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I spent the entire morning cleaning out debris and making a path so workers can get through to assist us in getting the tree off the roof etc. The electrician was out and made some repairs caused by the power surge and am now waiting for the insurance adjuster.
We are covered by Chubb and everything that occurred is not covered because the deduction is so high for a named hurricane. We are covered in the event of a zombie attack, however, according to the recent ad.
Getting too old for hurricanes.
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This from a long time friend, fellow memo reader and a West Point Graduate who has served his country honorably. He makes a valid case that links with my own previous comments.
What this election has confirmed and explains is why honorable and patriotic people who might like to seek office and turn their talents to public service are reluctant to do so because of the financial cost, because to do so opens them to attacks on their character and family and the price is too high and finally you have to defend yourself against the biased mass media which is prepared to literally destroy you. All of this occurs even before your opponent starts pummeling you.
Thus, it is little wonder we get candidates like The Clinton's, Trump, children of wealthy dynasties etc. Anyone in their right mind would be a fool to run .(See 1 below.)
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I would like to address the matter of campaign tactics employed by the Clinton's and the Mass Media:
The Clinton's
Clinton's are masters at projecting what they do by accusing their opponents of their own sins.
They defend their lies with more lies on the premise that the more they repeat them they will be deemed as factual. If that is not sad enough they trot out a whole host of liars who are more than
happy and willing to defend them with other lies.
Clinton's have perfected the ability to take a true statement of their opponent and subtly twist it into a form that suits their intent and repeat it until it becomes believed. They also know they can rely upon the biased mass media to support them
The Clinton's have done this to Trump regarding his comment about Putin who he believes, unlike Obama, is a strong leader. Trump never praised Putin.
The Clinton's are superb at bait and switch and selectively ignoring questions where an "honest" response would make them vulnerable. (Hillary says Putin is releasing documents through WIKILEAKS in order to elect Trump.)
I guess Putin is upset with Hillary who did not know the correct Russian word for reset and that is why he also invaded The Ukraine and now occupies Syria.
The Clinton's are robotic and will introduce obscure accusations even when irrelevant. They have their agenda of talking points and they will climb over mountains to work them into their responses.
Finally, the Clinton's have proved they can overcome their behaviour by attacking their accusers and win. This says a great deal about them but probably more about Americans who allow them to get off without even a wrist slap.
I do not deny the Clinton's are good at what they do they are simply corrupt liars and are accomplished at manipulating the system so they are always positioned at being above the law.
The Mass Media:
Various main Broadcasting and TV entities highlight a narrow rendition of what is happening and ignore or devote very little time to what they wish not to cover. This selective reporting always tilts in favor of their candidate(s) of choice.
The most egregious actions involve dispensing falsehoods either purposeful or to beat a competitor and any retractions are treated in an insignificant manner. The New York Times has become blatant and we know MSNBC , CNN and NPR, among others, are as biased as they come.
Any Republican running for office must overcome varying degrees of bias and the more conservative the candidate the more the upward slope of bias.
Obstruction of the truth has now spread to our college and university campuses and once freedom of speech is destroyed and the meek, or even the active and vociferous, are silenced, the game is over.
America is heading in this direction. This is the goal of those who wish to destroy America from within, the chaos seekers. They know how to take advantage of and manipulate our freedoms in order to destroy our Republic.
As a result of this combination, the video of Trump's vulgarities has captivated America's attention and everything Hillary has done to destroy evidence after Congress issued a subpoena and Comey's FBI agreed to destroy more evidence no longer is a topic of consideration.
The prospect of electing a woman who placed her personal interests above the nation's in order to protect herself and a president who sought to cover up incompetent embarrassments and purposeful lies is very distressing. For me it is a total turn-off.
My contempt for Hillary leaves me with no alternative and because of Trump's campaign style my vote for him is reaching 100% protest.
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Bret on Trump. (See 2 below.)
Sowell suggests talk speaks louder than action. (See 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) I am a fairly devout person. I am not embarrassed to make that statement. I believe the Almighty One created and sustains the universe and I believe the Almighty acts indirectly in human events through divine inspiration of individual thought and action. I believe that the United States of America was established by people so moved. With that in mind, I urge people who are reading this message to carefully consider what took place last week when an obscure piece of damaging material was released by Trump opponents just before a major confrontation between him and his opponents. Was this damaging material discovered the day it was disclosed, or were these people waiting for the perfect moment to release a recording they had in their possession for a fairly long time? I suspect they chose the time carefully. Was the recording gross and distasteful? Yes, it was. Does it disqualify Trump from running for office? I think not. Are the American people being hoodwinked, manipulated, and distracted from more horrible acts of despicable behavior on the part of Trump's opponents? Of course we are. The Almighty gave each of us the ability to discern the truth. A failure to see the obvious in the face of a grand deception is equivalent to a deadly sin. God help us and, please, God Bless America.
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2)Donald and the Enablers
By Bret Stephens
Donald Trump emerged the victor from his debate Sunday night with Hillary Clinton, which means he slightly exceeded expectations by not spontaneously combusting on stage, which means his ardent loyalists have again absolved him of sin. “Congrats to my running mate @realDonaldTrump on a big debate win!” tweeted Mike Pence as soon as it ended. “Proud to stand with you as we #MAGA.”
That’s “Make America Great Again,” though at this stage in the campaign it could equally mean “Mount Another Genital Assault.”
The Indiana governor is supposed to be the sober side of Trump-Pence, the guy who keeps cool, knows his policy brief and imposes ideological discipline on a ticket that would otherwise blow whichever way Mr. Trump puffs. But that misreads Mr. Pence’s role in this disastrous GOP season. Mr. Pence isn’t his boss’s junior political partner. He’s his moral enabler.
I use “enabler” in the psychiatric sense, meaning, as Merriam-Webster has it, “one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior (as substance abuse) by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior.” The enabler gets the kids to school when you’re passed out drunk, mops up the mess in the bathroom, pays the bills, and makes things seem OK when they aren’t. Enablers like to think of themselves as altruists or heroes. In truth they’re accomplices.
Mr. Trump doesn’t have substance-abuse issues: His problem is the emission, not ingestion, of poison. As we learned from Friday’s disclosure of his 2005 exchange with Billy Bush, it gushes out of him at nearly every turn, not least in the patter of casual conversation. In the most hideous of Mr. Trump’s now-infamous sentences, it’s hard to decide which part is most repellent: the predatory verb “grab,” the dehumanized object “them,” or the pornographic prepositional phrase “by the p—.”
Normal people understand this, which is why Mr. Trump’s presidential chances are now next to nil. But his Republican enablers are not normal people.
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, variously defended the Republican nominee by invoking Jesus Christ and Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress, which is the type of disgusting association you’d expect from a defrocked priest.
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council brushed aside the controversy by insisting his support for Mr. Trump rested on “shared concerns” not “shared values.” That marks a milestone: The president of an organization ostensibly devoted to the preservation of family values has endorsed a man who wants to sleep with other men’s wives.
And then there’s Mr. Pence, a man whose job has been to provide evangelical cover to Mr. Trump’s meretricious version of New York values. That’s the sort of role he could have assumed the way an ER nurse approaches an Ebola patient—out of stern professional duty and through thick rubber gloves.
Instead, Mr. Pence has thrown himself into the work with relish, constantly vouchsafing the character of “this good man” Donald Trump. About most other politicians the claim would be a throwaway line, but in this case it amounts to something else: part self-deception and part outright deception, till the hope and the lie blur. Like every other enabler, Mr. Pence is desperate to make true what he knows is not.
On Saturday, after the video eruption, Mr. Pence seemed to have his own moral awakening, refusing to serve as Mr. Trump’s surrogate at an event in Wisconsin and hinting that he might pull out of the race if his running mate didn’t express sufficient contrition at Sunday’s debate.But Mr. Pence’s moment of clarity was as short-lived as Mr. Trump’s remorse. He now claims he never considered leaving the ticket.
What a shame for Mr. Pence to besmirch himself through dogged fidelity to a candidate whose own notions of loyalty are as one-way as his concept of marriage.
Then again, maybe I’m being too generous to the Indiana governor, whose dismay at Mr. Trump’s behavior might be as sincere as Captain Renault’s objections to gambling at Rick’s Cafe in “Casablanca.” If Mr. Pence is shocked, shocked to discover Mr. Trump is a cad, then he’s a fool. If he isn’t so shocked, he’s a cad, too. As Benjamin Franklin warned in “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.
It isn’t clear what all this means for Mr. Pence’s career. The larger question is what it says about the Republican Party that men like Mr. Pence remain willing to carry Mr. Trump to the finish line—and carry his insults, boasts, prejudices, predations, threats and lies with them. My guess is that it means the current GOP is nearly beyond redemption.
On Nov. 9 Republican voters will likely wake up to the reality that they have lost the White House, again, and that they have nobody but themselves to blame, again. As with every addict and enabler, the surest path to recovery begins at rock bottom.
2a)Words Versus Deeds
By Thomas Sowell
Donald Trump's gutter talk about women shows yet again that he is bad news. The problem is that Hillary Clinton is far worse.
Trump's talk is indefensible. But Hillary Clinton's actions as Secretary of State, carrying out the Obama administration's foreign policies, have cost many lives in many places, including the American ambassador and others killed in Benghazi.
Women have a right to be offended by Trump's words. But women have suffered a far worse fate from Secretary Clinton's and President Obama's actions. Pulling American troops out of Iraq, despite military advice to the contrary, led to the sudden rise of ISIS and their seizing of many women and young girls as sex slaves.
A message from one of these women urged the bombing of ISIS. She said she would rather be dead than live the life of a sex slave. Some women who tried to commit suicide and failed have been tortured for trying.
Meanwhile, President Obama tried to downplay ISIS with flippant words, by calling them the junior varsity. His half-hearted, foot-dragging military response has allowed ISIS to parade before the world as triumphant conquerors, appealing to disgruntled people in Western countries to carry out terrorist attacks in support of their cause.
That is a lot worse than some stupid and gross words by Donald Trump, which even he has had to repudiate. Make no mistake about it. Neither party has a good candidate for President. The choice is between bad and disastrous.
Are women more in danger from Trump's words or Hillary's actions? Are Americans in general more in danger from Trump's shallowness on issues or Hillary's ruthless grabs for money and power -- a track record that goes all the way back to the days when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas?
Mrs. Clinton's own announced agenda attacks the very foundation of American Constitutional government, on which Americans' own freedom depends. She has already said that she will appoint Supreme Court justices who will specifically overturn a recent Supreme Court decision, "Citizens United versus FEC."
That decision said that both corporations and labor unions have freedom of speech, including the right to contribute money toward political campaigns.
Hillary Clinton's determination to pick judicial appointees on the basis of their willingness to overturn that decision is a more brazen extension of the political left's other attempts to stifle the free speech of those who oppose their agenda.
Demands that various advocacy organizations reveal the names of all their donors are an obvious attempt to scare off those donors, with harassment by everyone from vandals to rioters to the Internal Revenue Service and other government bureaucrats.
Without the right to free speech, none of the other rights is safe. Government officials can get away with all sorts of abuses, if others are not free to talk about those abuses.
Despite Hillary Clinton's claims to be a champion for black people, her political agenda threatens the education of black children, the employment of black adults and the physical safety of black communities.
Mrs. Clinton is on the side of the teachers' unions that want to stop the expansion of charter schools, even though these are among the very few places where black children can get a quality education to prepare them for a better future. Here, as with other issues, her public statements are contradicted by her actions.
No law has done more damage to the employment prospects of young blacks than the federal minimum wage law. But nothing is easier, or more popular, than for some politician to raise the minimum wage -- despite the fact that unemployment rates among black young people have skyrocketed to several times what they were before.
You don't get any wage at all when you are unemployed. And if you are young and unemployed, you don't get any job experience to help you rise up the ladder, when you don't get on the ladder.
As for safety in the black community, Hillary Clinton has allied herself with those who demonize the police. The net result has been a sharp increase in the number of blacks killed by other blacks, as criminal elements take control of the streets when the police are not allowed to.
Do you choose a President by talk -- or by actions and consequences?
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