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Friday, August 3, 2018

THE AP’S WAR ON DONALD TRUMP, VOTER ID EDITION

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN MEDIA BIAS, VOTER FRAUD

Tonight President Trump addressed a raucous rally in Florida. His speech featured a call for voter ID, a popular issue with most Americans but one the Democratic Party press opposes, since pretty much all voter fraud favors the Democrats. The Associated Press, perhaps Trump’s most bitter enemy other than CNN and MSNBC, headlined just one “fact” about Trump’s speech: “Trump at rally makes false claim on photo IDs for groceries.”

The AP starts its story:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday wrongly claimed that shoppers need to show photo identification to buy groceries and accused Democrats of obstructing his agenda and his Supreme Court nominee during a raucous rally aimed at bolstering two Florida Republicans ahead of the state’s primary.

Later, the AP elaborates:

Tuesday night’s freewheeling rally lasted more than an hour and included numerous attacks on the media, as well as one glaring false claim. Trump was railing against the idea of noncitizens voting and advocating stricter voting laws when he claimed that IDs are required for everything else, including shopping.

“If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID,” he said at the event at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa. “You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture.”

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about when the billionaire president last bought groceries or anything else himself. Photo IDs are required for certain purchases, such as alcohol, cigarettes or cold medicine.

This is classic Democratic Party press coverage. The AP doesn’t want to deal with the fact that Trump’s point was correct. We have to show ID for all kinds of things; everyone has identification. We should have to show ID to vote, too. The logic is unassailable, and it doesn’t turn on groceries.

Did the AP catch Trump in an untruth? No. Trump wasn’t making a specific point about groceries, he used groceries as an example. He went on to say that “You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture.” I think it is obvious that Trump was talking about paying for purchases (groceries or otherwise) with a check. Yes, Trump is so old that he remembers when people actually paid for things with checks.

In case you have forgotten, it is common practice for stores to ask for identification when you buy groceries or other goods with a personal check. For those who haven’t used checks in years, this site provides a helpful reminder:

If a business accepts checks, you will need to provide identification proving that the checking account you are using belongs to you. Some small businesses cannot afford the risk of bad checks, so they only accept other forms of payment. However, if you are allowed to pay with a check, your ID will be requested to try to minimize loss from people writing checks against closed accounts or accounts with no money.

Your check should contain your name and address, which should match the same information on your ID. Most businesses require a government-issued ID, such as a driver’s license or military card.

That obviously is what Trump was talking about when he said that “You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture.”

The problem with the Associated Press isn’t just that its reporters are stupid or ill-informed, although that often is the case. The real problem is that the AP’s reporting is so often in bad faith, deliberately pretending not to understand, as in this instance, President Trump’s reference, and doggedly refusing to engage with the point he was making: identification is required all the time, we all have identification or can easily get it, the only reason not to require it for voting is a desire to enable voter fraud. The Associated Press’s reporting is a giant exercise in trying to change the subject.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/the-aps-war-on-donald-trump-voter-id-edition.php

SOMEONE COULD GET HURT

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN LEFTISM, LIBERALS, MEDIA BIAS

Reaction to President Trump’s rally in Florida last night continues to reverberate. Some time before the event got underway, CNN’s Jim Acosta, who has made a career out of being a Resister, was reporting from a visible position in the hall when he was heckled by Trump supporters who chanted, among other things, “CNN sucks” and “fake news.” Acosta tweeted this video along with an expression of concern about possible violence:

Acosta’s tweet has occasioned a fair amount of reaction, some of which you can read about here.

What is striking to me is how unself-aware Acosta is. He is “very worried” that “hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.” But what about the violent, anti-Trump hysteria that is whipped up by many on the left, including Acosta himself? Someone already has gotten hurt, badly, as a result of that anti-Trump and anti-Republican frenzy, namely Steve Scalise. It is a miracle that he and other Republican Congressmen weren’t killed by Bernie Sanders volunteer and Republican hater James Hodgkinson.

That was only the most dramatic example of violence from the left, “whipped up” by reporters like Acosta. Many people have been assaulted because they were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. See, e.g., here, here, here, here and here for a few samples.

This is nothing new. Anti-Trump violence has been going on for two years. Have Jim Acosta and his fellow Democratic Party reporters really not noticed? I wrote just after the 2016 election:

In America, political violence is pretty much exclusively a phenomenon of the Left. The election of Donald Trump has precipitated a wave of violence, which the New York Times acknowledges rather grudgingly:

Thousands of people across the country marched, shut down highways, burned effigies and shouted angry slogans on Wednesday night to protest the election of Donald J. Trump as president.

***
British readers of the Daily Mail got a far more accurate picture of what went on:

Violence has broken out at anti-Trump rallies across America overnight as tens of thousands marched against the President-elect before angry mobs attacked police, started fires and shut down highways.

The streets of downtown Oakland in California were choked with smoke Thursday as police launched tear gas and protesters lit fires, in what became by some distance the most violent of the many protests against the election of Donald Trump.

More than 6,000 protesters were seen on the streets of Oakland with an initially peaceful march down a cop-lined street turning nasty after some protesters threw bottles at officers and torched a police car. An office block was also attacked, daubed with ‘f*** Trump’ and ‘kill Trump’ graffiti and then set alight.

Many liberals apparently yearn to murder President Trump; or, at any event, they like to talk about it and create images of his violent death. “Kill Trump” is a sentiment commonly expressed by liberals.

Follow the link above for photos of violence by anti-Trump Democrats. Also here.

It is possible that an extreme right-winger could try to harm a Democratic Party politician or reporter, or a Democrat wearing a Bernie Sanders t-shirt. But political violence exists pretty much exclusively on the left, and it has been going on for the last two years, at least. I’ve seen no sign that such violence concerns Jim Acosta–or, for that matter, any other liberal reporter or politician.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/08/someone-could-get-hurt.php

Government data shows the entire ‘family separation’ crisis was built of lies

Daniel Horowitz · July 27, 2018

Fact or Fake concept image with wood blocks

marchmeena29 | Getty Images

Now that the truth has come out about separating families at the border, the media has lost interest in the story and is on to the next hotness. It turns out that the people for whom they created biblical levels of sanctimony self-separated from their own kids while empowering drug smugglers to kill people in our country.

Rather than marshalling all its limited resources to deal with the drug cartels, gangs, and special interest aliens (SIAs) at our border and in the interior, the Department of Homeland Security has been forced to consume its resources and give almost daily updates to the new commander in chief, San Diego Judge Dana Sabraw. He now controls our border policy and the cascading effects of devastating social and economic ills perpetrated against the country as a result of the incentives he has created to promote catch-and-release.

It turns out many parents are smugglers and don’t want reunification

Through the process of reporting back to Sabraw, the DHS produced a memo breaking down the number of children reunited with parents. The data shows that of the 2,551 adults who were recently separated from children age five and older at the border, 917 are “either not, or not yet known to be eligible, for reunification;” 130 waived their right to be reunited because they wanted their children to get refugee status; and for 463, “case notes indicated adult is not in U.S., under review.” This likely means that in addition to the 130 who didn’t seem to care about reuniting with their children, an additional 463 left the country without explicitly waiving their right of reunification, but still left their kids behind.

What gives?

The media has lied to us from day one. To begin with, 80 percent of the children who have crossed over since 2014 are not with parents but are unaccompanied. Only 20 percent come with parents. Either way, almost all of them have been resettled with illegal in-laws or aunts and uncles as well as parents who successfully evaded the border patrol over the years and have settled in the country illegally. This phenomenon violates the whole purpose of the unaccompanied child law, which was to combat human smuggling, not complete that conspiracy of smuggling by delivering the children into the hands of other illegal aliens.

In other words, the illegals are self-separating from their kids either by sending them here first and smuggling them to illegal relatives in America, or by abandoning their kids in Central America and coming here first, sending money back, and then paying coyotes to bring them here over time.

In the case of the family units coming together, their optimal goal is to evade the border patrol or sometimes surrender themselves and get paroled into the country. But now that Trump is clamping down on the parents, they choose the next best outcome, which is to at least let their kids stay here with other illegal relatives.

These judges are the biggest enablers of the drug cartels and “opioid” crisis

Now we are going to shoulder the burden of schooling these kids. And what happens when they get older? We need not speculate. There’s a reason why Long Island and Maryland have had problems with gangs in schools since 2014. Several hundred thousand of these “children” have been placed in our communities, by no fault of the American taxpayer, and we are forced to pay for the noose to hang ourselves with. The drug cartels got the proceeds from the smuggling, used the UACs as drug mules, and in recent years have used these families as diversions while they bring in the drugs, gangs, and Middle Easterners.

As Judge Andrew Hanen said of this phenomenon in 2013, it “successfully complet[ed] the mission of the criminal conspiracy” of drug smugglers to smuggle people over the border on behalf of parents “at significant expense” to taxpayers.

Earlier this week, the Washington Examiner quoted from U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan observing that the cartels “use families and children to tie up Border Patrol resources while they bring narcotics through an adjacent point of the border.” This is exactly why the drug crisis spiraled out of control beginning with the border surge in 2014. It echoes similar comments made to me by Brandon Judd, the president of the Border Patrol Council, on how the Central Americans serve as the forward guard for drug smuggling.

In 2007, 5,171 people claimed credible fear in order to get asylum. In 2016, it was 91,786. That is your drug crisis right there. And the irony is that, over the same time, violence in Central America dropped by 30 percent, which shows that this is all a fraud being perpetrated on Americans on our dime. Oh, and 73 percent of the migrants in fiscal year 2017 were male , which doesn’t exactly reflect a reality of fleeing from violence. Sounds similar to what’s going on in Europe, huh?

Drug mules, most of whom are male, have been bringing in record levels of drugs, primarily in the Rio Grande Sector, the area responsible for the most Central American illegal migration of all non-border crossings. CBP has already seized more fentanyl in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2018 than all of 2017, which in itself saw a massive increase in importation of fentanyl and meth over previous years.

Phony asylum policies allow in dangerous Middle Easterners

It gets worse.

While the flood of asylum-seekers is providing the smugglers with the perfect tactic to bring in drugs and MS-13, they have also helped the uptick of special interest aliens (SIAs) coming across the border. These are individuals from 35 countries that “have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations,” aka from the Middle East. They often pay up to $30,000 to come across. You better believe the cartels are going to ensure they get in. In recent years, thanks to the border surge, several hundred Bangladeshis have come through, primarily in the Laredo sector. How many more have we not apprehended?

As Joseph Humire of the Center for a Secure Free Society said on my podcast yesterday, Venezuela and Nicaragua, with their ties to Iran, Russia, and China, are serving as hubs for Middle Easterners to come over, get false documents, and move on to Guatemala. The latter country has served as a bottleneck for many of the SIAs and has created security problems for our embassy in Guatemala City.

According to Humire, several hundred thousand Middle Easterners have been placed in Venezuela’s immigration system, and many of traveled to Nicaragua, which is on the verge of collapsing. Tareck El Aissami, former interior minister of Venezuela, has been sanctioned by the Treasury Department for giving terrorists identification and helping facilitate the immigration-crime pipeline headed north.

And what about those Bangladeshis coming here? Humire tells me many of them speak Farsi and were given false documents.

All of this is leaving us vulnerable because of a lie. A lie about asylum and separating families is preventing us from finally de-magnetizing our border. So when a bomb goes off in a major city, set by a terrorist who came in over the southern border, we can thank the people virtue-signaling on behalf of invaders.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/government-data-shows-the-entire-family-separation-crisis-was-built-of-lies/

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Mark Levin: Interrupt Obama and reporters are racist, interrupt Trump and they’re heroes.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Mark Levin: Interrupt Obama and reporters are racist, interrupt Trump and they’re heroes.

Hall of Fame conservative radio host Mark Levin is blowing the whistle on what he sees as a double standard over the Trump administration’s move last week to bar a CNN White House reporter from an event after she shouted several questions at the president inside the Oval Office.
On his top-ranked radio show, Levin mocked media that has “circled the wagons” around CNN’s Kaitlan Collins who asked Trump, sitting with European Union Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, about tapes the cable network had of the president allegedly talking with his former lawyer about payments to a Playboy model.
The White House claimed the questions were rude and came after the press pool was asked to leave the Oval Office. As a result, they barred her from a subsequent event, prompting most media including Fox to defend Collins.
C-SPAN pulled out this section of the scrum showing that the event was over when Collins started asking her questions. Juncker appears to be chuckling at the scene as aides try to get reporters to leave.
Levin raised the double standard and the handling of conservative press by the former Obama administration and how when they were targeted the liberal media didn’t rally for them.
He noted, for example, that three reporters from conservative outlets that endorsed Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid in 2008 were refused entry on the Obama campaign plane. “So he gets rid of the conservatives, gets rid of them, and by the way Glamour magazine and others were allowed to stay on the plane,” said Levin, the latest member of the Radio Hall of Fame.

That’s different, because shut up racist.

34 by Glenn Reynolds

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/303388/

Some Ideas To Think About

Some Ideas To Think About
Walter E. Williams

Poverty is no mystery, and it's easily avoidable. The poverty line that the Census Bureau used in 2016 for a single person was an income of $12,486 that year. For a two-person household, it was $16,072, and for a four-person household, it was $24,755. To beat those poverty thresholds is fairly simple. Here's the road map: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen.
How about some numbers? A single person taking a minimum wage job would earn an annual income of $15,080. A married couple would earn $30,160. By the way, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 4 percent of hourly workers in 2016 were paid the minimum wage. That means that over 96 percent of workers earned more than the minimum wage. Not surprising is the fact that among both black and white married couples, the poverty rate is in the single digits. Most poverty is in female-headed households.
Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign garnered considerable appeal from millennials. These young people see socialism as superior to free market capitalism. Capitalism doesn't do well in popularity polls, despite the fact that it has eliminated many of mankind's worst problems, such as pestilence and gross hunger and poverty. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the nonexistent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared with a
utopia, will not fare well. Indeed, socialism sounds good but, when practiced, leads to disaster. Those disasters have been experienced in countries such as the USSR, China, most African nations and, most recently, Venezuela. When these disasters are pointed out, the excuse is inadequacies of socialist leaders rather than socialism itself. For the ordinary person, free market capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.
Here are a couple of questions: Does an act clearly immoral when done privately become moral when done collectively? Does legality or majority consensus establish morality? Before you answer, consider that slavery was legal; South African apartheid was legal; the horrendous Stalinist, Nazi and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality or a majority consensus cannot establish morality.
You might ask, "If you're so smart, Williams, what establishes morality?" That's easy, and you tell me when I make the wrong step. My initial premise is that we own ourselves. You are your private property, and I am mine. Self-ownership reveals what's moral and immoral. Rape is immoral because it violates private property. So is murder and any other initiation of violence. Most people probably agree with me that rape and murder are immoral, but what about theft? Some Americans would have a problem deciding whether theft is moral or immoral.
Let's first define what theft is. A fairly good working definition of theft is the taking by force of one person's property and the giving of it to another to whom it does not belong. Most Americans think that doing that is OK as long as it's done by government. We think that it is OK for Congress to take the earnings of one American to give to another American in the form of agricultural subsidies, business bailouts, aid for higher education, food stamps, welfare and other such activities that make up at least two-thirds of the federal budget. If I took some of your earnings to give to a poor person, I'd go to jail. If a congressman did the same thing, he'd be praised.

People tend to love a powerful government. Quite naturally, a big, powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek explained why corruption is rife in government: "In government, the scum rises to the top."

https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2018/08/01/some-ideas-to-think-about-n2505043

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: ‘The truth is we had to leave’: Fleeing Venezuela for Colombia.

“Colombia is a lifeline for western Venezuela,” said Rafael Velasquez Garcia, the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) head of mission in Colombia. “Every day more than 35,000 Venezuelans cross the Simon Bolivar bridge alone to purchase food and receive vital medical assistance, among other services which are not available in Venezuela. Of that number around 4,000 do not return Venezuela – many of whom are without official documentation or status.”
This number does not include those who cross through the “trochas” or trails that are often controlled by Colombian armed groups and/or organised crime groups, which charge migrants and refugees fees and expose them to the risks of recruitment and robbery.
An assessment of Venezuelans in Cucuta and Villa del Rosario conducted by the International Rescue Committee in March 2018 showed that among respondents who spent the last month in Colombia, their self-reported highest priority need was to find a job (89 percent), followed by food (80 percent), and then shelter (58 percent).

As millions of Venezuelans wage a daily fight for survival at home, others have found a safe haven for their money across the Atlantic: Madrid’s real estate market.
During a walk around Salamanca, an upmarket district of the Spanish capital, Luis Valls-Taberner, a real-estate investment adviser, pointed out on almost every street a building that he said a wealthy Venezuelan had recently acquired.
Mr. Valls-Taberner would not identify the buyers. Some properties, he said, were purchased through investment companies based in Miami or elsewhere — but the money always came from Venezuela.

On foot or by private jet, almost everybody seems to want to escape the worker’s paradise.

90 by Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/303400/

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

CONTRA THE DROSS OF APRIL DOSS

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN FISAGATE, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

As I have noted here a time or two before, I greatly admire the job that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has done unearthing the true story of the intelligence agencies’ “insurance” work on the 2016 election and the Democrats’ related collusion with the friends of Vladimir Putin. It is an improbable story that everyone involved has mightily sought to keep hidden from him and his colleagues. Rep. Nunes has shown himself to be a dogged and thick-skinned investigator.

In the current issue of the Weekly Standard (dated August 6), executive editor Fred Barnes profiles Nunes in “He drives them crazy.” When I wrote about Fred’s profile this weekend in “Gaslighting by April Doss,” it hadn’t been posted online yet. Now that it has I want to repeat what I wrote on Saturday.

Fred must be something like the dean of Washington reporters at this point in his career. He is an experienced and sober observer. In this case he fairly notes: “Democrats and their allies have been waging a war of abuse, slander, and name-calling [against Nunes]. They’ve tried with occasional success to make his life miserable. Nunes has to be protected by a security detail when he leaves his office.”

Fred also looks back on the Nunes memo covering the FBI’s FISA applications to surveil Carter Page. “When Nunes put out a memo with preliminary findings last winter, Democrats went crazy,” Fred writes. “It raised questions about the legitimacy of the ‘Steele dossier,’ the collection of negative (but unverified) information about Trump that was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele. The memo said the Steele dossier was the key document cited to justify the wiretap of Page.”

Fred states baldly: “The submission was a deceptive document. It masked the fact that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign had paid for the dossier—the tab was $168,000—making it a partisan document. This was improper as grounds for a wiretap of an American citizen, a blatant one.”

Fred judges: “Nunes and his memo were vindicated.” Fred is of course not alone in his judgment. Arriving at the same conclusion, Byron York devoted an excellent column to the subject.

Fred itemizes the particulars of the gratitude I feel to Nunes: “We wouldn’t know these things if they hadn’t dug them up. (1) Hillary and the DNC paid for the still-unverified Steele dossier from his Russian sources. (2) The Steele dossier was largely responsible for approval of the Page wiretap.” Fred concludes with a rhetorical question: “Well worth knowing, don’t you think?”

The cover story of this issue of the magazine is by one April Doss. The Standard posted her cover story online under the headline “The Truth About Carter Page, the FBI, and Devin Nunes’ Conspiracy Theory.” Incidentally, Doss tried out another version of the piece for the Atlantic in “The FISA fiasco’s silver lining.” Both the Standard and the Atlantic identified Doss in part as former “senior minority [i.e., Democratic] counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence[.]”

Here’s the funny thing. Doss’s cover story illustrates Fred’s observation that Nunes has been victimized by a Democratic campaign of personal abuse and name-calling. Indeed, it could serve as Exhibit A to illustrate Fred’s point. According to Doss, “Nunes [has] spun a crazy conspiracy narrative.”

Well, something’s crazy here and I don’t think it’s Nunes. Fred’s profile of Nunes comports with Kim Strassel’s Wall Street Journal weekend interview “Devin Nunes, Washington public enemy number 1” and Bill McGurn’s Wall Street Journal column “Abolish the FISA court” as well as Andrew McCarthy’s NR column “FISA Applications Confirm: The FBI Relied on the Unverified Steele Dossier.”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/contra-the-dross-of-april-doss.php

5 Reasons Hillary Clinton Was the Worst Presidential Nominee in History

5 Reasons Hillary Clinton Was the Worst Presidential Nominee in History BY JOHN HAWKINS

Like every presidential election that liberals lose, years later we’re still hearing about how unfair it all was. Of course, the favorite complaint of liberals this time around is “Russia did it!” Even if you accept for the sake of argument that Russia wanted Trump to win and hacked John Podesta’s email (and neither of those assertions may be true), buying some inconsequential Facebook ads for both sides and revealing the contents of John Podesta’s emails (none of which turned into truly major stories) wasn’t exactly a game changer.
Liberals also noted that Hillary would have won had the election been decided by the popular vote. This is like noting that if football games were decided by passing yards instead of the score, the Patriots would have beaten the Eagles in the Super Bowl. It doesn’t work that way, by design. We’ve also heard complaints that Bernie Sanders is responsible, presumably for daring to run against Hillary at all and we can’t forget “sexism.” That’s always a liberal rallying cry.

Moreover, it is impossible to overemphasize that, other than a few true believers, almost all of the political professionals (myself included) thought Hillary would win. In fact, if you believe Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury, even the Trump campaign thought it was going to lose – and no wonder.
Just look at these numbers from June of 2016, In the latest ABC News poll, Trump’s unfavorable ratings among all Americans have hit 70 percent; and 77 percent of women view him unfavorably. His favorable rating among his base of white men is 46 percent, down from 54 percent in last month’s ABC News poll. Only 47 percent of self-identified conservatives view him favorably, down from 58 percent in May. On top of that, Trump’s campaign staff were widely considered to be mediocre because the best staffers didn’t want to be associated with him back then. His get-outthe-vote and data operations were weak. The Billy Bush “Grab 'em by the p*ssy” tape was about as good as it gets for an October surprise and… he still EASILY beat Hillary Clinton.
How? Well, a big part of it seems to be because Hillary Clinton was the worst candidate ever run by a major party in American history. Why?

1. Unlikable

If you just apply the "Whom would you rather go to a ballgame with?" test to elections, it explains the winner of every presidential election at least back to Nixon and arguably even longer. In Hillary’s case, her own husband probably wouldn’t put her on a list of people he’d want to go to a ballgame with. Hillary combined being the most hated Democrat in the country for Republicans with being completely uninspiring to her own party. In the year of the outsider when even Ted Cruz was too “establishment” (LOL) for Republicans and Bernie Sanders was getting traction, Clinton was the ultimate insider. She has none of her husband’s charisma, rather famously referred to Republicans as her “enemies” as well as “deplorables” during the campaign, and her agenda could have been fairly summed up as, “I am a woman and therefore, I should be president!” 2. Sickness

Most people had no idea what was wrong with Hillary Clinton, but pretty clearly SOMETHING was physically wrong with her. Of course, since Hillary lies like a lying liar who just invented a lying machine for an Olympic lie-off, no one believed any of her lame excuses. She had multiple falls, was constantly coughing, and was rather famously dragged into a van like a sack of potatoes after a 9/11 memorial service. The presidency is a high-energy, difficult, stressful position and, quite frankly, she didn’t seem like she was physically up to the job.

3. Unaccomplished
Like Obama before her, Hillary was not qualified to be president. She married the right guy, parlayed that into a short and largely irrelevant tenure in the Senate, lost a presidential campaign, and then had a short, well-below-average run as secretary of state. There was absolutely nothing in her background that should have made anyone think, “Wow! With her accomplishments, she would make a great president.” In fact, one of the more hilarious things conservatives did early in the campaign was to put Hillary Clinton supporters in front of a camera and then ask them to talk about Hillary‘s accomplishments. Almost inevitably they blurted out some “You go, girl” platitude because none of them could come up with anything. 4. The email scandal

One of the great ironies of Hillary’s campaign is that the email issue that bedeviled her whole campaign was known to everyone through the Democratic primaries. Every voter who pulled the lever for her knew she might be facing serious legal troubles down the road. The FBI investigation of Clinton started in JULY of 2015 and it was widely believed to be serious. After all, there are people who have gone to jail for being less careless with classified information than Hillary Clinton. In fact, the general assumption most Republicans (myself included) make is that if Hillary hadn't been treated as “above the law” by James Comey, she’d be in jail today for what she did. So, yes, she deserved those “lock her up” chants and James Comey didn’t hurt her campaign so much as gave her a huge break. After all, it’s hard to show up at campaign rallies if you’re sitting in prison.

5. Baggage
Hillary Clinton had a baggage train behind her as long as the Mississippi River and luckily for Trump, it almost perfectly canceled out his weaknesses. You don’t like how Trump treats some women? Then, I have two words for you: Bill Clinton. Did you have a problem with some of Trump’s business practices? Well, let me refer you to Whitewater, The Clinton Foundation, and what many people believed were credible bribery allegations traced back to Hillary’s time as secretary of state. Do you think Trump can be dishonest? Well, remember when Hillary claimed she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia even though the scariest thing that happened was a young girl handing her flowers? Every scandal from her husband’s time in office (and there were many of them) was hanging around her neck like an albatross. Other than perhaps Anthony Weiner (WHO WAS ACTUALLY TIED TO HER CAMPAIGN through Huma Abedin), there wasn’t a more scandal-plagued Democrat they could have run.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/5-reasons-hillary-clinton-was-the-worst-presidential-nominee-in-history/

WE’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN ROBERT MUELLER, RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

Last week the New York Times breathlessly reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had opened a new avenue of inquiry in the investigation of President Trump. According to the story by Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, “Mueller Examining Trump’s Tweets in Wide-Ranging Obstruction Inquiry.” They report that Mueller is “scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey[.]”

Schmidt and Haberman base their page-one story on interviews with “three people briefed on the matter.” Now I wonder if these people briefed on the matter might be seeking to discredit the Mueller investigation by the ridicule the story should generate. We can’t dismiss the thought.

If taken at face value, however, the story suggests to me that Mueller has many other angles he may have yet to explore. Mueller probably hasn’t exhausted the possibilities of building obstruction of justice charges against Trump based on his regular activities. Trump’s use of Twitter barely scratches the surface of the potential wrongdoing that falls within the scope of Mueller’s probe. Consider the possibilities:

• Trump has recruited and endorsed Republican congressional candidates in the midterm elections. If elected, these candidates might have to vote on articles of impeachment in the House and pass judgment on Trump in the Senate.

• Trump has raised campaign funds for the candidates he has recruited and endorsed. Now he has vowed to campaign for congressional candidates in the two months before election day.

• Trump has also criticized former Obama CIA Director and Gus Hall supporter John Brennan.

• Trump has in addition criticized Mueller’s supervisor in the investigation, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

• Trump has exercised his authority as president in ways designed to enhance his standing with American voters. If they were persuaded to vote for candidates Trump supports, Mueller’s investigation of Trump would come to naught.

• Trump has held campaign style rallies in which he has expressed impure thoughts about the Mueller investigation itself.

• Trump’s criticism of Sessions and Comey pales next to his criticism of Mueller himself. Indeed, it is based on part on Mueller’s investigation and actually includes ridicule. Trump has failed to provide Mueller the praise and encouragement he deserves in the pursuit of his removal from office.

Surely this cannot stand.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/weve-only-just-begun-2.php