RUTHFULLY YOURS

Much of the media are already declaring the election an all-but-certain win for Hillary Clinton. Today, the political forecasting site FiveThirtyEight, using polls plus historical and economic data, gives Hillary a 74.7 percent chance of being elected. But smart Democrats are resisting overconfidence; they know a lot can happen before the election. “American politics is freaky and can turn on a dime and in the other direction in one news cycle,” Democratic strategist Brad Bannon admitted last week,

Forecasts like the one from FiveThirtyEight are often based on a combination of polls, economic conditions, and factors such as the popularity of the incumbent president. They clearly don’t include the inevitable “x factors” in a campaign, such as the performances in presidential debates, possible terrorist attacks, and mega gaffes by one or more of the candidates. They also ignore the impact a late-breaking scandal can have on a race. Donald Trump has to worry about a potential leak from his IRS tax returns (it happened to Mitt Romney in 2012). Hillary Clinton has known since the Democratic convention in Philadelphia just how disruptive a WikiLeaks revelations can be — the leaks of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee cost chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job.

Clinton must also remember what happened exactly 20 years ago during her husband’s campaign for reelection. That campaign has so far been recalled this year mostly for the skillful decision by Haley Barbour’s Republican National Committee to put some distance between GOP congressional incumbents and presidential nominee Bob Dole. The RNC urged voters not to “hand Clinton a blank check,” in the event he won reelection, by turning control of Congress over to the Democrats. It worked: Democrats actually lost two seats in the Senate and gained only two seats in the House.

But another story emerged from the 1996 election, centering around how Bill Clinton had to run out the clock on a growing campaign-finance scandal that in the last month of the campaign changed the dynamics of what had been a complete cakewalk of a race. Clinton ended up winning by eight points over Bob Dole (49 percent to 41 percent, with Ross Perot taking 9 percent of the vote). But that loss was not nearly as bad as Republicans had feared. Six final pre-election polls had Clinton winning by anywhere from eleven to 16 points. The New York Times/CBS poll was the most off-base, showing Clinton beating Dole 53 to 35 percent. CNN’s final tracking poll had Clinton ahead by 16 points. The respected Pew Research Center issued a final poll showing Clinton ahead 52 percent to 38 percent, a 14-point lead almost double the actual results on Election Day.

ad one of Donald Trump’s Republican opponents during the campaign for the GOP nomination given the same speech on combating global terrorism he gave last week, it would have raised few eyebrows. Naturally, competing candidates would have disputed particular points—some vigorously—but the speech’s overall analysis fits well within mainstream conservative and Republican thinking.

Some Trump opponents and supporters alike will be distressed by this news, but the speech visibly sharpens the contradictions with Hillary Clinton, who clearly would continue President Obama’s nonstrategy concerning radical Islam—now confirmed to include paying ransom for hostages. More broadly, the speech underlines why terrorism and other grave national-security threats should take center stage in the presidential race.

Mr. Trump rightly sees an ideological war being waged against the West by a hateful, millenarian obsession targeting core American constitutional and philosophical principles. From that assessment flow several policy consequences, most important the imperative to destroy the terrorist threat rapidly and comprehensively before it kills and maims more innocent people. Mr. Trump correctly argues that, in combating Islamic State, al Qaeda and others, “we must use ideological warfare” as well as stronger military and intelligence operations, and be “a friend to all moderate Muslim reformers.” This strategy is entirely consistent with what Jordan’s King Abdullah II and other Arab leaders characterize as a civil war within Islam.

In contrast, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton still believe terrorism is a law-enforcement issue. They fail to grasp the ideological war we are in and therefore refuse to combat the enemy effectively. There were once those who did not see Communism as an ideological threat. They played down their views publicly because U.S. public opinion was overwhelmingly contrary, as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are doing now regarding terrorism. Mr. Trump should emphatically move the debate about radical Islam into the campaign spotlight. Let’s see who stands where.

Mr. Trump’s speech also demonstrated his willingness to face the hand dealt an incoming president, rather than following ideological abstractions, as Mr. Obama has consistently done. Although Mr. Trump restated his opposition to President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the dictator Saddam Hussein, he nonetheless argues correctly that Mr. Obama’s “reckless” withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2011 rested on an “election-driven timetable” that “surrendered our gains in that country and led directly to the rise of ISIS,” thereby constituting “a catastrophic mistake.” CONTINUE AT SITE

After years of claiming that the Clinton Foundation poses no ethical conflicts for Bill and Hillary or the U.S. government, Bill Clinton now admits the truth—sort of. If his wife becomes President, he says the Super PAC masquerading as a charity won’t accept foreign or corporate contributions. Bill will also resign from the foundation board, and Chelsea will stop raising money for it.

Now they tell us.

If such fund-raising poses a problem when she’s President, why didn’t it when she was Secretary of State or while she is running for President? The answer is that it did and does, and they know it, but the foundation was too important to their political futures to give it up until the dynastic couple were headed back to the Oval Office. Now that Hillary is running ahead of Donald Trump, Bill can graciously accept new restrictions on their pay-to-play politics.

Bill must be having a good laugh over this one. The foundation served for years as a conduit for corporate and foreign cash to burnish the Clinton image, pay for their travel expenses for speeches and foreign trips, and employ their coterie in between campaigns or government gigs. Donors could give as much as they wanted because the foundation is a “charity.”

President Obama may have banished Sidney Blumenthal from the State Department, but Bill could stash his conspiratorial pal at the foundation, keeping him on the family payroll while Sid flooded Hillary with foreign-policy advice. Her private email server was supposed to hide their email traffic—until that gambit was exposed last year. But FBI Director James Comey let Hillary off the hook on the emails, and he declined to investigate the foundation, so it looks like they’re home free.

Kevin Williamson is a fierce #NeverTrump member…..His words are hollow if he cannot choose #NeverHillary….rsk

The politics of blame are a funny thing. We will blame anybody and everybody for any and all imaginable problems — except the people who actually have blame coming.

Nobody really cares very much about evidence, reason, argument, etc. What they care about is telling a story with good guys and bad guys, and that the right people are cast in each role.

For the left, that shapes everything from economic thinking to foreign policy.

For example, we hear a great deal about economic “inequality,” a term that, in an open and dynamic society, means almost nothing. What the Left wants it to mean is that the poor are poor because the rich are rich, and that the middle class is struggling because corporate profits are high and billionaire playboys forget how many yachts they have. But that simply is not the case, as anybody who has even a passing familiarity with the actual economics literature on the subject can tell you. A $10-an-hour job pays $10 an hour because $10 an hour gets you somebody who can do that job. If both Bob and Sam can do the job and Bob wants $12 an hour while Sam will do it for $10 an hour, it’s a $10-an-hour job, and Sam has it.

It’s not the case that it would have been a $12-an-hour job if only the CEO made $500,000 a year instead of $700,000. (The average salary for a U.S. CEO is in fact a little less than $200,000 a year; those wild numbers you see in the news are for the CEOs of a relatively small number of very large global firms; in the same way, the compensation figures for the category “basketball coaches” can go very different ways depending on whether you’re talking only about the NBA or including high-school coaches.) It is true that costs get shifted around within and between companies, and it’s probably true that they get shifted more onto lower-wage workers than higher-wage workers, because those workers are, generally speaking, less in demand. (That’s why they are lower-wage workers.) But CEO pay usually isn’t a real big chunk of a corporation’s financial picture. In 2011, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, was the highest-paid CEO on God’s green Earth, and his paycheck, large though it was ($376 million), amounted to about three-tenths of 1 percent of Apple’s revenue that year. The groundskeepers and secretaries in Cupertino don’t get paid what they get paid because of fluctuations within an approximately 0.3-percent-of-revenue outlay.

You might see some compensation-rejiggering effects from a proportionally much larger outlay, such as the 24.2 percent of its profit Apple paid in taxes that year.

Because we have a free market in labor, it isn’t always clear or straightforward how changes in companies’ expenses affect workers’ compensation. It’s not like Apple or Walmart or GE can simply declare a wage and expect programmers, warehousemen, and engineers to just show up. Workers have choices, too, though some have more choices than others. But if you think that paying the CEO a lot drives down workers’ wages, wouldn’t you also think that other expenses would put downward pressure on wages, too? And which would produce the heavier pressure: $376 million for the CEO or $8.3 billion for the IRS?

Instead of trashing Trump and complaining that he has alienated some Republicans, why doesn’t the WSJ question why Hillary gets almost universal support among Democrats, the media and Hollywood no matter what she says or does? Isn’t supporting a scandal ridden congenital liar more troubling than alienating some Republicans?

We are constantly told by Democrats and the media that Hillary is so smart and the most qualified person to run for president but what they never do is list actual accomplishments because they have trouble thinking of any.

When Trump says something, Republicans and Democrats alike are asked to comment. Yet when Hillary says or does anything the media does not trot out its microphones for comments. Why the discrepancy? For example, when Hillary called Gold Star Mom Samantha Smith a liar, no one went to Reid, Obama, Durbin, Pelosi, Schumer et al and asked: what do you think of Hillary treating a Gold Star Mom like that? The media obviously doesn’t really care about all Gold Star families.

Does the WSJ or the politically entrenched Republicans in DC actually believe if Trump changed his verbiage that the media would love him? The Clinton team called Pence the most extreme VP candidate in the last century so would he be treated respectfully?

The media loved McCain until he was the Presidential candidate and then they trashed him. They also trashed Romney and Bush. They are for the Democrat no matter what they do. Facts do not matter.

Hillary’s economic policy could be summed up in one sentence. The government should tax more, spend more, and regulate more because the fair share for the government vs. the governed is never enough.

Hillary supports continuing Obama’s economic policies which have resulted in a 38-year low on the labor participation rate, the slowest economic recovery in almost 70 years, a 50-year low on home ownership and a 40 year low on productivity. Why would anyone think that continuing and expanding those policies would yield better results?

We know what Hillary has said and done. Could Trump be worse?

It is a shame the WSJ climbed on the bandwagon.

In the land of NeverTrump, it turns out one American is more reviled than Donald Trump. This would be the Donald Trump voter.

Lincoln famously described government as of, by, and for the people. Even so, the people are now getting a hard lesson about what happens when they reject the advice of their betters and go with a nominee of their own choosing. What happens is an outpouring of condescension and contempt.

This contempt is most naked on the left. No surprise here, for two reasons. First, since at least Woodrow Wilson progressives have always preferred rule by a technocratic elite over democracy. Second, today’s Democratic Party routinely portrays its Republican Party rivals as an assortment of nasty ists (racists, sexists, nativists, etc.) making war on minorities, women, foreigners and innocent goatherds who somehow end up in Guantanamo.

Thus Mr. Trump confirms to many on the left what they have always told themselves about the GOP. A New York Times writer put it this way: “Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society.”

Still, the contempt for the great Republican unwashed does not emanate exclusively from liberals or Democrats. Thanks to Mr. Trump’s run for office, it is now ascendant in conservative and Republican quarters as well.

Start with the fondness for the word “Trumpkin,” meant at once to describe and demean his supporters. Or consider an article from National Review, which describes a “vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles” and whose members find that “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” Scarcely a day goes by without a fresh tweet or article taking the same tone, an echo of the old Washington Post slur against evangelicals as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”

We get it: Trump voters are stupid whites who are embittered because they are losing out in the global economy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump made another pivot back to the issues on Monday, this time laying out his strategy to fight radical Islam. As usual it included some good ideas and some bad, but if we’re lucky he’ll stick with the subject long enough to force Hillary Clinton to debate something other than his temperament.

The polls show Mr. Trump still has a slight edge over the Democrat in fighting terror, thanks in large part to President Obama’s eight-year record. Islamic State incubated in the vacuum left by American retreat in Iraq and Syria, and its poison has spread throughout the world. Mrs. Clinton is promising to continue Mr. Obama’s strategy, which gives the Republican an opening.

“The failure to establish a new Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq, and the election-driven timetable for withdrawal, surrendered our gains in that country and led directly to the rise of ISIS,” Mr. Trump said as he read from a prepared text in Youngstown, Ohio. That’s exactly right, though he should have added Mr. Obama’s decision to let the Syrian civil war rage out of control.

Then again, Mr. Trump has sometimes said the U.S. should stay out of Syria’s civil war because it amounts to the “nation-building” that Mr. Trump again promised to end. That’s a good applause line on the right and left these days, but setting up safe zones in Syria so millions of refugees won’t flood Turkey, Jordan and Europe is a long way from nation-building. The U.S. did that for the Kurds after the first Gulf War, and the Kurdish territory of Iraq is a rare American success in the Middle East.

If Mr. Obama had kept 10,000 U.S. troops in Iraq after 2011, the critics might have called that nation-building too. But it would have blocked the march of Islamic State and spared us from having to refight the war in Iraq today. Mr. Trump’s caricature of nation-building is closer to Barack Obama’s view than he would like to admit.

The better news is that Mr. Trump seems to be warming to the idea that the U.S. needs coalitions to defeat radical Islam. Most notably, he reversed course on NATO in his speech, praising its role in fighting terrorism. He also called for “an international conference” on fighting radical Islam and he cited Israel, Egypt and Jordan as particular allies in the fight.

Mr. Trump still seems naive in expecting Vladimir Putin’s Russia to assist in this effort, but then so were Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton in 2009. Mr. Trump hasn’t seemed to notice that Mr. Obama recently agreed to share intelligence with Russia in Syria over the vociferous objections of the Pentagon. The Republican nominee would have to learn the hard way that Mr. Putin is a hard man who only responds to the logic of hard geopolitical facts. CONTINUE AT SITE