Why Trump might do better than expected in winning votes from black Americans

Lawrence Person analyzes here why Trump might get more black votes than has been heretofore assumed.

Russia has created a no fly zone over Syria.

Micah Halpern reports that there already is a no fly zone in Syria. It was created by the Russians.

...Israel and Russia have gone to great lengths to make certain that, at least when it comes to their air-forces flying over Syria, they are on the same page and there will be no problems. There have been face-to-face meeting between Putin and Netanyahu to iron out any issues and to secure lines of communication. Putin has said that Israel can and should defend herself. Israel has said that they are not taking a side, but they will certainly prevent weapons from being transferred into the hands of Hezbollah. If need be, they will also retaliate when necessary. Russia will be informed by Israel in advance but may not pass a warning on to Israel’s target. These are the terms of Israeli and Russia’s agreement.

That leaves 11 other countries, including the United States. The US and Russia are on opposite sides of almost everything when it comes to Syria. And given the current status of the Russian defense system, the other air forces are, effectively, now grounded.

Read more here.

Total absurdity

Eugne Volokh reports,

You can be fined for not calling people ‘ze’ or ‘hir,’ if that’s the pronoun they demand that you use. That’s the official legal guidance from the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Read more here.

Hillary's extreme irresponsibility

David Foster writes at Chicago Boyz,

Sharam Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist, was executed by the regime on August 3 after being convicted of providing secret information to the Americans. Sharam Amiri was also discussed in emails that were found on Hillary Clinton’s unsecured server.

Did Clinton’s negligence lead to Amiri’s execution? Possibly not: the regime was suspicious of him for other reasons, and we don’t know for certain that the Clintonmail bathroom server was hacked by the Iranians. But discussing a foreign intelligence contact on a system that is not certified for classified information can easily lead to the deaths of American agents and other individuals, whether or not it happened in this specific case.

...Clinton’s extreme irresponsibility may have led to Amiri’s execution or it may not; it may have led to the execution or murder of others of whom we were unaware. This case provides one more piece of evidence about Hillary’s utter lack of concern about the lives and well-being of actual, particular human beings

Read more here.

“No one is listening to me,” means “no one is agreeing with me.”

Any blogger who calls himself Assistant Village Idiot must be worth reading. This post by him is very clever. Enjoy!

Do you have your own script, or are you following someone else's?

At Observer Ryan Holiday interviews Mike Cernovich. I have seen Twitter quotes by Mike a lot, so I wanted to learn about him without actually going to Twitter. apparently he writes a lot about the mainstream media:

If 90% of mainstream media went away, no one would notice. You’d have fewer sites to visit, but you’d still read the same stories. You’d read the story one time rather than re-worded 100 times by 100 “writers.”

Individual writers do not stand out. They have a bylines as “prestigious” publications, but no one goes to those websites for the writer. Most writers today are commodities. They are fungible. There’s a surplus of 24-year old English majors who all think and write the same.

...I may seem mean online, but I am mean to people who work in the media – the same people who are mean to others for a living. They simply call themselves “journalists” and dismiss all critics as “trolls.” Journalism is trolling, full stop.

...Live video is the future of journalism. Soon we will have drones with GoPros on them doing “reality journalism.” The RNC and DNC both banned drones or else I’d have done that.

...Most of what the liberal media does is outright hoaxing. We’ve gone from a world where journalists are biased to a world where journalists fabricate stories, as Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone did.

...Traditional media hates on Breitbart, but I attended the RNC and DNC. Breitbart had reporters in the field providing coverage. Where were the New York Times and other “legitimate” publications? They were inside the media tents drinking hot chocolate and sucking up to each other.

Will Weiner surrender his warrant-less communications to obtain some sort of a deal?

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

...With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal: the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure; Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader; Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero.

...no one thought discredited deviant Anthony Weiner could much harm Hillary—except of course “conspiratorial” Donald Trump. He warned months ago that Clinton aide Huma Abedin might have been passing on classified materials to her dissolute husband. Because Weiner couldn’t repress his electronic libido with young girls, he ended up on the FBI’s radar—and by extension his smartphones, tablets, computers, and by further extension supposedly his estranged wife’s confidential communications. It was thought that Weiner might have stopped his sexting addiction when he lost his House seat, when he lost his mayor’s race, when he lost his wife, when he lost his jobs—or, at the very least, before he might lose Hillary (who supposedly fixed Abedin up with Weiner) her election.

Hillary’s team dared Comey to put up incriminating e-mails or shut up about investigating Hillary, hoping that the Obama Justice Department might quash any request for court-ordered warrants. But that demand assumed that Weiner is a loyal Clintonista and will put his fealty to Hillary and the Democrats above his own fear of federal prison and its supposed cultural intolerance for supposed predators. For now, the Clinton attack on the FBI might be not only futile but stupid—antagonizing her inquisitor, without the ability to apply pressure to silence him—if Weiner voluntarily surrenders his warrant-less communications to obtain some sort of deal.

Should we laugh or cry when Barack Obama’s Department of Justice warns about mixing politics with the Weiner investigation, after Attorney General Loretta Lynch had stealthily met on the tarmac with Bill Clinton while her office was supposedly investigating his spouse? Normally the nation’s lesser federal prosecutors don’t have chats about grandchildren on airport runways with the husbands of suspects under investigation. Should we weep or smile when Hillary and John Podesta decry a federal official’s 11th-hour disclosure of possible criminality—this from a party that rejoiced over Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s indictment (later dismissed) of George H.W. Bush cabinet official Caspar Weinberger a week before the 1992 election, won by Bill Clinton. As far as last-minute election surprises go, Democrats themselves have turned it into an art form. In 2000, it was the leaked George W. Bush DUI arrest; in 2004, it was the “fake but accurate” forged National Guard Memos.

Experts and Clinton officials dismiss the Weiner disclosures as either insignificant or not significant enough to affect the election. But that assumes that Weiner was loyal, sane, and ever committed to his marriage with Huma Abedin. There is no evidence that any of those three assumptions is true.

Read more here.

There are four FBI investigations related to the Clintons.

Sharyl Attkisson reports that there are actually four active FBI investigations related to the Clintons.

1. Clinton Foundation: Four FBI field offices– New York, Los Angeles, Little Rock and Washington DC– have been involved in a lengthy probe of the Clinton Foundation charity. “Pay to play” allegations include the charity soliciting donations from corporations and foreign countries in exchange for access and policy considerations from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which she denies. Emails published this month by Wikileaks reflect consternation among various Clinton allies about the possible appearance of conflicts of interests.

2. Anthony Weiner sexting: ...The FBI began a probe into whether Weiner had traded sexually explicit texts with a minor, and in the process of examining his computers, investigators ran across evidence of Abedin emails sent to and from Clinton’s insecure private server(s), which the FBI had previously investigated.

3. Hillary Clinton email: In July, FBI Director Comey said that Hillary Clinton had been “grossly negligent” in the mishandling of classified emails on private servers as secretary of state, but that there was no basis under which to charge her with a crime. However, the revelations of new Abedin emails that could be relevant to the investigation have returned the status of the case to “open.”

4. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Longtime Clinton ally, former Clinton Foundation board member, and former head of the Democratic National Committee, McAuliffe is also said to be under FBI investigation (led by the Washington Field Office).

Read more here.

The fix was in

Do you know how many Congressmen went into the secure room to review the evidence in the impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton? 65. How many of them voted to impeach Clinton? 64. How many US Senators accepted the invitation to inspect the evidence? Zero. The Senate voted not to impeach.
Read more here.

“This is an issue of the federal government restricting crucial information from the public ahead of a presidential election and it is unacceptable."

Brandon Darby reports at Breitbart,

A record number of illegal aliens have crossed the U.S.- Mexico border and are in U.S. Border Patrol custody in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley Sector (RGV), according to the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC). Border Patrol Agent and NBPC President Brandon Judd spoke exclusively with Breitbart Texas and condemned the leadership of the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), for allegedly “keeping this information secret” ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.


“We are at breaking point. We have the highest number of illegal aliens in custody in history inBorder Patrol’s RGV Sector and this information has been kept from the American public,” said Agent Judd. “The talk of amnesty has once again created pull factors and encouraged people from all over the world to cross Mexico and then cross our porous southern border to illegally enter the U.S. We are simply overwhelmed.”

Agent Judd told Breitbart Texas that Americans should vote their conscience, but they should do so with all of the information available. “This is an issue of the federal government restricting crucial information from the public ahead of a presidential election and it is unacceptable. Americans deserve to know the truth. Our Border Patrol agents deserve for Americans to know what they are really facing. Too many Border Patrol agents have given their lives and left loved ones to grieve for CBP leadership to play these types of political games ahead of such an impactful election.”

"Free speech under threat in America"

"Ask me a question that is less disingenuous." "The AltRight is energized by three issues, political correctness (free speech), immigration, and trade." "It isn't radical Islam, it's Islam, that is the problem." "I'm talking about culture, not race. It's typical of the BBC to conflate the two. What they want to do is say that if you are proud of your country and the ideals on which it was founded, that somehow makes you a racist. It doesn't!"

"The regressive social attitudes of Muslims in the west are terrifying. Organizations like yours won't report honestly, accurately, or fairly on Muslims."

"The only people who are still feminists are journalists!" "The patriarchy is a conspiracy theory."

Some must win states for Trump

At The New York Post Michael Walsh delivers an in depth analysis of what states Trump must winn in order to win the election.

Disappeared

Fears are growing for the safety of North Korea’s first lady, who has vanished from public view for the past seven months.

Ri Sol-ju is thought to have tied the knot with her food-loving fella Kim Jong Un in 2009 and soon after she gave birth to his child and heir to the hermit state.

Sporting designer clothes and pricey handbags, she has since appeared alongside her hubby as he tours factories and theme parks.

But now the slim and attractive spouse has vanished from public view after last being seen at a sporting event in March.

North Korea observers fear she could have fallen foul of her despotic husband or incurred the wrath of his equally menacing sister, Kim Yo Jong.

Experts believe Yo Jong is the power behind the throne and is even more deadly than her brother.

Concern is also mounting for Kim’s wife because of the gruesome fate of people who cross the loony leader.

In August, it emerged he had executed one of North Korea’s top officials with an anti-aircraft gun after the man fell asleep in a meeting.

Read more here.

18-year-old- teen beats up his principal.

Can we go ahead and put this guy in prison now, or do we have to wait until he kills someone?

It's all about DNA...Or is it?

Joshua Rhett Miller has the latest on the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case here.

CNN fires cheater; nobody asks Clinton why she had not reported the cheater

Donna Brazile has been fired by CNN.

WASHINGTON — CNN said Monday it’s “completely uncomfortable” with new leaked emails that Donna Brazile fed debate questions to Hillary Clinton and announced it has accepted her resignation as contributor.

Fresh WikiLeaks emails show that Brazile — previously accused of leaking to Team Clinton for a CNN town hall — also gave the Democratic nominee a heads-up before her Democratic primary face-off with Sanders.

...WikiLeaks earlier revealed a separate email in which Brazile told Team Clinton that the former secretary of state would get a question about the death penalty before a March 13 town hall on CNN.

Read more here.

Update: Joel Pollak reports at Breitbart,

Trump challenged journalists in the room to ask Hillary Clinton why she had not reported Brazile after being provided with the debate questions.

"If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we'll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won't we?"

John Kass writes,

FBI director James Comey's announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious.

...What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands.

The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political action committee — should begin demanding it.

...But what will Hillary do?

She'll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling nothing but political influence.

She'll remind the nation that she's a woman and that Donald Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of female victims, which she has never been.

Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the "Year of the Woman." Then he preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas.

If you take a step back from tribal politics, you'll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She'd never be hired.

As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn't remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids.

FBI's Comey acted out of 'obligation' to lawmakers, fear of leak to media
FBI's Comey acted out of 'obligation' to lawmakers, fear of leak to media
And there was no prosecution of Hillary.

That isn't merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous.

And during this presidential campaign, Americans were confronted with a two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards for the Clintons and one for the peasants.

I've always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several fortunes.

The Clintons weren't skilled merchants. They weren't traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of dollars.

All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it.

If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we'll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won't we?

Read more here.

Don't get overconfident, folks!

Ann Althouse makes another important point this morning. She asked,

Do you remember how Watergate looked on the eve of the 1972 election? We knew about the Watergate break-in when we went to the polls. Here's how we voted:


Here's a Watergate chronology. The break-in occurred in June 1972. The burglars, caught in the act, were indicted on September 15th. Nixon had made an announcement on August 30th that his counsel John Dean had done an investigation that determined that no one in the White House was involved, but on September 29th, WaPo reported that Attorney General John Mitchell "controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats." On October 10th, WaPo reported:
FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.
So that's what people had to think about when we reelected Nixon in the biggest landslide ever. (I was 21 and it was the first time I was eligible to vote, though the voting age was suddenly 18. All that youth vote — which represented a lot of opposition to the war (and, especially, the draft) — wasn't enough to stop Nixon. Like everyone I knew, I voted for McGovern.)

The news that there were audiotapes of White House conversations didn't come out until July of the following year, and without these tapes, Nixon would have hung onto the presidency. The slow roll out of the Watergate scandal went on for more than a year after that before Nixon resigned. It was August 8, 1974. Almost 2 years after that landslide election.

So let's look back in 2 years and see how Hillary's big trouble looks compared to Watergate. But if you want to compare it to Watergate now, try comparing it to how Watergate looked on the eve of the 1972 election. And think about what it was like to go through those 2 years from landslide election to forcing the President to resign. What an ordeal! But I'm not saying that if Hillary Clinton gets elected — even by a slim margin — that she'll be swamped by scandal the way Nixon was. The press won't be straining to take her out, and for all the wars we are fighting, there's nothing like Vietnam.

"A conflict between freedom of speech and the freedom from discrimination."

This morning Ann Althouse blogged about the trial of Gert Wilders in the Netherlands.

"His remarks touched the very being of this population group. You cannot choose to be part of a population group or not; it’s a group that’s decided by birth, so it’s a whole different matter."

Said Frans Zonneveld, the prosecutor in the hate-speech trial of Geert Wilders (in the Netherlands).
As Mr. Zonneveld put it, the case is about a conflict between freedom of speech and the freedom from discrimination. “These are two essential rights in the Dutch rule of law,” he said, “and it’s clear that these two rights are conflicting in this case.”...

“It is a travesty that I have to stand trial because I spoke about fewer Moroccans,” [said Wilders, who refuses to attend the trial]. “Not because they despise all Moroccans or want all Moroccans out of the country, but because they are sick and tired of the nuisance and terror caused by so many Moroccans.... If speaking about this is punishable, then the Netherlands is no longer a free country but a dictatorship.”

Speaking about discrimination should be countered by speech against discrimination, and let people decide which is the better viewpoint. The prosecution is relying on the argument that speech about discrimination is discrimination. But anyone who smashes those 2 ideas together is quite simply rejecting the idea of free speech.

A song to sing

Bookworm writes,

Pedophiles do not fare well in prison, something Weiner — who gave the name #Dickileaks to this most recent Clinton scandal — knows well. Indeed, anonymous rumors (so take them for what they’re worth) are that Weiner knows so well his fate should he go to prison that he’s singing like a bird and has quite a song to sing.

Then Bookworm adds some posters: