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OCTOBER 17,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:25 P.M. ET: 

WARM HILLARY – FROM HEATSTREET:   Hillary Clinton “blatantly” disregarded security and diplomatic protocols as Secretary of State and frequently insulted U.S. ambassadors by refusing to ride with them to diplomatic events abroad, a former U.S. diplomatic security officer told FBI agents investigating Clinton’s private email server.  According to FBI interview notes released Monday, the former security officer described the “stark difference” between Hillary Clinton’s conduct as secretary of state and the conduct of her predecessor Condoleezza Rice, who closely adhered to the appropriate protocols. Hillary’s “abundant” protocol breaches, on the other hand, were widely known in the diplomatic security community.  There have also been numerous reports of Clinton's awful behavior toward those officers sworn to protect her, from state troopers when she was first lady of Arkansas, through Secret Service agents when she was first lady of the United States, through members of the Diplomatic Security Service when she was secretary of state.  No class act, she.

OUR NEUTRAL MEDIA – FROM DAILY CALLER:  “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd and his wife, a Democratic consultant, hosted a dinner party at their Washington D.C.-area home last year for Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director.  An invitation for the shindig was sent on July 11, 2015 to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. Podesta’s hacked emails have been released online by Wikileaks.  The party, which also involved a cocktail hour, was thrown for Palmieri and her husband, Jim Lyons.   Todd’s wife, Kristian Kenny Todd, was at that time a consultant for former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, one of Hillary Clinton’s challengers.  The invite is just the latest glaring example of the cozy relationship between mainstream journalists and the Clinton campaign found in the Podesta emails.  Reporters from The New York Times, MSNBC, Politico and other outlets have been shown coordinating with Podesta or other Clinton campaign officials in the emails.  I'm shocked that anyone would think ill of our fine journalists.  Why, I'm sure Todd was just trying to get a good, neutral story.  I also had lunch yesterday with the tooth fairy.  She says hello.

HONEST GOVERNMENT – FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS:  ALBANY — A lobbyist with ties to Gov. Cuomo has a novel argument why he shouldn’t be forced to repay a company $85,000 — it was meant to be a bribe, not a loan.  Cor Development is suing its former lobbyist Todd Howe for the money.  But in legal papers filed Monday, Howe’s lawyers argued that the “purported loan was illegal, as it was part of an illegal conspiracy to deprive the public of its intangible right to honest services of an employee of the state of New York by soliciting and giving bribes and gratuities.”  Cor officials told Syracuse newspapers, which first reported the legal maneuver, that Howe is lying and the debt is real.   That's what I like – real imagination in our state capital. 

October 17, 2016       Permalink

THE SAD DECLINE OF A CITY – AT 10:45 A.M. ET:  Chicago is an American tragedy, a great city unable to solve its problems, run by hacks and racialists who refuse to confront crime the way Rudy Giuliani confronted crime in New York, and pushed it back.  From the Chicago Tribune:

A thousand more people have been shot in Chicago this year compared with the same time last year after a weekend that saw eight people killed and at least 40 wounded, according to police and data compiled by the Tribune.

At least 3,475 people had been shot in the city as of shortly after midnight Monday compared with 2,441 people shot this time last year, an increase of 1,034, according to Tribune data. There have been at least 595 homicides this year compared with 409 this time last year, an increase of 186.

The gun violence over the weekend was at levels usually seen in the summer when shootings typically spike.

A single attack Friday night in East Garfield Park killed one man and left six others wounded, according to police. The people were standing together in the 3300 block of West Maypole Street when someone opened fire from a black vehicle, police said.

An attack of that scale has not occurred in Chicago since 2014, when seven people -- including several young teens -- were shot in Lawndale.

The Maypole shooting capped off an exceptionally deadly night on the West Side. Less than a half-hour before, two men were fatally shot in a South Austin drive-by, police said. About an hour before that, an 18-year-old man was killed in West Garfield Park.

COMMENT:  I don't see any great concern expressed by Barack Obama, who comes from Chicago and represented Illinois in the Senate.  Nor do I hear the voices of Black Lives Matter.  Apparently, the only black lives that matter are the ones that advance their career interests.

You would think, by now, that some so-called "news" organization would do a documentary, or long written piece, called "A Tale of Two Cities," explaining how New York largely solved its violent-crime problem, while Chicago founders.  But that won't happen.  It would mean giving credit to a Republican mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and that is a sin in mainstream journalism.   

October 17, 2016       Permalink

THE UGLY CAMPAIGN – AT 9:52 A.M. ET:   Anyone who reads Urgent Agenda knows that our enthusiasm for Donald Trump is limited.  But, despite our concerns about him, the man is being treated with gross unfairness by the mainstream media.  It is legitimate for journalists to point out factual lapses by candidates.  It is not legitimate to apply a standard of truth to only one side.

Andrew Malcolm, one of the most respected columnists writing today, examines the vast media corruption.  From McClatchy:   

A few things you’re unlikely to read elsewhere: Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy – and Americans’ ability to choose their next leader – is being destroyed by a sequence of events way too well orchestrated to be coincidental.

This is not about the billionaire’s qualifications or disqualifications to move into the Oval Office, his braggadocio, his awful manners, alleged sexual harassment, crass behavior, ostentatious wealth.

Americans have had unsavory political leaders before, most recently Hillary Clinton’s charming, unfaithful hubby who, among other things, received oral sex from an intern in that same revered office. And then lied about it to authorities.

This is about Americans being politically manipulated quite cleverly, something people do not appreciate, if they’re allowed to be aware of it. Recent events could be a movie called “Wag the Dog – Again.”

Let’s consult the autumn timeline: A few days before the first presidential debate last month, The New York Times says it received anonymously some select pages of Trump tax returns from a generation ago....

COMMENT:  Please read the whole thing, and Andrew Malcolm's excellent reporting.  As he says, the assault on Trump appears too coordinated to be coincidental.  This is a media attack designed not to enlighten, but to swing history.  And I fear it's the media telling us that this is the way it will be.  They'll choose the side they prefer, always the left side, and shape the news to advance that side.

The death of journalism.

October 17, 2016       Permalink

BATTLE FOR MOSUL BEGINS – AT 9:17 A.M. ET:  Mosul, Iraq, is currently controlled by ISIS, which wasn't the case when Field Marshal Obama took office.  Now there is a military attempt to take it back.  It has just started.  From AP:

KHAZER, Iraq – Iraqi government and Kurdish forces, backed by U.S.-led coalition air and ground support, launched coordinated military operations early on Monday as the long-awaited fight to wrest the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State fighters got underway. But the battle for Mosul is likely to be long and at was unclear at this early stage when the troops would enter the city itself.

Also, the fate of civilians trapped inside Mosul will also be critical as the battle intensifies in the days and weeks ahead amid concerns that the extremist Islamic State could use them as potential human shields.

In the morning hours Monday, convoys of Iraqi, Kurdish and U.S. forces moved east of Mosul along the front line as U.S.-led coalition airstrikes sent plumes of smokes into the air and heavy artillery rounds could be heard.

The move came shortly after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the start of the operations on state television, launching the country on its toughest battle since American troops left nearly five years ago.

Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, has been under IS rule for more than two years and is still home to more than a million civilians according to U.N. estimates.

"These forces that are liberating you today, they have one goal in Mosul which is to get rid of Daesh and to secure your dignity," al-Abadi said, addressing the city's residents and using the Arabic language acronym for the Islamic State group. "God willing, we shall win."

COMMENT:  The anti-ISIS forces probably will win in the end.  However, that will not be the end of ISIS.  We've seen that if it loses territory in one place, it springs up in another, and increases its terrorist operations overseas.

We hope the anti-ISIS side, backed by the United States, prevails.  But we're under no illusions about the future struggle against terror.

October 17,  2016     Permalink

OCTOBER 16,  2016

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

THIS JUST IN – FROM LONDON'S EXPRESS:   POTATOES and cereals increase the risk of heart disease while high fat dairy products cut the risk, according to a new study which rejects accepted wisdom on a healthy diet.  The research, which looked at dietary habits in 42 European countries over 16 years, conflicts with current government nutrition guidance and has led to calls for new advice to be issued.  The work, published in the journal of Food and Nutrition Research, examined food consumption, heart disease and cholesterol levels in the most up-to-date international statistics and raised questions about the reliability of traditional data, much of which was carried out decades ago.  Dr Pavel Grasgruber, a sports scientist and lead author of the study, from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, called for current dietary advice to be overturned.   I am throwing out the potatoes and immediately buying all the Friendly's chocolate marshmallow swirl that I can find.  This is truly inspiring research.  Er...of course it will probably be contradicted in a week or two, so have fun while it's still current.  Does the term "settled science" come to mind?

DISGRACEFUL! - FROM FOX:  Top Hillary Clinton aides were upset a Muslim man was publicly named as the shooter in a 2015 massacre that left 14 people dead, and a longtime Clinton confidant even expressed regret that the terrorist wasn’t a white man, according to purported emails released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.  The emails were part of a trove of messages stolen from the gmail account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, who has had a long association with the Democratic presidential nominee and her husband, former President Bill Clinton. The email chain began on Dec. 2, when digital operative Matt Ortega forwarded a tweet from MSNBC host Christopher Hayes that named one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., attack as Sayeed Farook. Consultant Karen Finney forwarded the email to Podesta, commenting, “Damn.”
Podesta responded: “Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk [sic] was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.”  I guess they consider themselves advanced intellectuals, the kind who would have described the Japanese pilots over Pearl Harbor as "sincere multicultural activists responding to their oppression by Western capitalist warmongers."

A CLASS ACT IN EVERY WAY – FROM FOX:  A beloved junior high school music teacher battling cancer took her last breath after her students sang a Christian song of love to her in tribute.   A video of Wednesday’s touching performance for Mariana Walker was posted on Facebook and let the teacher know how much she meant to students at Alvin Junior High School in Texas, KTRK-TV reported.  The students performed Hillsong United’s “Oceans” outside the home of the 69-year-old Walker who was in bed under hospice care.  “We had the windows open. We had the screen door open and she could hear that,” Walker’s daughter Alyx Vesey told the staion. “I think that gave her a lot of peace.”  The students also said a prayer for Walker before they left. She then passed away.  We hear so much about "bad" kids or irresponsible kids, or spoiled college students.  These are good kids, and there are plenty of them. 

October 16, 2016       Permalinks

THE PERILS OF POLLING – AT 12:38 P.M. ET:  We publish regular warnings here about becoming too dependent on a single poll, or even a series of polls.  That warning is emphasized by an excellent piece on polling at The Hill:

Virtually all the opinion polls right now give Hillary Clinton a firm lead over Donald Trump in the race for the White House this November. The latest poll average compiled by RealClearPolitics puts her at least five points ahead of Trump, with or without Gary Johnson and Jill Stein included as choices; the Huffington Post Pollster projects a better than 99-percent chance that “Clinton is very likely leading;” and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives her an 85 percent chance of winning.

It looks like the race is decided.

But that was the same sentiment that led the major pollsters 68 years ago to stop polling several weeks before the 1948 election. Tom Dewey’s lead was so firm and consistent that there was no way Harry Truman would be able to win. At least, so it seemed. The man from Missouri did win, of course, thrust to victory by a late surge of votes sparked by his whistle-stop campaign.

If, as Harold Wilson’s once said, a week in politics is an eternity, what do we call three weeks left until Election Day? More than ample time to squander a lead or to catch up.

Polling would never again be suspended weeks before Election Day, no matter how big the lead in the polls. Yet this has not proved to be a guarantee that polls would get it right in the end.

In the most recent presidential election, Gallup’s final estimate of likely voters, issued on the eve of Election Day in 2012, projected Mitt Romney as the winner. A day later, Obama was the winner by nearly 4 percentage points.

Soon after this debacle the Gallup Organization, the inventor of scientific polling in the 1930’s, fell on its sword and quit the election horse-race business altogether. Rasmussen got it wrong in 2012 as well, but they opted to stay in the business.

But in all fairness to those polling giants, they weren’t alone. Three pollsters wimped out, projecting a tied vote, and of the four remaining polls on the RealClearPolitics summary, only two predicted an Obama victory, and those two did so with minimal confidence.

COMMENT:   Read the whole piece.  There could still be surprises and turns of luck.  On the other hand, luck is often created by skillful candidates.  Do any names pop up?

October 16, 2016       Permalinks

AND IN THE REAL WORLD – AT 11:33 A.M. ET:   Grown-ups know that there are critical events happening as we fight our adolescent-level presidential campaign.  And what is happening now can easily result in American casualties in the future.  Anyone in the press interested?  From NBC News:

The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Mason was fired on again in international waters off the coast of Yemen, but the ship deployed countermeasures and the vessel was not struck, two U.S. officials said.

The incident occurred late Saturday or early Sunday local time. At least one missile was fired, the officials said.

"The Mason once again appears to have come under attack in the Red Sea, again from coastal defense cruise missiles fired from the coast of Yemen," Navy Admiral John Richardson, chief of naval operations, told reporters at an event in Baltimore Saturday.

The destroyer was targeted by missiles fired from rebel-controlled areas in Yemen twice earlier this week, prompting the U.S. military to launch cruise missiles that destroyed three radar sites in response.

After the earlier attempted missile attacks this week, a Defense Department official warned that those who fire on U.S. vessels do so at their peril.

Yemen is embroiled in a two-year-long conflict between Houthi rebels and forces loyal to the President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. More than 4,000 civilians have been killed since the conflict escalated in March 2015, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Monday.

COMMENT:  And it's being reported that Obama, probably against his own instincts, is considering further American action in Syria.  The world is a serious place, and we're talking about the weight of a Miss Universe contestant and whether Donald Trump, no Boy Scout he, did some vulgar things years ago.

We'll pay the price for the breathtaking immaturity of this era.

October 16, 2016       Permalinks

THAT'S ALL? – AT 11:08 A.M. ET:  Hillary Clinton leads by only four points in the Washington Post/ABC News poll out today.  With all the pounding Trump has taken, and his own disorganized, sometimes bizarre defense, you'd think Clinton would be running away with it.  From WaPo: 

With three weeks until Election Day, Hillary Clinton holds a four-point lead over Donald Trump in the race for the White House, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with the Republican nominee hobbled by persistent perceptions that he is not qualified to be president.

The poll was conducted during one of the most tumultuous periods of Trump’s candidacy, after the release of a video in which he spoke about taking sexual advantage of women and during a time when numerous women have accused him of sexual misconduct.

Nearly 7 in 10 respondents believe Trump probably made unwanted sexual advances, and a majority say his apology for boasts about forcing himself on women on a hot-mic videotape was insincere. Nonetheless, the controversy appeared to have had only a minimal impact on his overall support.

Overall, Clinton leads Trump by 47-43 percent among likely voters, a slight edge given the survey’s four-percentage-point error margin. Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson has the support of 5 percent, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein is at 2 percent. Among registered voters, the poll shows a similar four-point margin, with Clinton at 44, Trump at 40, Johnson at 6 and Stein at 3. In a two-way matchup, Clinton leads Trump by 50-46 percent among likely voters and by 50-44 percent among registered voters.

COMMENT:  Trump is running a pathetically poor campaign.  As Karl Rove suggested, he should have answered the charges of women who have suddenly come forward to accuse him of improper sexual advances, announced he would discuss the matter no further, and gone on to hit the issues of deepest concern to the American people, the economy and terrorism.

As we've said before in this space, any decent Republican candidate would have probably put Clinton away by now.  Everything that comes out about her in the Wikileaks releases shows a deeply flawed, conniving individual with little regard for the truth.  She won't "win" the election, but Trump will probably lose it because of his sheer obnoxiousness.  What a pathetic situation for a great nation.

The last presidential debate is Wednesday night.  Trump will have to have the debate of a lifetime to turn this around.  He did well in the last debate, and maybe he can pull it off.  But the election is three weeks from Tuesday.  He's running out of time, and the liberal press probably has more ammo ready to fire against him.

October 16,  2016     Permalinks