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POLITICS

Actually, a Malfunction Did Affect Donald Trump’s Voice at the Debate

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and PATRICK HEALYhttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/us/politics/donald-trump-debate.html?_r=0

The Commission on Presidential Debates said Friday that the first debate on Monday was marred by an unspecified technical malfunction that affected the volume of Donald J. Trump’s voice in the debate hall.

Mr. Trump complained after the debate that the event’s organizers had given him a “defective mike,” contributing to his widely panned performance against Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton lampooned Mr. Trump’s claim, telling reporters on her campaign plane, “Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night.”

Mr. Trump was clearly audible to the television audience. And there is no evidence of sabotage. But it turns out he was on to something.

“Regarding the first debate, there were issues regarding Donald Trump’s audio that affected the sound level in the debate hall,” the commission said in its statement.

The commission, a nonprofit organization that sponsors the presidential debates, released no other information about the malfunction, including how it was discovered, which equipment was to blame, or why the problem was admitted to only on Friday, four days after the debate.
Reached by phone, a member of the commission’s media staff said she was not authorized to speak about the matter.

Some members of the audience, held at Hofstra University in New York, recalled in interviews that the amplification of Mr. Trump’s voice was at times significantly lower than that for Mrs. Clinton. And at times Mr. Trump appeared to be hunching down to get his face closer to his microphone.

Young Virginia Democrat Admits to Registering 19 Dead People to Vote By Rick Moran

The kid will probably get some kind of award from the DNC.

Andrew Spieles, a student at James Madison University, has confessed to re-registering 19 deceased Virginians to vote in the 2016 election.

The 20-year-old is deeply involved in local and state politics, calling himself “Lead Organizer” for HarrisonburgVOTES, a get-out-the-vote organization in the city of Harrisonburg. [Ed. note: It appears the HarrisonburgVOTES website has been taken down as of 12:25 p.m. EST.]

Zero Hedge:

The 19 applications of deceased citizens were submitted by Spieles through an organization called HarrisonburgVOTES. According to the organization’s “About Us” page, HarrisonburgVOTES is a “non-partisan” voter registration organization in Harrisonburg, VA and the surrounding areas.

As the HarrisonburgVOTES webpage points out, the sole goal of the organization is to raise the number of registered voters in Harrisonburg to 25,000…though it’s unclear what percentage of that goal was intended to be filled by dead voters.

The sole goal of HarrisonburgVOTES is to increase the number of registered voters in Harrisonburg and the surrounding areas to increase and encourage civic engagement.

Harrisonburg has the lowest percentage of voting age population (VAP) registered to vote among Virginia localities. Very roughly, about 17,000 people are registered to vote and about 18,000 are voting age and not registered. The goal of HarrisonburgVOTES will be to overcome these issues and raise the number of registered voters to 25,000.

HarrisonburgVOTES was founded by Joseph Fitzgerald who, “shockingly”, is also a prominent democrat in Harrisonburg. Fitzgerald is currently Chairman of the Sixth Congressional District Democratic Committee in Virginia and the former Mayor of Harrisonburg.

Fitzgerald told reporters, of course, that his organization had no knowledge of Spieles’s actions and fired him immediately after his confession.

“He’s smart, and he understands the [political] process,” Fitzgerald told the Daily News-Record of Spieles.“Who the hell knows what his motivations were?”

Jamie Glazov Moment: The Question No One Dares to Ask Hillary

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/09/30/jamie-glazov-moment-the-question-no-one-dares-to-ask-hillary/In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie discusses The Question No One Dares to Ask Hillary and he wonders: Does it really not matter if her Chief of Staff will be connected to the Muslim Brotherhood?

Why Do Some Election Officials Want to Hide Evidence of Non-Citizen Voting? Here’s a little clue: About 80 percent of non-citizen voters vote . . . Democratic. By John Fund

Arcan Cetin faces five counts of murder after his shooting rampage at a Seattle-area mall last week. But he also turns out to be a non-citizen who has voted three times in state elections since 2014. Liberals claim non-citizen voting fraud is extremely rare, but Cetin’s case should cast light on both just how easy it is to commit and the efforts of federal and state officials to block efforts to uncover it.

Cetin, who is from Turkey, is a legal resident of the United States but not a citizen. In 2014, he registered to vote and voted three times, most recently in May’s presidential primary. Washington State, like all but a handful of states, doesn’t require any proof of citizenship. “Our hands are kind of tied,” Secretary of State Kim Wyman told a Seattle TV station, noting that the state doesn’t allow verification of a person’s citizenship for voting purposes. “But make no mistake,” she adds. “We want to make sure that everybody has confidence that people casting ballots are eligible. This is certainly going to be a topic at the next legislative session.” Local registrars can currently use a database to check the age and residence of people who register to vote, but a person’s claim to be a citizen is based on the honor system.

The problem is that not all non-citizens are honorable — or they may be led astray in being told they can vote. In our 2012 book Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk​, Hans von Spakovsky and I noted numerous cases of non-citizen registration and voting all over the country.

In 2014, a study released by three professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, estimated that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election and that 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterm congressional elections.

Since 80 percent of non-citizens vote Democratic, according to the study, non-citizen participation could have “been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes [in North Carolina in 2008], and congressional elections,” such as the 2008 race in Minnesota in which Al Franken was elected to the U.S. Senate, giving Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote to pass Obamacare.

The authors’ paper is consistent with other credible reports of non-citizen voting. In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 people who were called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period in one of the 94 current U.S. district courts were non-citizens. In 2012, a local NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla., found that at least 100 individuals in one county had been excused from jury duty because they were not citizens but were registered to vote. Many had also voted in some elections.

But federal agencies refuse — in direct violation of federal law — to provide citizenship data to state election officials who attempt to verify citizenship status. Kansas and Arizona have put in place new commonsense proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration to prevent illegal voting, but they have been fought tooth and nail by Obama’s Justice Department. The DOJ is even using strong-arm methods to intervene in a lawsuit challenging the right of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to allow states to require proof of citizenship when registering. Rather than fulfill its duty to represent a federal agency, the DOJ is siding with the League of Women Voters and the NAACP in the case. A federal judge, Richard Leon, has already been rebuked by the DOJ for its “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” refusal to defend a federal agency and its decision instead to side with the plaintiffs suing it.

Take Virginia, where last year Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have required jury commissioners to forward information to election officials on individuals who were excused from jury duty for not being a citizen. Then James Alcorn, one of McAuliffe’s two Democratic appointees on the Virginia Board of Elections, proposed that rules be changed so that people who left the citizenship question unanswered on the voter-registration form would still be allowed to register. A few years ago, the Fairfax County Electoral Board found close to 300 non-citizens who had illegally registered, about half of whom had also illegally voted in prior elections. No action was taken to prosecute any of those non-citizens.

The FBI’s Defense of How the Clinton Interview Was Conducted Is Full of Holes The Bureau was clearly hamstrung by the Obama administration’s goal of avoiding prosecution. By Andrew C. McCarthy

In a nutshell, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department permitted Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills — the subject of a criminal investigation, who had been given immunity from prosecution despite strong evidence that she had lied to investigators — to participate as a lawyer for Clinton, the principal subject of the same criminal investigation. This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law.

Yet, the FBI and the Justice Department, the nation’s chief enforcers of the federal criminal law, tell us they were powerless to object.

Seriously?

In his testimony this week before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI director James Comey inveighed against critics who have slimed the Bureau as “weasels” over its handling of the Clinton e-mails investigation. I am not one of those people. After a quarter-century in the trenches with the Bureau as a prosecutor, I am one of those hopeless romantics who love the FBI and harbor real affection for the director himself.

I genuinely hate this case. I don’t mind disagreeing with the Bureau, a not infrequent occurrence in my former career. But I am hardwired to presume the FBI’s integrity. Thus, no matter how much irregularities in the Clinton investigation have rankled me, I’ve chalked them up to the Bureau’s being hamstrung. There was no chance on God’s green earth that President Obama and his Justice Department were ever going to permit an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Jim Comey says he didn’t make his final decision to recommend against prosecution until after Mrs. Clinton was interviewed at the end of the investigation, and that he did not coordinate that decision with his Obama-administration superiors. If he says so, that’s good enough for me. But it doesn’t mean the director made his decision detached from the dismal reality of the situation. And whatever one’s armchair-quarterback view on how he should have handled it, that reality was not of his making.

Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome She alone stands between America and the reign of the most unstable, unfit president in U.S. history.Dorothy Rabinowitz see note please

The author is a dear friend of mine…..And I totally disagree and the bulk of comments do so also…..e.g. “She has confused the minor peccadilloes of Trump — a little misogyny here, a little narcissism there — with the full-throated roar of Hillary’s lies, corruption, hate of the American people and the country they love, her Marxist-inspired ideology and her basic incompetence, displayed, full monty, by her handling of Libya (esp. Benghazi), Syria, reset of Russia, North Korea and Iran”…..rsk

There were cheers when Donald Trump assured his Virginia audience last weekend that the wall will be built and, yes, that Mexico would pay for it. But the cheers lacked the roaring ecstasy his promise used to evoke at rallies. No one has the heart, by now, to pretend that such a wall will actually be built, but that’s all right with Mr. Trump’s dauntless fans, who can find plenty of other reasons for their faith in him. The NeverTrump forces, appalled at the prospect of a Trump presidency, are no less passionate.

The NeverHillary forces are another matter entirely—citizens well aware of the darker aspects of Donald Trump’s character but who have nonetheless concluded that they should give him their vote. They are aware of his casual disregard for truth, his self-obsession, his ignorance, his ingrained vindictiveness. Not even the first presidential debate, which saw him erupt into a snarling aside about Rosie O’Donnell, could loosen his hold on that visceral drive to inflict payback, in this case over a feud 10 years old.

The NeverHillary forces are aware, too, of his grandiosity—his announcement that he knows more about Islamic State than any of America’s generals will long be remembered—his impulse-driven character, his insatiable need for applause, the head-turning effect on him of an approving word from Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader’s compliment late last year was of the mildest kind—he referred to Mr. Trump as “talented” and “colorful”—but it was enough to make the candidate’s heart go pitter-patter with gratitude and engender instant expressions of his faith in Mr. Putin’s integrity and leadership. As Mr. Trump himself has explained, “if he says nice things about me, I’m going to say nice things about him.”

Such are the values that drive the Republican candidate’s judgment—a fact interesting to contemplate as one imagines a President Trump dealing with international conflict and rogue heads of state. Still Mr. Trump is now the choice of voters who have concluded that of the two flawed contenders running, he would be far preferable.

Jonathan Turley: FBI’s Tanked Clinton Email Probe ‘a Legitimate Matter of Congressional Concern and Investigation’ By Debra Heine

A professor of law at George Washington University is expressing grave concern over the “bizarre” way in which the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation.

Respected legal scholar Jonathan Turley had previously opined that “FBI Director James Comey was within accepted lines of prosecutorial discretion in declining criminal charges,” even though he believed that charges could have been brought. Now, due to recent revelations that the Department of Justice handed out at least five immunity deals, Turley believes the matter is a “legitimate matter of congressional concern and investigation.”
The Five Clinton Aides Covering for Her Who Were Granted Immunity

Turley writes at his blog, “the news of the immunity deals (and particularly the deal given top ranking Clinton aide Cheryl Mills) was baffling and those deals seriously undermined the ability to bring criminal charges in my view.”

Now, Comey has testified before both the Senate and the House. His answers only magnified concerns over the impact and even the intent of granting immunity to those most at risk of criminal charges.

Before his testimony in the House, Comey spoke in the Senate and stated that he gave immunity to Mills because she refused to turn over her laptop — a highly dubious rationale, as I previously discussed.

First the timeline is now becoming clear and it makes the immunity deal even more bizarre given what the FBI knew [about] Colorado-based tech specialist Paul Combetta and Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and IT specialist Bryan Pagliano.

In July 2014 , then-chief of staff Cheryl Mills was told that Clinton’s emails were being sought.

On July 23, 2014 Combetta got a call from Mills on the server and emails.

On July 24, 2014, Combetta received an email from Clinton IT specialist Pagliano.

On July 24, Combetta then went online to Reddit to solicit help on stripping out “a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived emails.” He revealed that “they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone.”

Clinton’s undebatable Iran message: Ruthie Blum

During the first U.S. presidential debate on Monday night, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton articulated her party’s positions clearly, while defending the Obama administration’s policies that she helped forge and implement.

One topic absent from the verbal boxing match between Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump was Israel. This may or may not have been intentional on the part of moderator Lester Holt, who asked a general question about American security. Whether the candidates purposely avoided the subject is also unclear.

But what Clinton said about the Islamic Republic of Iran was plain as day.

She claimed that when she was secretary of state, Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. To confront this threat, she boasted, she was instrumental in imposing the sanctions that “brought” the ayatollahs to the negotiating table. Finally, she asserted, America achieved a deal that “put the lid” on Iran’s nuclear program. Such, she crowed, is the stuff that “diplomacy” and “coalition-building” are made of.

This echoed what she is reported to have told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday in New York City, where the two met in the aftermath of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly. According to a statement released by her office after the tete-a-tete, Clinton said she would “enforce” the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement signed in July 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 powers led by the United States.

She failed to mention that the JCPOA is not worth the paper on which it was written; that secret addenda provide loopholes for Iranian military operations; that billions of dollars in cash and gold were transferred clandestinely to Tehran in exchange for the release of American hostages, among other things; and that Iran has already violated several clauses that do appear in the document.

Which brings us to Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, the key negotiator of the disastrous deal.

Kerry, who kept his mouth shut while his counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, shouted at him during every summit, has no problem whatsoever berating the Jewish state.

As Haaretz reported on Sunday, at a meeting last week of nations that fund the Palestinian Authority, Kerry chastised Israel.

“How does increasing the number of settlers indicate an attempt to create a Palestinian state?” he was quoted as saying. “The status quo is not sustainable. So either we mean it and we act on it, or we should shut up. … The consequences of the current trends reverberate far beyond the immediate damage the destruction and displacement may cause. What’s happening today destroys hope. It empowers extremists.”

Trump vs. Clinton, Round One The modern political debate format and its disservice to voters. Bruce Thornton

If the first presidential debate was a boxing match, Hillary dropped her guard and stuck out her chin at least half a dozen times, Donald threw wild haymakers that landed maybe once or twice, and the referee Lester Holt obviously had laid a six-figure bet on Hillary. Ali vs. Frazier it wasn’t.

Whether this debate makes a difference in the election is unknowable. Romney cleaned Obama’s clock during their first debate in 2012, but that mattered less than the leaked “47%” sound bite. Remember, in 2008, from September 5 to 17, McCain and Obama were virtually tied in the polls. After Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, McCain never again led in a poll, and Obama won by seven points. In every election, candidates are vulnerable to the sort of “event” that terrified British PM Harold Nicolson. Right now in 2016 the dice are still rolling.

More interesting to me is how this spectacle illustrates just how debased our political culture has become. First, what we call a “debate” is not a debate. Rather than two people directly confronting and challenging each other, we have a “moderator” choosing the questions and attempting to manage the answers. Holt’s obvious bias for Hillary illustrates the problem of having a moderator drawn from the media, which are clearly in one camp or another and choose questions and interventions consistent with their ideology.

Thus Holt wasted time scourging Trump with the stale “birther” issue, his tax returns, his alleged misogyny, his bankruptcies, stop-and-frisk, and his support for the Iraq war. But nary a question for Hillary on the Clinton Foundation and the evidence for a conflict of interest during her tenure as Secretary of State, nary a one on her documented lies about her email server through which she passed classified information, nary a word on her responsibility for the debacle in Benghazi and the deaths of four Americans. And how about Hillary’s “basket of deplorables,” or her accusation that whites have an “implicit bias” against blacks, or her support for the Iraq war, or her public insult of General David Petraeus when in 2007 she said his true data on the success of the surge in Iraq “required a willing suspension of disbelief”? More telling, Holt asked Trump six follow-up questions, and Hillary not a single one. And he interrupted Trump more than he did Hillary.

The point, however, is not that we need a “good” moderator rather than a bad one. Nor do I think Holt’s bias is why Trump didn’t do as well as he could have. Trump had every opportunity to pound Hillary with the issues Holt ignored, or to brush off Holt’s “gotcha” fishing. The real point is why do we have a moderator at all? There was no moderator in 1858 during the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates, the perennial epitome of good political debates. Each candidate decided on the issue to address, posed questions to his opponent, or made a claim about him. Each candidate then responded and “fact-checked” his opponent’s assertions, as Lincoln did in the first debate when he responded to Douglas’ charge that he had conspired to “abolitionize” the Democrat and Whig parties. It was up to the some ten-thousand spectators to adjudicate between which candidate was truthful or which made the better argument, not some “moderator” with a partisan axe to grind.

A SEAL Goes to Congress By Elise Cooper Ryan Zinke (R-MONTANA)

“Since he is Jewish, he agrees that people should not be comparing the refugees of today with the Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis. “For me it’s like two completely different subsets, apples and oranges. Some of the refugees today seem to have no allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and do not assimilate well. There should be experts trained to determine a high threat, medium threat, and low threat. Just look how this administration processed illegal immigrants who were supposed to be deported, but were granted illegal status here.”
Retired Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke is running for re-election as Montana’s sole congressman. He is in a tight race against a Democrat liberal enough to make Hillary Clinton appear like a conservative. Recently, those who served in the U.S. armed forces, like Zinke, have decided to extend their service by becoming the new leaders in Washington DC. He interviewed with American Thinker, sounding off about issues important to him and this country.

Once elected, Zinke knew he must wade through the waters once again, but this time as the first Navy SEAL to go to Congress. Having to maneuver through the Washington bureaucracy has been a lot harder than performing his duties as a SEAL. “I went to Congress to give veterans a voice and because we understand what it takes to get the job done. We are less Red or Blue, but more Red, White, and Blue. Having been overseas we understand the importance of how national security/defense are critical in keeping this country free.”

A twenty-three-year veteran, he ended his military career as a commander and trainer. This propelled him to understand what it takes to become a U.S. representative, bringing character and leadership to Washington. He told American Thinker, “When you go out on the field, when you’re in battle, then you have to operate as a team and understand you’re doing it for a higher purpose. I think we should re-establish what the higher purpose is. We were all sent here, Republican or Democrat, to represent our district and also look at what’s in the best interest of this country.”

One of the most important issues to him is the vetting of Middle Eastern refugees. He helped to sponsor the American Safe Act, which passed the House of Representatives with a bipartisan vote in November 2015. The bill’s purpose is to bolster the refugee screening process. After hearing the FBI director’s testimony he knew that it is very difficult to vet these refugees because there is no database. Having fought in Iraq he understands “In Iraq and Syria you’re looking at a country that doesn’t have indoor plumbing. And yet we think that we have a database where we can determine who is a terrorist, who is a terrorist sympathizer? And who is not and who is an innocent victim? Quite frankly, we don’t have the database because a database doesn’t exist. So I think the right path is to make sure we have a vetting process where we can identify the threat. And we need to stop and pause. Provide more transparency. And when we do have refugees, we need to ensure those refugees are not terrorists. I see it as extremely dangerous since we are still at war.”

Since he is Jewish, he agrees that people should not be comparing the refugees of today with the Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis. “For me it’s like two completely different subsets, apples and oranges. Some of the refugees today seem to have no allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and do not assimilate well. There should be experts trained to determine a high threat, medium threat, and low threat. Just look how this administration processed illegal immigrants who were supposed to be deported, but were granted illegal status here.”