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OCTOBER 12,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

US MILITARY ACTION IN YEMEN – FROM ABC NEWS:   U.S.-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles destroyed three coastal radar sites in Houthi-controlled territory on Yemen's Red Sea Coast early Thursday, officials said, a retaliatory action that followed two incidents this week in which missiles were fired at U.S. Navy ships.  The strikes marked the first shots fired by the U.S. in anger against the Houthis in Yemen's long-running civil war. The U.S. previously only provided logistical support and refueling to the Saudi-led coalition battling Yemen's Shiite rebels known as Houthis and their allies, including supporters of Yemen's former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.  While the U.S. military has been focused on al-Qaida in Yemen, the Houthis had not been a primary target of American forces until the missile launches from Houthi-controlled territory this week.  I'd watch this carefully.  It can escalate.  But I see very little attention paid.  Not as big a ratings grabber as Donald Trump's tape.

A BIG DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR CAVES – FROM CBS LOCAL:   Gov. Mark Dayton made a stunning admission on Wednesday about rising health insurance costs and the future of MNsure.  “Ultimately I’m not trying to pass the buck here but the reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable,” Dayton said.  Dayton says changes to the program are critical, as he stepped away from one of his signature political platforms.  “The Affordable Care Act has many good features to it, it has achieved great success in terms of insuring more people, 20 million people across the country and providing access for people who have pre-existing conditions alike, but it’s got some serious blemishes right now and serious deficiencies,” Dayton said.  Premiums for 250,000 Minnesotans, or 5 percent of the population, insured under MNsure will skyrocket by 50 percent or more on some health plans.  Obamacare is an enormous deception.  It may formally insure some people, but it is causing enormous hardship for others.  It was poorly designed because no one particularly cared about the details.  It was the headlines, and the name, that mattered.

I'M SHOCKED, SHOCKED – FROM DAILY CALLER:   The massive trove of emails by Clinton confidant John Podesta released by Wikileaks has exposed journalists from a variety of media organizations who are “with her.”  CNBC chief Washington correspondent and New York Times political writer John Harwood is the most prominent journalist who is cozy in the emails with the Clinton camp. The CNBC anchor is also the one who should arguably be the most embarrassed.  Harwood in several emails to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta showers Hillary in praise. Harwood in one email to Podesta says “[Hillary] was good here” after an event and in another describes her as “pretty strong.”  Worse than just showing his love for Hillary, Harwood in the emails helps the campaign. The CNBC anchor describes a story he is writing about Hillary as one “she wants. "  Harwood should be fired, but won't be.  This kind of corruption is, incredibly, accepted in some journalistic circles.

October 12, 2016       Permalink

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE? – AT 10:44 A.M. ET:  Religious bigotry is alive and well in the Democratic Party.   Only "Islamophobia" is condemned.  From Fox: 

A top spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign mocked Catholics and evangelical Christians in a 2011 email exchange exposed by WikiLeaks this week.

In the exchange reported Tuesday night on Fox News Channel's "The Kelly File", Jennifer Palmieri, now the Clinton campaign's director of communications, says that politically conservative Catholics "think [Roman Catholicism] is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals."

Palmieri was responding to a message from John Halpin, a fellow at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. Halpin remarked on a magazine article that discussed 21st Century Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch's decision to raise his children in the Catholic faith.

"Ken Auletta's latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the [Wall Street Journal], are raising their kids Catholic," Halpin wrote. "Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus."

"It's an amazing bastardization of the faith," Halpin added. "They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy."

The exchange was included in a batch of Clinton adviser John Podesta's hacked emails. Podesta was copied on the exchange between Palmieri and Halpin, but did not comment.

COMMENT:  Pretty sickening stuff.  As usual on the left, there is a clear assumption that liberals are just superior people, no doubt about it.  And all those peasants out there are merely pegs on a political board.

At one time Catholics were valued participants in the Democratic Party.  Now they are ridiculed.  On the left they call that progress.

October 12, 2016       Permalink

THE PRESS AND THE DONALD – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:45 A.M. ET:  No matter what you think of Donald Trump and, as readers know, my enthusiasm is limited, he has been treated horribly by a corrupt and biased press, especially by the deteriorating New York Times.  From one of the best columnists around, Michael Goodwin, of the New York Post:   

Dean Baquet, the Gray Lady’s boss for two years, recently claimed that Trump’s campaign had forced the paper into a new way of covering politics.

“I think that he’s challenged our language,” Baquet told an interviewer. “He will have changed journalism, he really will have.”

The claim is presented as one of those chin-stroking insights about a new paradigm that liberals spot around every corner. In fact, it is just another example of the Times getting it all wrong.

Trump didn’t change the Times — Baquet did. He’s the one who authorized reporters to abandon the paper’s standards when covering Trump and express their personal political opinions.

Or, as Baquet said in the interview with Nieman Lab’s Ken Doctor, the struggle for fairness is over. “I think that Trump has ended that struggle,” Baquet boasted. “I think we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it’s false.”

Fact-checking, of course, is often in the eye of the beholder, and quickly morphs into opinion when there is no restraint or neutral standard. The result is the paper’s relentless, daily assault on Trump, to the advantage of Hillary Clinton.

Opinions, all uniformly anti-Trump, now ooze from the paper’s every pore, with headlines on front-page “news” articles indistinguishable from daily denunciations on the editorial and op-ed pages.

This is not a mere continuation of the old liberal bias that infected the Times, the Washington Post and the broadcast networks for years. This is a malignant strain of conformity that strips away any pretense of fairness in favor of strident partisanship.

COMMENT:  Read the entire piece.  It's excellent, and damning.  Baquet, with the full permission of his boss, Times publisher "Pinch" Sulzberger, has destroyed the paper.  Its news department is compromised.  Its editorials, over which Baquet does not have control, are written on the intellectual level of high-school students who've been put back a grade. 

And the disease is spreading throughout journalism. 

A recent Gallup survey reported that respect for the American press is at an all-time low.  I am not shocked.  The people are on to the racket.

October 12, 2016       Permalink

LATEST POLL – 9:16 A.M. ET:  According to Rasmussen, the race is tightening again, with Trump down only four against Clinton.  From Rasmussen: 

The race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton continues to tighten as the results following Sunday’s night debate keep coming in.

Clinton still holds a four-point lead over Trump - 43% to 39% - among Likely U.S. Voters in Rasmussen Reports’ latest White House Watch national telephone and online survey. But that’s down from five points yesterday and her biggest lead ever of seven points on Monday.

Rasmussen Reports updates its White House Watch survey daily Monday through Friday at 8:30 am Eastern based on a three-day rolling average of 1,500 Likely U.S. Voters. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 2.5. Monday’s survey was the first following the release of an 11-year-old video showing Trump discussing women in graphic sexual detail. Tuesday’s survey was the first to include a full night of results following Sunday’s debate; two out of the three nights in the latest survey follow the debate.

The latest White House Watch shows Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson remaining at seven percent (7%) and Green Party candidate Jill Stein holding steady at two percent (2%). Four percent (4%) like some other candidate, and five percent (5%) remain undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Eighty-two percent (82%) of voters now say they are sure how they will vote. Clinton holds a narrow 48% to 46% lead over Trump among these voters. On Monday, she was ahead 51% to 45% in this group. Johnson now picks up for percent (4%) support and Stein two percent (2%) among those certain of how they will vote.

Among voters who say they could still change their minds between now and Election Day, it’s Clinton 45%, Trump 28%, Johnson 23% and Stein five percent (5%).

COMMENTS:  This could still be a close election despite Trump's largely self-inflicted wounds and the obvious press bias.  But Trump will have to put on a spectacular display in the four weeks remaining to the election, and he just isn't doing it.  He's back to his old style, running against the Republican Party rather than against Hillary Clinton.  He is doing nothing to expand his base.  His advisers must be exasperated. 

October 12,  2016       Permalink

OCTOBER 11,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:54 P.M. ET: 

THE NEED TO SMILE – FROM DAILY CALLER:  Newly leaked emails reveal that Hillary Clinton had to be told when to smile while she was speaking.  The emails, hacked from the campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account and published by WikiLeaks Tuesday, reveal that campaign staffers prompted Clinton to smile at certain times while she was preparing for the Democratic primary debates.  “[Smile] My goodness, I was having a lighthearted moment when I said that,” the talking point reads. “Look, my dad was a Republican.”   I'm sure she never had to be told to take the check.

DISGRACEFUL – FROM FOX:   Justice Clarence Thomas marks his 25th anniversary on the Supreme Court this month, and befitting the man, it likely will be a low-key affair.  But while Thomas has broken barriers his entire professional life without seeking the limelight, the 68-year-old justice is being conspicuously ignored by a powerful new showplace for black heritage. The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened last month in Washington – and missing from the four floors of exhibits is any reference to Thomas's personal and judicial legacy, shocking for perhaps the second most powerful black political figure in America, after President Obama...What the museum does have is a prominent display of Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of creating a hostile work environment while her supervisor at a federal agency. She outlined her allegations during Thomas's 1991 confirmation hearings, and the candid discussion rocked the nation.  Pure politics and political correctness.  And the black community will be the loser. 

OUR SOARING ECONOMY – FROM NEWSMAX:    Bankruptcy filings by U.S. businesses soared 38 percent in September from a year earlier in an ominous sign of a weakening economy, says Wolf Richter, editor of the Wolf Street blog.  Last month’s bankruptcies reached 3,072 to bring the year-to-date total to 28,789 and marked the eleventh straight month of increases from 2015, according to data from the American Bankruptcy Institute.  “Rising bankruptcies are an indicator that the ‘credit cycle’ has ended,” Richter says in a commentary about the limits of the Federal Reserve’s ability to help an economic recovery. “The Fed’s policy of easy credit has encouraged businesses to borrow – those that could. But by now, this six-year debt binge has created an ominous debt overhang that is suffocating these businesses as they find themselves, against all promises, mired in an economy that’s nothing like the escape-velocity hype that had emanated from Wall Street, the Fed and the government.”   The new president may have to face a recession, or worse.  Another legacy of the indifferent Obama.

October 11, 2016       Permalink

AND THEY HAVEN'T SEEN ONE DAY OF MILITARY SERVICE – AT 10:52 A.M. ET:  Our dear college students, put upon and abused by a cruel society, are rushing to mental-health systems.  Oh their agony.  Oh their pain.  From The Wall Street Journal: 

On a recent Thursday afternoon at Ohio State University, about 30 students sit in a classroom listening to instructor Kipp Pietrantonio lecture. “Imagine you were just handed your physics test, what would happen?” he asks.

“You sweat,” calls out one student.

“Your heart starts racing,” says a young woman.

“You get jittery,” answers another.

It is a meeting of the twice weekly “Beating Anxiety” workshop” and Dr. Pietrantonio is a clinical psychologist who works at the university’s counseling center. The workshop advises students to tackle anxiety by exercising, getting enough sleep and reframing catastrophic thoughts (if my friend doesn’t text me back right away, she hates me) in more logical ways (maybe she’s studying) among other strategies.

It is one part of Ohio State’s effort to cope with the dramatic increase in the number of its 59,000 students on the Columbus campus seeking help for mental-health issues.

Ohio State has seen a 43% jump in the past five years in the number of students being treated at the university’s counseling center. At the University of Central Florida in Orlando, the increase has been about 12% each year over the past decade. At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, demand for counseling-center services has increased by 36% in the last seven years.

Nationwide, 17% of college students were diagnosed with or treated for anxiety problems during the past year, and 13.9% were diagnosed with or treated for depression, according to a spring 2016 survey of 95,761 students by the American College Health Association. That is up from 11.6% for anxiety and 10.7% for depression in the spring 2011 survey. Counseling centers say they are also seeing more serious illnesses, including an uptick in the number of students coming to college with long psychiatric histories.

COMMENT:  I don't mean to minimize serious mental illness, and I favor swift and effective intervention.  But the sheer numbers suggest something very wrong in this society, in our parenting, in our attitudes toward children, even in our definition of mental health. 

Young people today have problems, but they don't begin to compare with the problems faced by the Depression and World War II generation.  A perceptive actress friend of mine points out that today's kids have rarely seen actual strife.  Many are indeed soft, "snowflakes" as they're called.

I think we'll be seeing more discussion on the mental condition of our young.  Many employers report that kids believe the world owes them a living.  No, it's what they owe the world that counts.  Giving a youngster a real challenge is often the most liberating experience, and the one that builds morale.  Maybe we've forgotten that.

October 11, 2016       Permalink

THERE GOES ANOTHER DEMOCRATIC CLAIM – AT 9:52 A.M. ET:  Wait!  You mean the economy isn't booming?  We're not all flooded with cash?  How can that be?  Obama is in the White House.  He come to save us.  Well, it be.  From Weekly Standard:   

President Obama got a fair amount of good press a few weeks ago when it was reported that Americans' incomes had risen. But that was from 2014 to 2015. During 2016, Americans' incomes have dropped.

New figures from the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, compiled by Sentier Research, reveal that the typical American household's real (inflation-adjusted) income has taken a turn for the worse during this election year. In December 2015, the real median household income was $57,701 (in seasonally adjusted, August 2016 dollars). Eight months later, in August 2016 (the most recent tally available), that figure has dropped to $57,380. That's a decline of $321 across eight months.

Real median household income is also down since January 2000, it's down since November 2008 (the month Obama was elected), and it's down since January 2009 (the month he took office). It's up since June 2009—the last month of the Bush-Obama recession—but only by $1,191. In other words, across the 7-year "recovery," typical Americans' incomes have risen an average of just $3.20 a week.

In 2016, they haven't risen at all. If they don't start doing so before Obama leaves office, he'll fall short even of George W. Bush's 8-year performance: Under Bush, incomes rose by just $377 across 96 months (from January 2001 to January 2009). Under Obama, incomes have fallen by $102 across 91 months (from January 2009 to August 2016).

COMMENT:  Nothing to write home about.  Our economy is essentially stagnant.  The Obama administration represents a political party that has long since lost interest in the American worker.  We recall the phrase,  "the forgotten man," from the Depression.

We thought the forgotten man would be championed well by the Republican presidential candidate in this election.  Sadly, the vessel for that championing is a very flawed candidate, nominated by an antiquated system. 

Americans are losing their traditional optimism, yet we must fight that tendency.  We can get this country back on track, but I'm afraid it will be a long and bitter fight.

October 11, 2016      Permalink

DEBATE MAY HAVE HELPED TRUMP – AT 8:54 A.M. ET:  But Clinton still holds an impressive lead, and most voters are sure of their vote.  From Rasmussen:

With the first night after their latest debate being surveyed, Donald Trump has narrowed Hillary Clinton’s lead slightly in the latest White House Watch.

The daily Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds Clinton still holding a five point lead - 44% to 39% - over her Republican rival. But yesterday she had jumped to her biggest lead ever - 45% to 38% - following the release of a video showing Trump discussing women in graphic sexual detail.

Rasmussen Reports updates its White House Watch survey daily Monday through Friday at 8:30 am Eastern based on a three-day rolling average of 1,500 Likely U.S. Voters. This is the first survey in which one of the nights follows the Sunday night debate.

The latest survey shows Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson holding steady at seven percent (7%) and Green Party nominee Jill Stein still trailing with two percent (2%). Four percent (4%) like some other candidate, and another four percent (4%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Eighty percent (80%) of voters say they are certain how they will vote. Among these voters, Clinton still leads 49% to 45%; yesterday, she posted a 51% to 45% lead in this group of voters. Among those who say they could still change their minds between now and Election Day, it’s Clinton 43%, Trump 28%, Johnson 25% and Stein four percent (4%).

COMMENT:  It will be a tough climb for Trump.  He is now racing the clock.  The election is four weeks from today, there is only one debate left, there may be more Trump tapes out there, and some prominent Republicans have jumped ship.

But you never know.  It's the strangest election year I've seen.  If the election were held today, Clinton would win.  But the election isn't being held today.

October 11,  2016     Permalink