is not constituted by a 50 percent-plus individual income tax rate (including state income taxes and property taxes) and the top 1 percent of wage earners paying nearly half of all individual income taxes, while earning 20 percent of total income. Nor is it constituted by the 35 percent corporate tax rate, the highest among major Western countries.
Trump described his tax proposal: "Under my plan, I'll be reducing taxes tremendously from 35 percent to 15 percent for companies (and) small and big businesses. That's going to be a job creator like we haven't seen since Ronald Reagan. ... Companies will come. They will build. They will expand. New companies will start."
Is that not important and substantive?
Clinton believes that reducing taxes "is not how we grow the economy." Isn't her economy-crushing view worthy of more attention than "Miss Piggy?"
Trump, on the other hand, knows what virtually every economist knows: Tax cuts and regulatory reductions produce jobs. He said to Clinton: "You are going to approve one of the biggest tax increases in history. You are going to drive business out. ... You are going to regulate these businesses out of existence. ... New companies cannot form, and old companies are going out of business. And you want to increase the regulation and make them even worse. I'm going to cut regulations. I'm going to cut taxes big league, and you're going to raise taxes big league. End of story."
End of story is correct. Could Trump have been clearer on how to revive the American economy? Could Clinton have been clearer on how she would suppress growth and vastly expand the size and power of the government?
On the 2008 recession, Clinton was mendacious and demagogic, saying that it "was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street and created a perfect storm."
There is no truth to what she said. The bursting of the real estate bubble that caused the 2008 recession had nothing to do with "slashed taxes." It was overwhelmingly caused by her husband, President Bill Clinton, and the Democrats' attempt at social engineering, by forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and even private banks to provide billions of dollars in home loans to people -- many of whom were minorities -- who could not sustain their mortgage payments as soon as interest rates on their adjustable-rate mortgages were raised. (Had Trump made this point, it would have been a highlight of the evening.)
Clinton described her gigantic-government -- and preposterous -- solution to the sluggish economy: "We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. We can build a new modern electric grid. That's a lot of jobs; that's a lot of new economic activity.
"Trump's correct rejoinder was: "She talks about solar panels. We invested in a solar company ... that was a disaster."
Yet there was another Clinton expansion of federal power that went unnoted. She said: "I'm going to have a special prosecutor. We're going to enforce the trade deals we have, and we're going to hold people accountable."
Clinton and Trump discussed her e mails.
Clinton said: "I made my mistake using a private email. ... And if I had to do it over again, I would obviously do it differently. But I'm not going to make any excuses. It was a mistake, and I take responsibility for that."
Trump said: "That was more than a mistake. That was done purposely. When you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment ... so they're not prosecuted, when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it's disgraceful. And believe me, this country thinks it ... is disgraceful also."
Who won that exchange, American media?
Clinton on race: "Race remains a significant challenge in our country. Unfortunately, race still determines too much ... it determines how they are treated in the criminal justice system. We've just seen those two tragic examples in both Tulsa and Charlotte."
In Charlotte, a black officer killed a black man who wielded a gun after officers -- whose police department is headed by a black man -- repeatedly yelled, "Drop the gun." And yet, Clinton charged the police and America with racism.
If you want more race baiting, America, vote for Clinton.
Why is there so much black-on black murder?
"We've got to get guns out of the hands of people who should not have them," Clinton insightfully observed, as if there were one American who doesn't want to do so.
Clinton added, "The gun epidemic is a leading cause of death of young African-American men, more than the next nine causes put together." A question for her is, which is more responsible for black males committing murder at a higher rate than any other Americans: too many guns, or too few fathers?
But it was not her gun-based and racism-based explanations of black crime that troubled the American media. It was Trump's responses.
First, Trump said: "Secretary Clinton doesn't want to use a couple of words, and that's law and order. ... If we don't have it, we're not going to have a country."
Second, he correctly noted: "We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African-Americans (and) Hispanics are living in hell because it's so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot. In Chicago, they've had thousands of shootings ... Is this a war-torn country? ... We have to stop the violence. We have to bring back law and order. In a place like Chicago ... in fact, almost 4,000 have been killed since Barack Obama became president."
And third, he said: "Right now, our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything. We have to protect our inner cities because African-American communities are being decimated by crime."
To all of these powerful truths, Clinton could only respond with demagoguery. She said, "Well, I've heard Donald say this at his rallies, and it's really unfortunate that he paints such a dire, negative picture of black communities in our country." She added later, "When it comes to policing ... I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers."
That's what America needs -- more federal governance of Americans' lives and more re-education programs. (And what is "implicit bias"?)
Meanwhile, Trump, in his simple way, uttered a truth that I can't recall any Republican has uttered: "Look, the African-American community has been let down by our politicians. They talk good around election time, like right now, and after the election they said, 'See you later. I'll see you in four years."
On ISIS and Iraq, Trump correctly said: "President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq ... They shouldn't have been in, but once they got in, the way they got out was a disaster."
This was another major truth ignored in all the commentary on Miss Piggy and "birtherism." Iraq was finally rendered relatively peaceful, and then Obama announced that America was leaving.
On the Iran deal, Trump was also dead-on: "You started the Iran deal, that's another beauty, where you have a country that was ready to fall ... They were choking on the sanctions. And now they're going to be actually probably a major power at some point pretty soon, the way they're going."
Perhaps my favorite moment of the evening -- also completely ignored -- was Trump's quick reaction to Clinton saying that nuclear weapons "is the No. 1 threat we face in the world." He said: "I agree with her on one thing: The single greatest problem the world has is nuclear armament. ... Not global warming, like you think and your president thinks."
She never responded to this devastating point about left-wing hysteria over global warming. But she did have a lot to say about Miss Piggy, birtherism and Trump's tax returns. And so do her allies: the American media.
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4)
IDF paratroopers in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge. (Photo: Wikipedia).
3)
Clinton Won on Nonsense, Trump Won on Substance
By Dennis Prager
The overwhelming media consensus regarding the first presidential debate -- Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton and Lester Holt -- is that Clinton won.
If she did win it was because Trump, after a strong opening 30 minutes, allowed himself to get baited into emotional and tendentious self-defense.
And because the media have decided to focus on the tendentious, such as the utterly moronic issue of whether, in 1996, Trump called then-Miss Universe Alicia Machado "Miss Piggy," almost all the debate analyses ignored many of the most important things each candidate said.
On those grounds, Clinton did not win. On many truly significant subjects, she said things that were actually frightening, and he said things that were actually important.
Here are some examples.
Clinton explained how she would expand government control over American life: "We also have to make the economy fairer. That starts with raising the national minimum wage and also (guaranteeing), finally, equal pay for women's work. I also want to see more companies do profit-sharing. If you help create the profits, you should be able to share in them, not just the executives at the top."
It's astonishing how little attention this proposal of forcing companies to give a specified share of their earnings to employees received in the post-debate coverage. It's socialism, bordering on communism.
What she will have the government provide for free is "affordable child care and debt-free college."
She will have it paid for "by raising taxes on the wealthy. "I think," she said, "it's time that the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share to support this country."
According to Clinton, a "fair share" is not constituted by a 50 percent-plus individual income tax rate (including state income taxes and property taxes) and the top 1 percent of wage earners paying nearly half of all individual income taxes, while earning 20 percent of total income. Nor is it constituted by the 35 percent corporate tax rate, the highest among major Western countries.
Trump described his tax proposal: "Under my plan, I'll be reducing taxes tremendously from 35 percent to 15 percent for companies (and) small and big businesses. That's going to be a job creator like we haven't seen since Ronald Reagan. ... Companies will come. They will build. They will expand. New companies will start."
Is that not important and substantive?
Clinton believes that reducing taxes "is not how we grow the economy." Isn't her economy-crushing view worthy of more attention than "Miss Piggy?"
Trump, on the other hand, knows what virtually every economist knows: Tax cuts and regulatory reductions produce jobs. He said to Clinton: "You are going to approve one of the biggest tax increases in history. You are going to drive business out. ... You are going to regulate these businesses out of existence. ... New companies cannot form, and old companies are going out of business. And you want to increase the regulation and make them even worse. I'm going to cut regulations. I'm going to cut taxes big league, and you're going to raise taxes big league. End of story."
End of story is correct. Could Trump have been clearer on how to revive the American economy? Could Clinton have been clearer on how she would suppress growth and vastly expand the size and power of the government?
On the 2008 recession, Clinton was mendacious and demagogic, saying that it "was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street and created a perfect storm."
There is no truth to what she said. The bursting of the real estate bubble that caused the 2008 recession had nothing to do with "slashed taxes." It was overwhelmingly caused by her husband, President Bill Clinton, and the Democrats' attempt at social engineering, by forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and even private banks to provide billions of dollars in home loans to people -- many of whom were minorities -- who could not sustain their mortgage payments as soon as interest rates on their adjustable-rate mortgages were raised. (Had Trump made this point, it would have been a highlight of the evening.)
Clinton described her gigantic-government -- and preposterous -- solution to the sluggish economy: "We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. We can build a new modern electric grid. That's a lot of jobs; that's a lot of new economic activity.
"Trump's correct rejoinder was: "She talks about solar panels. We invested in a solar company ... that was a disaster."
Yet there was another Clinton expansion of federal power that went unnoted. She said: "I'm going to have a special prosecutor. We're going to enforce the trade deals we have, and we're going to hold people accountable."
Clinton and Trump discussed her e mails.
Clinton said: "I made my mistake using a private email. ... And if I had to do it over again, I would obviously do it differently. But I'm not going to make any excuses. It was a mistake, and I take responsibility for that."
Trump said: "That was more than a mistake. That was done purposely. When you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment ... so they're not prosecuted, when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it's disgraceful. And believe me, this country thinks it ... is disgraceful also."
Who won that exchange, American media?
Clinton on race: "Race remains a significant challenge in our country. Unfortunately, race still determines too much ... it determines how they are treated in the criminal justice system. We've just seen those two tragic examples in both Tulsa and Charlotte."
In Charlotte, a black officer killed a black man who wielded a gun after officers -- whose police department is headed by a black man -- repeatedly yelled, "Drop the gun." And yet, Clinton charged the police and America with racism.
If you want more race baiting, America, vote for Clinton.
Why is there so much black-on black murder?
"We've got to get guns out of the hands of people who should not have them," Clinton insightfully observed, as if there were one American who doesn't want to do so.
Clinton added, "The gun epidemic is a leading cause of death of young African-American men, more than the next nine causes put together." A question for her is, which is more responsible for black males committing murder at a higher rate than any other Americans: too many guns, or too few fathers?
But it was not her gun-based and racism-based explanations of black crime that troubled the American media. It was Trump's responses.
First, Trump said: "Secretary Clinton doesn't want to use a couple of words, and that's law and order. ... If we don't have it, we're not going to have a country."
Second, he correctly noted: "We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African-Americans (and) Hispanics are living in hell because it's so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot. In Chicago, they've had thousands of shootings ... Is this a war-torn country? ... We have to stop the violence. We have to bring back law and order. In a place like Chicago ... in fact, almost 4,000 have been killed since Barack Obama became president."
And third, he said: "Right now, our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything. We have to protect our inner cities because African-American communities are being decimated by crime."
To all of these powerful truths, Clinton could only respond with demagoguery. She said, "Well, I've heard Donald say this at his rallies, and it's really unfortunate that he paints such a dire, negative picture of black communities in our country." She added later, "When it comes to policing ... I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers."
That's what America needs -- more federal governance of Americans' lives and more re-education programs. (And what is "implicit bias"?)
Meanwhile, Trump, in his simple way, uttered a truth that I can't recall any Republican has uttered: "Look, the African-American community has been let down by our politicians. They talk good around election time, like right now, and after the election they said, 'See you later. I'll see you in four years."
On ISIS and Iraq, Trump correctly said: "President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq ... They shouldn't have been in, but once they got in, the way they got out was a disaster."
This was another major truth ignored in all the commentary on Miss Piggy and "birtherism." Iraq was finally rendered relatively peaceful, and then Obama announced that America was leaving.
On the Iran deal, Trump was also dead-on: "You started the Iran deal, that's another beauty, where you have a country that was ready to fall ... They were choking on the sanctions. And now they're going to be actually probably a major power at some point pretty soon, the way they're going."
Perhaps my favorite moment of the evening -- also completely ignored -- was Trump's quick reaction to Clinton saying that nuclear weapons "is the No. 1 threat we face in the world." He said: "I agree with her on one thing: The single greatest problem the world has is nuclear armament. ... Not global warming, like you think and your president thinks."
She never responded to this devastating point about left-wing hysteria over global warming. But she did have a lot to say about Miss Piggy, birtherism and Trump's tax returns. And so do her allies: the American media.
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4)
DOUBLE STANDARDS FOR ALEPPO AND GAZA
IDF paratroopers in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge. (Photo: Wikipedia).
Make no mistake, the carnage taking place in Aleppo right now is a disgrace to the international community.
The Syrian government and Russian-backed forces are reportedly using chemical weapons, barrel bombs and increasingly powerful explosives to target innocent men, women and children. While rebel fighters have undoubtedly embedded themselves in the city in fortified positions, it appears that the civilian population is bearing the brunt of the conflict.
While there has been some condemnation from the UN, where are the protests on the streets of European capitals and where is the media frenzy about this disgrace?
Had Israel been involved, or had the IDF aimed one solitary munition at Aleppo, I think the response would be much different.
The international community’s condemnation of the Assad regime and Putin’s Russia is nothing compared to the vitriol leveled against Israel for its far more restrained (and completely justified) 2014 operation against Hamas in Gaza.
Unfortunately for the 250,000 residents of Aleppo, the city is not being attacked by the IDF. There are no leaflets being dropped warning civilians to evacuate areas in the line of fire. There is no “roof knocking” — where non-explosive devices are dropped on the roofs of targeted buildings to give civilians time to flee. And judging by the number of civilian casualties and the extent of the destruction in Syria, there is very little to no concern for the well-being of innocent civilians.
Aleppo is a testament to the double standards at play when it comes to the treatment of Israel’s military operations. There is, however, a caveat. The IDF should be held to higher standards than the militaries of both Syria and Russia.
And that is why The Sunday Times of London caught my eye recently. One story was headlined “Putin’s gigantic firebombs torch Aleppo.” Next to it was an article entitled, “RAF drone crew divert missile to save ‘civilian’ seconds from death.”
The dissonance between the two stories is striking. On one side, we have the alleged deployment by Russia of a weapon “capable of blasting a massive ball of flame across wide areas of Aleppo.” On the other, the release of a video by Britain’s Royal Air Force showing a drone missile aimed at ISIS terrorists being diverted at the last minute to avoid killing a civilian.
One side was indiscriminately firebombing, while the other was deliberately acting to prevent civilian casualties.
The RAF evidently felt that its tale was a positive story, which showed that its drone squadrons act both ethically and in accordance with international law. Why is this news? Israel released many videos from incidents where missiles targeting Hamas terrorists were diverted due to the presence of Palestinian civilians. So why then were Israel’s identical efforts not deemed newsworthy?
Granted, the Sunday Times is a British newspaper covering the British military, but the UK press has never been shy about devoting many column inches to Israel and the Palestinians.
Israeli efforts to minimize civilian casualties go unreported or even ignored by the press, and Israel instead finds itself regularly judged in the court of public opinion, which is led by a lazy or hostile media.
So Israel is subjected not only to a different standard than the deplorable militaries of Syria and Russia, but even to a different standard than other Western militaries.
If and when the Syrian conflict comes to an end, will anyone be held to account for what certainly appear, at face value, to be genuine war crimes? Will there be a UN investigation and a Goldstone-style report? Will the International Criminal Court issue indictments? Given Russian involvement and the lack of American global power projection, it is unlikely that anyone will be held to account.
The next time open conflict between Israel and Hamas breaks out, will the parameters of judgment have changed as a result of the carnage in Aleppo and other parts of Syria? Or will Israel continue to be held to a standard of behavior unlike any other military in the world?
The likelihood is that nothing will have changed when it comes to how Israel is treated, and we will be left to conclude that, ultimately, the world will be outraged by Israel defending itself and its citizens irrespective of how ethically it behaves.
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5)Why Donald Trump Gets Pulled Off Course
BY GERALD F. SEIB
You could argue that Donald Trump had the strongest 30 minutes of his presidential campaign at the beginning of the first presidential debate, when he delivered a direct and succinct summary of his argument that American jobs are being shipped overseas by trade deals and big-business defections and can be lured back.
You could argue that Donald Trump had the strongest 30 minutes of his presidential campaign at the beginning of the first presidential debate, when he delivered a direct and succinct summary of his argument that American jobs are being shipped overseas by trade deals and big-business defections and can be lured back.
And then…
Well, after those opening minutes the debate shifted away to his comments about women and why he pursued for years the debunked assertion that President Barack Obama was born overseas. In the days since, the focus has been, bizarrely, on how he assailed weight gains by a Miss Universe and, more substantively, the performance and tax treatment of his businesses. It culminated in a Saturday night rally in which, among other things, he mocked unkindly the way Hillary Clinton walked to her car while suffering a bout of pneumonia.
Since about 9:30 last Monday night, in short, the campaign agenda has been more or less the kind the Clinton campaign would have wanted.
This is a recurring pattern in Mr. Trump’s world, raising the question of how it keeps happening—and whether it is destined to continue happening over the next five weeks.
The usual explanations are that the candidate lacks the self-discipline to avoid being lured down dead-end alleys, and has a temperament that allows him to be baited into self-defeating controversies. There is obvious credence to both arguments, though they also held true while the same style was succeeding during the Republican primary season.
But there are two other, more subtle explanations for this pattern.
The first is that Mr. Trump has over time planted some time bombs in his own pathway that now are starting to go off. The most obvious one has to do with his tax returns. The conversation now under way—what those returns show about his actual income, what they might show about the state of his business empire, the amount of federal taxes he has or hasn’t paid—would have been better held five months before the election, not five weeks before the election.
Mr. Trump decided, though, to resist calls then, not from Democrats but from fellow Republicans, to release his returns. Now the conversation is being driven instead by a leak to the New York Times, timely or untimely depending on your point of view, of portions of his 1995 return showing a staggering business loss of almost a billion dollars, providing a tax carryforward that likely reduced or eliminated Mr. Trump’s federal tax liability in the years since. Calmly explaining that would have been difficult months ago, but it’s twice as difficult in the general-election hothouse.
As a consequence, Mr. Trump now gets the worst of both worlds on the tax front. He is taking hits because of the presumption he’s paid very little in federal income taxes for the last decade, while still suffering from the perception that he may be hiding something else by not releasing the returns.
The same time-bomb phenomenon is at work, on a lesser scale, with some of the cruder comments and scenes from Mr. Trump’s past and his primary-season campaign. One thing is certain: The Clinton campaign knows how to take advantage.
The second, more subtle explanation is that Mr. Trump may be paying the price now for not having a fully-formed policy platform. The long stretches in a one-on-one debate, and the long open spaces in a general-election campaign, can be filled either with these kinds of controversies, or with more serious policy conversations.
Those arguments have a visceral appeal to many voters, and on a couple of fronts—notably taxes and energy—he has fleshed them out with detailed policy meat. But others remain vague or incomplete with details rarely discussed. So after the top lines are laid out, say in a 90-minute debate, the empty spaces tend to get filled in with discussions of the ideal weight of a Miss Universe.
All of which raises the question of whether it would be better now for Mr. Trump to do what some of his allies are suggesting, which is to turn the focus to Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities—or to go back to the more substantive points made in the first minutes of that first debate.
5b)The Apology of Donald J. Trump
To those who don’t get why Clinton isn’t ahead by 50 points—here’s the answer.
What follows is a draft of a speech Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver Tuesday, Oct. 4 in Prescott Valley, Ariz. We haven’t confirmed its authenticity because, like the rest of the corrupt media, we’re totally dishonest.
Thank you, everybody, thank you. It’s good to be back in Arizona. And you know we’re going to win, right? The polls say we’re going to win in Arizona, and we will.
The polls also say we’d lose the general election if it were held today. But they’re wrong. So wrong. You know how pollsters work? They guess who will show up to vote on election day, and then they poll these “likely voters.”
But let me tell you something. The pollsters have no clue. None. They don’t have a clue who the electorate is, and they don’t have a clue of what’s going on in America. Believe me, folks, on election day they’re going to find out.
The other day, in Colombia—I’m talking about the country in South America—they held a vote. A referendum. President Santos staked his reputation on a, quote-unquote, peace deal with the terrorists of the FARC.
Now the FARC, they’re the worst people in the world. They’ve killed tens of thousands of people. They make their money through drug trafficking and kidnapping. They’ve been terrorizing Colombians for 50 years.
Along comes Santos, and he makes this terrible deal that says to the FARC: We’re not going to send you to jail. We’re going to sentence your leaders to community service. We’re even going to guarantee you seats in the Congress.
And all the polls said the deal was going to win in a landslide. Obama and Kerry lined up behind it. Santos told Colombians they had no choice, that it was the only road to peace.
Guess what? The polls were wrong. The Colombians knew a bad deal when they saw one. They weren’t going to let killers get away with their crimes. The only deal they want with the FARC is the same deal Reagan got from Russia: We win, they lose.
Folks, it was the same story with the Brexit vote in June. All the polls said the Brits wouldn’t vote to leave the European Union. They did. All the experts said the sky would fall if the Brits voted to go. It didn’t. These geniuses said that Britain was too small to be the master of its own destiny. The British people believe otherwise, and I’m with them!
What happened in Britain, in Colombia, it’s going to happen here. Because, like them, we’re sick of it.
We’re sick of hearing ObamaCare is working when even the New York Times admits it’s a total disaster. We’re sick of hearing how great the economy is when it’s floating on a big wave of cheap credit that benefits Wall Street at the expense of savers. We’re sick of hearing how great the Iran deal is, then watching our sailors being humiliated while we secretly fork over pallets of cash.
You know what we’re also sick of? Liberal hypocrites.
I’m not supposed to say the name I’m about to say. Well, two words: Alicia. Machado.
Who is this Alicia Machado, other than a political prop for Hillary? She was a beauty queen for a business I helped run called “ Miss Universe.” The business of beauty queens is to be beautiful, just like it’s the business of athletes to be fit. Duh! And when she gained some weight, I insisted she lose it. Did I call her “ Miss Piggy”? Boo hoo. Get over it.
For this I’m being treated very badly. Let me ask you something: Other than Lena Dunham, when was the last time Anna Wintour ran a fat person on the cover of Vogue? And when was the last time Hillary said no to one of Ms. Wintour’s big fundraisers because of Vogue’s “lookism”?
So spare me the sensitivity lectures. Spare me the business lectures, too. Those tax returns someone stole and the New York Times published? The ones that showed I once lost nearly a billion dollars and used every legal trick in the book to stage a comeback?
That’s the real world. It’s only in the unreal world that Hillary lives in that you can make a fortune by being a failed secretary of state and then cash in on obscene speaking fees, or arrange for Bill to get an $18 million salary to be “honorary chancellor” at a for-profit college while the Obama administration destroys every other for-profit. That’s called corruption, no matter whether it’s legal or not.
Folks, there’s a giant wave coming. A tsunami of Americans who won’t stand for being told we don’t know what’s good for us. Who refuse to be lectured by political grifters about how to make an honest buck. Who don’t need our morals improved by Hillary Macbethand Billy Caligula. And who refuse to accept that we have to make lousy deals, or make do with less, or that America can’t ever be great again.
To all the liberals and Never Trumpers who don’t get why Hillary isn’t ahead by 50 points—I just explained it. To all of you, get ready for Nov. 8. It’s going to be a beautiful thing. Believe me.
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Judging President Obama on His Own Terms
The administration consistently failed to meet its projections for GDP growth.
By Lawrence B. Lindsey
As President Obama’s time in office winds down, the debate over the success of his economic policies has become more pronounced. This might seem difficult to objectively evaluate, given that every president inherits a unique economic situation. But there exists a fair way to judge the president: Compare the results of his policies with forecasts from his own administration.
Mr. Obama’s various budgets, which included projections for how the economy would respond to his programs, provide an excellent test. And I will only consider postrecession budgets, so this is not about the Great Recession. Likewise, the president’s defenders cannot blame some hangover from the economy Mr. Obama inherited. His economic team was aware of the past when these projections were made.
The first postrecession budget came in February 2010. By then, the three main pillars of the president’s program—the stimulus package, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank—had either been adopted or were close to enactment. The administration was well aware of them and doubtless included their effects when making its projections.
The administration’s February 2010 budget submission projected that real growth would average 3.9% annually over the next five years, including 2010. As it turned out, real growth averaged only 2.2% a year during this period. One year later, the administration submitted its fiscal year 2012 budget. Equally optimistic, the budget predicted growth would average 3.9% for five years. The economy instead grew at an anemic 2% each year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
In February 2012, the administration submitted its fiscal year 2013 budget based on new economic projections, predicting five-year growth of 3.6%. It did so well aware of the other key economic-policy achievement of the president’s first term, the 2011 budget deal. Mr. Obama signed the deal, and his administration also suggested the sequester mechanism—automatic, deep cuts to military spending that went into effect after Congress could not agree to a long-term budget.
Because the five-year period starting with 2012 includes 2016, assume an average of 3% growth in the latter half of this year. (This is generous to the Obama administration, as it is higher than most economists expect.) Still, this means actual growth of only 2.1%—the third consecutive overestimate and an average of 1.7 percentage points lower than expected.
Mr. Obama began his second term with a budget submitted in April 2013. Somewhat chastened by the disappointments of the first term, the administration cut its growth projection for the next four years to an average of 3.3% annual growth. This estimate was repeated the following March for the three-year period beginning in 2014. Making the same 2016 growth assumption as above, real growth will average only 2.3% annually from 2013-16 and 2.1% annually from 2014-16. This means five consecutive overestimates by the administration.
The poor economic performance observed during Mr. Obama’s two terms was not for lack of trying, at least in quantitative terms. The national debt has nearly doubled over the past eight years. And even today the “cyclically adjusted” budget deficit—that is, the deficit observed when the economy is at full employment—will be at least 2.8% of GDP in 2017. At full employment, this figure should be zero for there to be no stimulus.
Also at full employment, the federal-funds rate would normally be higher than it currently is. In the last eight years, the Federal Reserve has quintupled the size of its balance sheet. It termed these measures “extraordinary,” and even today describes its policy stance as highly accommodative. Despite this help, the economy had a lackluster performance.
Policy makers often say that the headwinds were stronger than they expected—shifting blame to something outside political control. Yet the February 2015 forecast through the end of this year is already 1.5 points too high and will still miss by a point, even if the U.S. somehow averages 3% growth for the rest of 2016. For some reason, the headwinds were never apparent to the administration, even in its seventh year. Perhaps these unforeseen circumstances are being conjured up after the fact.
Put all this in perspective: The average annual growth rate from 2010-16 (again assuming 2% real growth for 2016) was 2.1%. The administration’s multiyear forecasts averaged a 71% overestimate from this figure. Compounding growth at 3.6% annually means a 28% larger economy after seven years. Compounding at only 2.1% means 15.7% growth. If the administration’s growth projections were accurate, the GDP would be about $1.8 trillion larger. That’s roughly $6,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
To err is human. To not acknowledge errors is perhaps a bit vain. To not learn from them and adjust is stubborn. But to plan to continue the same failing policies for another four years while expecting a different result is simply insane.
Mr. Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor and assistant to President George W. Bush for economic policy, is president and CEO of the Lindsey Group.
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