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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

What’s Up With Fox and Trump? Retailing the unfair slanders of the Left. Joseph Klein

Fox News has branded itself as “fair and balanced.” Compared to the mainstream media, Fox News has indeed provided some welcomed balance to coverage of the national news. However, Fox News has not lived up to its branding when it comes to its handling of Donald Trump. Several of its on-air personalities have expressed the kind of downright hostility to the Republican presidential nominee that one might expect to witness on leftist cable news bastions such as MSNBC.

Shepard Smith, the host of “Shepard Smith Reporting” as well as the managing editor of Fox News Channel’s Breaking News Division, is cast as a Fox News “hard news” anchor. Yet he leads the station’s biased coverage against Trump. Indeed, Shepard Smith has taken it upon himself to attach the racist label to Trump. For instance, following Hillary Clinton’s speech in August attempting to link Trump to the white nationalist alt-right movement, Smith became a part of her race baiting attack machine.

“He trades in racism, doesn’t he?” Shepard Smith asked rhetorically, referring to Trump. That is not hard news. It is an unfounded attack designed to discredit Trump falsely as a racist.

Smith’s attack on Trump is part and parcel of the news anchor’s penchant for engaging in the race-baiting game, which he has proven quite proficient in playing. Smith, for example, chastised former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal last July for saying that “all lives mattered” in response to the killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge. “Governor,” Smith said to Jindal, “you know, you know that that phrase you just used is is (sic) one that’s seen by many as, as derogatory, right? I, I just wonder why it is that you use that phrase when there’s a certain segment of the population that believes it’s a real dig on ’em.”

Not long ago, Smith twisted his reporting on Trump’s recent reversal on the racially charged birther issue. Smith did not limit himself to stating Trump’s past record in continuing to push the issue even after President Obama produced his long-form birth certificate. Instead, Smith acted as if he were a Hillary Clinton surrogate in stating categorically that there was “no evidence to support the claim” that Hillary Clinton’s team had “started the theory that President Obama wasn’t born in America.” In case anybody missed his point, Smith added for emphasis, “Zero, it never happened.” Except it did happen, according to former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher. Asher claimed that top Hillary Clinton aide and confidante Sid Blumenthal had “told me in person” during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign that Obama was born in Kenya. At that time, Asher was an investigative editor and in charge of Africa coverage.

“During that meeting, Mr. Blumenthal and I met together in my office and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya,” Asher said. “We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and that reporter determined that the allegation was false. At the time of Mr. Blumenthal’s conversation with me, there had been a few news articles published in various outlets reporting on rumors about Obama’s birthplace. While Mr. Blumenthal offered no concrete proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth, I felt that, as journalists, we had a responsibility to determine whether or not those rumors were true. They were not.”

Secret Report: Terrorists Running Wild Within U.S. Borders Leaked document reveals the staggering breadth of domestic terrorist activity — and the administration’s cover-up. Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration has been concealing the staggering breadth of terrorist activity in the United States – quantified as close to 8,000 terrorist encounters in a recent year — a leaked government report suggests.

There are disturbing parallels between the Obama administration’s ongoing cover-up of the true extent of terrorist operations in the U.S. and its election season cover-up four years ago of the real causes of the Benghazi, Libya terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2012.

Remember that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly lied four years ago, saying the Benghazi attack was carried out by an angry mob of Muslims that had been inflamed by an obscure anti-Islam video on YouTube. It has since been established that Clinton advised her daughter Chelsea by email on the very night of the assault that cost four American lives that Muslim terrorists from an al-Qaeda-like group were the actual perpetrators.

The Obama administration participated in the ruse because Election Day 2012 was only weeks away at the time and the White House didn’t want information getting out that countered the official narrative that al-Qaeda was on the run and that Obama’s policies were decimating the nation’s terrorist enemies.

The lie got Obama past the finish line in 2012, so it’s not hard to conclude that he is following the same playbook right now to make it seem like the homeland is safe and secure on his watch. If the public knew that terrorists were running wild all across the fruited plain it might be difficult for Obama to carry Clinton, his preferred would-be successor and a fellow radical left-wing Alinskyite, into the winner’s circle this Nov. 8.

This is because word of fresh Obama administration misconduct or incompetence imperiling national security and putting innocent Americans at risk could hurt Clinton, a former member of his cabinet and therefore the candidate of the status quo, at the polls.

The government report itself is chilling.

“Known or Suspected Terrorist (KST) Encounters,” a Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) document obtained by Brandon Darby, editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas, states that there were an astounding 7,712 encounters between terrorists and law enforcement officials from July 20, 2015 through July 20, 2016. The report is labeled, “UNCLASSIFIED/LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE.”

Free Trade vs. Balanced Trade By Raymond Richman, Howard Richman and Jesse Richman

During the 2016 presidential campaign, trade has become a major economic and voting issue. For decades both political parties, in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular, have supported expansion of free trade through trade agreements that reduce tariff rates. In contrast, Donald Trump has upended that politics, seizing the Republican nomination with the promise to renegotiate trade agreements so that they balance trade.

As a result, the two alternatives in this year’s election are free trade vs. balanced trade. These are not necessary mutually exclusive. Indeed, there have been periods of world history in which trade has grown more free without getting out of balance. Especially notable were the 1840-1870 and the 1950-1997 periods. Those were the two golden ages of globalization in which tariff reductions around the world greatly benefited and integrated the world economy.

But the 1840-1870 period was followed by a period, much like the present, in which world trade became more and more unbalanced. The European countries were experiencing worsening trade deficits and eventually had to choose between free trade and balanced trade. Those that chose to balance their trade through tariffs resumed their economic growth, while those that stuck with free trade continued to stagnate. The United States faces a similar choice today.

The U.S. economic growth rate has followed the U.S. trade balance downward, as shown in the following graph:

The slow U.S. economic growth rate of the last 17 years is unprecedented. From 1999 through 2015, the average U.S. growth rate was just 2.1% per year, as compared with over 3% for almost every ten-year period during the previous five decades. And the first two quarters of 2016 (not shown on the chart) have been even lower — just 0.8% and 1.1% growth. There are six primary reasons why trade deficits slow economic growth:

Hillary’s Debate Lies With her comments about crime, policing, and race, the candidate helps push a false—and dangerous—narrative. Heather Mac Donald

Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie last night that the criminal justice system is infected with “systemic racism.” Race “determines” how people are “treated in the criminal justice system,” she said. Blacks are “more likely [than whites] to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated” for “doing the same thing.” Such a dangerous falsehood, should Clinton act on it as president, would result not just in misguided policies but in the continued delegitimation of the criminal justice system. That delegitimation, with its attendant hostility and aggression toward police officers, has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides in urban areas in nearly a half-century.

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Clinton also complained that “too many young African-American and Latino men end . . . up in jail for non-violent offenses.” In fact, the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are serving time for violent felonies. The enforcement of low-level public order offenses in New York City during the mayoralties of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg actually lowered New York State’s prison population by intervening in criminal behavior early, before it ripened into a serious felony. Even as misdemeanor arrests increased in the city, felony arrests and felony incarcerations dropped. The number of jail inmates and convicts under parole and probation supervision in New York City dropped as well. Hillary Clinton may think that low-level public-order enforcement (otherwise known as “broken windows” policing) is racist, but law-abiding residents of high-crime communities beg the police to enforce public-order laws because they know that out of street disorder erupts gun violence and other forms of predation.

FBI Docs: Hillary Deleted Nearly 1,000 Emails With David Petraeus By Debra Heine

A potentially explosive nugget from the FBI’s Friday document dump of investigatory notes from the Clinton email probe has been all but ignored by the media. And that is the revelation that Hillary Clinton deleted 1,000 work-related emails between herself and General David Petaeus from his time as the director of the United States Central Command.

Via the Washington Examiner:

In Aug. 2015, the Pentagon called the State Department and informed an unnamed official there that “CENTCOM records showed approximately 1,000 work-related emails between Clinton’s personal email and General David Petraeus.”

The FBI noted that “[m]ost of those 1,000 emails were not believed to be included in the 30,000 emails” that Clinton turned over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.

Hillary has long maintained that the emails her lawyers unilaterally deleted were personal emails pertaining to “yoga routines, family vacations” and other matters that had nothing to do with government. She repeated the same nonsense to Congress while under oath. In August of 2015, she signed a statement to a federal judge declaring “under penalty of perjury” that she turned over all work-related emails.

Now we find out that 1,000 emails between Clinton and General Petraeus were not turned over. This should be a bigger story. Petraeus started out as the leader of U.S. Central Command and then became the director of the CIA during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State, so not only were those emails obviously work related, they very likely were highly classified. The implications here are staggering.

But it gets worse. CONTINUE AT SITE

Transcripts Show ISIS Influence on Orlando Gunman Omar Mateen cited the death of an Islamic State leader as a motivation for the June massacreBy Dan Frosch and Nicole Hong

Holed up in an Orlando nightclub and surrounded by police, Omar Mateen told a hostage negotiator that he was angry about the death of a top Islamic State operative, according to recently released transcripts of their phone conversations during Mateen’s massacre earlier this year.

The new details of the conversations, released by Orlando Police last week, show Mateen had more than a passing interest in Islamic State, counterterrorism experts said. He specifically singled out the death of Abu Wahib, one of the more visible leaders of the terror group, as one of the main motivations for his attack. Abu Wahib was killed in an airstrike in Iraq just weeks before Mateen opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in June in an attack that killed 49 people and wounded 53. Mateen died in a shootout with police.

“Yo, the airstrike that killed Abu Wahid a few weeks ago—That’s what triggered it, okay?” he told the police negotiator, an apparent reference in the transcript to the Islamic State commander.

Abu Wahib, whose real name is Shaker Wahib al-Fahdawi, was known as one of the group’s more Internet-savvy leaders, often appearing in propaganda videos.

Only an “avid consumer” of Islamic State propaganda would know when Abu Wahib was killed, said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

“This isn’t somebody who decided that night he was going to wrap his personal grievances around ISIS,” Mr. Hughes said.

Islamic State supporters in the U.S. more commonly cite as inspirations people like Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al Qaeda recruiter who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. While talking to the 911 operator the night of the Orlando shooting, Mateen also pledged allegiance to Mr. Baghdadi, according to a partial version of transcripts released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in June.

It is unclear when precisely Mateen, 29, was radicalized, though he had aroused the FBI’s suspicion after making claims of ties to terrorists in 2013.

At a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday defended his agency’s handling of probes into Mateen, as well as into Ahmad Khan Rahami. Mr. Rahami is awaiting trial on charges he placed bombs around New York and New Jersey earlier this month that injured 31 people.

Mr. Comey was repeatedly pressed by lawmakers about whether the FBI should have investigated longer before closing its probes into Mateen and Mr. Rahami, which took place well before their deadly attacks. Mr. Comey acknowledged that in the case of Mateen, agents had not searched his online activity for indications of radicalization.

In the series of phone calls with the negotiator during the Orlando massacre, Mateen also railed against U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, saying they were killing women and children.

“What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. You get what I’m saying?” he said.

Mateen’s constant references to U.S. airstrikes are a “basic regurgitation of the propaganda he’s consuming,” said Brig Barker, a retired FBI special agent who focused on counterterrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

Fact-Checking Lester Holt Here’s the legal back story on that stop-and-frisk ruling.

We told you Tuesday that Donald Trump was right when he pushed back on debate moderator Lester Holt over “stop and frisk” policing. But the story deserves a more complete explanation, not least because the media are distorting the record.

Mr. Trump invoked stop and frisk as a way to “take the gun away from criminals” in high-crime areas and protect the innocent. That provoked Mr. Holt, who said that “stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York.” Mr. Trump then noted that the ruling in the case came from a “very against police judge” who later had the case taken away from her. Mrs. Clinton then echoed Mr. Holt.

Here’s what really happened. The federal judge in the stop-and-frisk case was Shira Scheindlin, a notorious police critic whose behavior got her taken off the case by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court put it this way:

“Upon review of the record in these cases, we conclude that the District Judge ran afoul of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges . . . and that the appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation was compromised by the District Judge’s improper application of the Court’s ‘related case rule’ . . . and by a series of media interviews and public statements purporting to respond publicly to criticism of the District Court.”

The court then remanded the case to another judge who would not present an appearance of bias against the police. In a follow-up opinion, the appellate judges cited a New Yorker interview with Judge Scheindlin that included a quote from a former law clerk saying “what you have to remember about the judge is that she thinks cops lie.”

This is an extraordinary rebuke by a higher court and raises doubts that the merits of her ruling would have held up on appeal. As Rudolph Giuliani makes clear nearby, the judge’s ruling of unconstitutionality applied only to stop and frisk as it was practiced in New York at the time. Such police search tactics have long been upheld by higher courts.

James Comey’s Clinton Immunity More questions about the FBI’s special handling of the email case.

FBI Director James Comey appears Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee, where he’ll get another chance to explain his agency’s double standard regarding Hillary Clinton. His probe of the former Secretary of State’s private email server is looking more like a kid-glove exercise with each new revelation.

House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz on Friday disclosed that the FBI granted immunity to Mrs. Clinton’s top aides as part of its probe into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information. According to Mr. Chaffetz, this “limited” immunity was extended to former chief of staff Cheryl Mills and senior adviser Heather Samuelson, in order to get them to surrender their laptops, which they’d used to sort through Mrs. Clinton’s work-versus-personal emails.

Why the courtesy? “If the FBI wanted any other Americans’ laptops, they would just go get them—they wouldn’t get an immunity deal,” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told Politico. He’s right. The FBI merely had to seek a subpoena or search warrant. By offering immunity, the FBI exempted the laptops and their emails as potential evidence in a criminal case.

Beth Wilkinson, who represents Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson, says the immunity deals were designed to protect her clients against any related “classification” disputes. This is an admission that both women knew their unsecure laptops had been holding sensitive information for more than a year. Meanwhile, Mr. Comey also allowed Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson to serve as lawyers for Mrs. Clinton at her FBI interview—despite having been interviewed as witnesses and offered immunity.

The FBI also offered immunity to John Bentel, who directed the State Department’s Office of Information Resources Management; to Bryan Pagliano, Mrs. Clinton’s IT guru; and to an employee of Platte River Networks (PRN), which housed the Clinton server. Usually, the FBI only “proffers” immunity deals in return for genuine information. In this case the FBI seemed not to make any such demands. The deals also did not include—as they often do—requirements that the recipients cooperate with other investigating bodies, such as Congress.

Meantime, the FBI waited until late Friday to dump another 189 pages of documents from its investigation, including notes from interviews with Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson, Mr. Pagliano, Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, and Platte River Network employees. They raise even more questions.

Was the FBI concerned that Ms. Mills in the fall of 2013 (after Congress began investigating the Benghazi attacks) called Mr. Pagliano to ask about software that could be used for “wiping computer data”? Or that a Platte River Networks employee, after getting instructions from Ms. Mills to begin deleting Clinton emails more than 60 days old, entitled the resulting work ticket the “Hillary coverup operation”? Or that a PRN employee was instructed by the company’s lawyer “not to answer any [FBI] questions related to conversations with” David Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s personal lawyer?

The FBI documents also disclose that Mr. Pagliano admitted to having, at the beginning of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, several conversations with unnamed State Department official(s) who expressed concern that her private server posed “a federal records retention issue,” and that it was likely transmitting classified information. When Mr. Pagliano relayed these concerns to Ms. Mills, she ignored them. CONTINUE AT SITE

MY SAY: NOTHING HAPPENED

Last night Trump got a C and Hillary got a B. He lost big opportunities to smash her arguments and challenge her integrity when he got on the defensive. But he didn’t erupt or insult.
She was smug and loaded for bear with the help of Lester Holt’s obvious bias.
Remember 2008? She won every debate with Barack Obama on policy, his inexperience, “training on the job” jabs, and his inability to handle the three o’clock A.M. call. She even threw in the race card when she opined that “white working class men” were more likely to vote for her. And she lost the primary and he won the election.
Those who prefer Trump still do and those who prefer Hillary still do. We’ll see what the poll weevils will say.

Obama’s Legacy of Demagoguery and Divisiveness The “Ferguson effect” takes its toll on the African-American community while race relations are at a nadir. Ari Lieberman

When Obama assumed office in 2009, there were high hopes that the first African American president with bi-racial parents would be able to bridge the racial divide and foster unity in the country. Those hopes were soon dashed. Nearly eight years later, the nation is more polarized than ever, as devastating race riots grip large metropolitan cities with alarming frequency.

Instead of offering hope, Obama gave us demagoguery. Instead of fostering unity he stoked and encouraged divisiveness. Instead of providing concrete solutions, he issued speeches laced with empty rhetoric and platitudes. Instead of calming the nation in times of crisis, he engaged in race baiting.

The first test of Obama’s seriousness in addressing race relations came just six months after being sworn in. Police officers in Cambridge Massachusetts received a call of a possible burglary in progress and responded. When arriving at the scene, they found Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. trying to force his way into his house through a malfunctioning door. The police were unfamiliar with his identity and asked for identification to establish residency. Gates instantly became irate, indignant and uncooperative. It went downhill from there. Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, though the charges were later dropped.

An event that was essentially a misunderstanding and a local matter was suddenly thrust into the spotlight and propelled to the national stage. You see, Gates, an African American, cried racism. He also happened to be pals with Obama. Obama could have told Gates to work things out with the police or file a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board if he felt slighted. Instead, Obama stoked the flames of hate by publicly siding with Gates, claiming the police “acted stupidly.”

Before ascertaining the facts, Obama rushed to judgment and immediately condemned those entrusted with safeguarding our security. His asinine response would set the administration’s tone for the next seven years. Obama later backtracked on his rush to judgment and offered the arresting police officer, Sgt. James Crowley, a beer but the damage had already been done. The only thing that the African American community took away from the encounter was that the police acted “stupidly,” thus reinforcing preexisting negative perceptions so prevalent within that community.

There is no doubt that some level of tension exists between various police departments and members of the African American community but the president has a responsibility to calm frayed nerves and foster understanding and outreach. Instead, Obama has done the opposite. Race-baiting, tax cheats and serial liars like Al Sharpton are frequent guests of the White House. According to official records, Sharpton visited the White House on more than 100 occasions and that number excludes official administration visits to him.