RUTHFULLY YOURS

The media’s outrage over the latest thing Trump said is not just bias, it’s ridiculous hypocrisy. After all much of the time Democrats have said the same things that Trump did. Including Dems like Hillary.

Trump called Obama and Hillary the founders of ISIS. The media swarmed. It’s apparently inappropriate to use such a figure of speech. Except that they had no problem with it when Hillary Clinton called Trump an ISIS recruiter.

“We have seen how Donald Trump is being used to essentially be a recruiter for more people to join the cause of terrorism,” Hillary insisted on CNN.

Her campaign and the media blamed Trump for ISIS terror attacks.

Then in an interview with Business Insider, she quoted Hayden’s claim that Trump was a recruiting sergeant for ISIS.

“I think it was said just this week that the way Donald Trump talks about terrorism and his very insulting language towards Muslims is making him the ‘recruiting sergeant’ for ISIS.”

The media had no problem with this. Its problem with Trump’s founder comments has nothing to do with anything objective, but is entirely a function of their bias.

The one percent of the one percent.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, released their tax returns on Friday.

For a person who left the White House “dead broke and deeply in debt” (in spite of stealing White House furniture and artwork), the Clintons have done very well in the succeeding years. For fiscal 2015, they reported an income over $10.6 million, significantly down from the $28.5 million they earned in 2014.

Yeah, running for president doesn’t leave people time for other income-generating activities. Either way, they are the 1% of the 1%!

Slightly over a third of their income went for income taxes, while another 10% went to charity. How thoughtful! How generous! Not really! Actually, how selfish!

Of the the $1,042,000 the Clintons gave to charity as listed on their return, $1 million of that went to the Clinton Family Foundation. The other $42,000 went to Desert Classic Charities.

In other words, the Clintons donated – tax-free, no less! – to themselves. The Saudis, the Algerians, and other wealthy and not so wealthy Muslim human rights-abusing countries and prominent Wall Street firms and individuals associated with them also donated to the Clinton Family Foundation.

Not that the donors expected any favors or such, of course – they just are as generous and concerned about the less fortunate as the Clintons. Yeah.

Oh, and not so by the way, and I know this will come as a shock, shock, shock!, the Desert Classic Charities partners with the Clinton Family Foundation. Boom!

Desert Classic Charities, the local non-profit entity that has organized the Humana Challenge in partnership with the Clinton Foundation (formerly the Bob Hope Classic) for 53 years, today presented 40 Coachella Valley charities with more than $2 million in donations[.]

And as for the Clinton Foundation itself, well, it has been called a “giant slush fund,” with such high overhead and such little charity that it was placed on a watch list by a charity watchdog group last year.

The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends. (snip)

In all, the group reported $84.6 million in “functional expenses” on its 2013 tax return and had more than $64 million left over — money the organization has said represents pledges rather than actual cash on hand. (snip)

None of the Clintons is on the payroll, but they do enjoy first-class flights paid for by the foundation. (snip)

According to tax returns for 2015 released by the Clinton campaign, 96% of the candidate’s charitable donations went to the Clinton Foundation.

Daily Caller:

The documents show that the power couple earned $10,745,378 last year, mostly on income earned from giving public speeches.

Of that, they gave just over a million to charity. But the contributions can hardly be seen as altruistic, since the money flowed back to an entity they control.

The other $42,000 contribution was to Desert Classic Charities. That group hosts an annual PGA golf event. Doug Band, a Clinton Foundation adviser and Bill Clinton’s longtime assistant, was on the board of directors of that organization through 2014, according to its IRS filings.

Desert Classic Charities effectively returned that donation back into the Clinton orbit. Its 2015 tax filing shows that it contributed $700,000 to the Clinton Foundation for work on obesity programs. The group handed out $1.6 million in grants that whole year.

The Clinton Foundation dispenses contracts to Clinton cronies like Doug Band while also paying for the non-political travel of the Clintons and staffers. It’s all perfectly legal — and disgustingly unethical. The Foundation is used as a slush fund that enriches friends of the Clintons while allowing foreign businesses and governments to purchase influence.

I doubt this story will get much play beyond the conservative net. It might cast Hillary in a bad light, and we can’t have that when the press now sees that it has a holy quest to keep Donald Trump from winning. CONTINUE AT SITE

The number of associations is large and creepy.

Unless you had taken a course in advanced agitprop, you would not have recognized that Seddique Mateen, the father of the Orlando nightclub shooter, was a plant. He was part of the propaganda show for Hillary Clinton, now playing to sparse audiences from coast to coast. The show is produced and directed by radical “let it all hang out” leftists, in coordination with misogynistic Islamic supremacists, who believe in forced marriage of children under 13 and clitorectomies.

The purpose of Mateen in Florida, a state Hillary needs to win, was to change the narrative, since Khizr Khan was so successful in changing the narrative at the Democratic National Convention. Those “selected” for front- or second-row status at a presidential candidate’s event are hand-picked for ideology, gender, race, or ethnicity. There is no chance that the Clinton show did not know of and approve of his appearance.

Clinton needed to change the narrative for two reasons. First, her poll numbers are not really up as Pat Caddell, a professional pollster, has attested to, especially if you look at the abracadabra methodology. It’s a classic case of disinformation.

What if you give a candidate event, and very few voters show up? You change the narrative, as the Clinton campaign has done, PhotoShop the audience of the event to downplay the numbers, get fire marshals to close down overflowing events of the opponent, or whip up interest in the campaign events via “walk-ons” like Khan and Mateen.

Second, and more important, there are continuing photos of Hillary tripping on and off stage with Broadway lights flashing “brain freeze,” “conquers the stairs,” and more. There are numerous documented events, that is, that even the producers cannot hide.

Pakistani-born Khizr Khan published writings in support of sharia, the enemy of the U.S. Constitution. And the choice between these two is the issue of this election. To understand the importance of sharia in today’s threat to America, here is a quote from Stephen Coughlin, who formerly briefed the Pentagon and other U.S. officials on the threat of Islam:

Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech on economic policy in Michigan, just after Donald Trump had laid out his own economic agenda. Mrs. Clinton’s presentation was an exercise not in economics, but in mythology.

A seemingly trivial but nonetheless illuminating example of her fundamental intellectual unseriousness on economic questions was her repetition of the ancient, repeatedly discredited myth that Henry Ford raised his workers’ wages on the theory that doing so would enable them to buy Ford cars, thus increasing his company’s profit. Nothing of the sort ever happened, in reality, and the economic assumptions behind this myth — that one can spend one’s way to prosperity — is preposterous. Economically speaking, this is flat-Earth stuff, pure hokum from a woman who likes to smugly proclaim: “I believe in science!”

It is economically illiterate, but Mrs. Clinton sincerely believes it, arguing that, in the same vein, raising the federal minimum wage would actually help U.S. employers by giving consumers more money to spend at their businesses. That money of course must come from somewhere, and where it comes from is businesses (who, of course, pass on some of those costs in a variety of ways). Some consumers would have more to spend, and businesses would have less to spend. Mrs. Clinton, who does not know very much about any business other than charging $10,000 a minute for speeches (which is, to be sure, an excellent business model) perhaps has never been informed that the biggest customer of the typical small American business is — pay attention here — another business, small and family-owned firms making the majority of their sales to commercial operations rather than to individual consumers.

Her policy isn’t bootstrapping — it’s pure magical thinking.

The email controversy that Hillary Clinton hoped had died out when federal prosecutors closed their investigation last month now looks likely to shadow her campaign all the way through Election Day.

Rolling releases of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary of state, combined with her own failure to provide succinct, consistent answers on her email practices, have kept the issue simmering.

“Any time she talks about it or engages someone on the issue, it just keeps the story alive rather than letting it go away,” said Andrew Ricci, a former aide to two Democratic congressmen who is a vice president at the public relations and crisis communications firm Levick.

The drumbeat is undercutting Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and hindering her efforts to seize fuller control of the presidential race by painting Republican rival Donald Trump as an unacceptable alternative.

Last October, 42% of people polled said her use of a private email system while secretary of state was an “important factor” in whether to vote for her, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed. A survey last month found that figure had jumped to 55%.

What’s more, half of voters surveyed said she lacked the right judgment to be president based on a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe that showed she was careless in handling sensitive government information, compared with one-third who said she does have the right judgment.

John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, said: “She’s said probably about a hundred times now, it [the private email server] was a mistake, wouldn’t do it again. She’s learned from it.”

However, Mr. Podesta conceded the issue has lingered. “It’s a problem that we’ve had to cope with, but I think it’s one we’ve tried to put behind us and people are going to have to weigh that against an opponent on the other side who remains kind of outrageous every day,” he said.
The campaign’s decision to eschew news conferences also limits Mrs. Clinton’s ability to put the issue to rest. The Democrat hasn’t held a full news conference since Dec. 4, 2015, although aides said she has taken more than 2,600 questions from reporters this year on a variety of subjects, many in one-on-one interviews with television anchors.

Mrs. Clinton did take questions from reporters after an appearance last week, and offered a new, and muddled, response to the email flap that stirred fresh headlines. CONTINUE AT SITE

Many elections redefine political parties.

The rise of George McGovern’s hard-left agenda in 1972, followed later in the decade by Jimmy Carter’s evangelical liberalism, drove centrist Democrats into the arms of Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan.

These so-called neoconservatives (“new conservatives”) grew tired of liberals’ perceived laxity about fighting the Cold War. In foreign policy, the neoconservatives were best known for supporting idealistic nation-building abroad. They distrusted the rise of what would become political correctness and ever more government. They worried about violent crime and higher taxes. So decades ago, these Democrats joined the Republican party.

Since the 1980s, the neoconservatives have made up the elite of their newly adopted party — despite their unease with the conservative orthodoxy of border enforcement, fierce resistance to gun control, and opposition to abortion.

Now, a few neoconservatives are reinventing themselves again and returning to the Democrats to support Hillary Clinton. We could call them “neoliberals.”

They believe that socialist Bernie Sanders made the hard-Left Clinton seem like an acceptable centrist. As neoliberals, they hope that beneath her opportunistic embrace of Obamism, Clinton still could recalibrate herself as more of a Democrat of the 1990s, a period when her husband, President Bill Clinton, championed balancing the budget while intervening abroad.

Neoliberals — along with some members of the conservative establishment — consider Republican party nominee Donald Trump to be toxic. Many of them are supporting Clinton because they do not like Trump’s idea of building a wall on the Mexican border to stop illegal immigration. Nor do they appreciate Trump’s slogans about “putting America first” when negotiating trade deals, conducting alliances, and avoiding optional foreign interventions. They hate Trump’s crude, take-no-prisoners invective more than Hillary’s polished and refined lying.

The 2016 neoliberals were never very culturally conservative. So they are certainly not bothered by Clinton’s pro-choice advocacy. They do not mind her promotion of gun control, and they are open to global warming agendas and soft multiculturalism. They see Clinton as preferable to Trump and his unapologetic nationalism. Many of the neoliberal converts supported the Obama–Clinton intervention in Libya and oppose Trump’s get-tough trade stance on China.

Neoliberals also find themselves more in the same class — defined by income, education, and cultural tastes — with Clinton’s elite Democrats than with Trump’s new army of lower-middle-class cultural and economic populists.

Neoliberals get along well with the small elite class that fuels the Clinton machine — similarly wealthy, well-educated grandees on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, along with those in big media, academia, the arts, and the top echelons of state and federal bureaucracies.

Democrats no longer win over the middle classes, who lack the culture of the elite and the romance of the distant and subsidized poor. NASCAR and the NRA are anathemas to Democrats and were never popular with neoconservatives either.

Will the old neoconservatives/new neoliberals who support Clinton instead of Trump ever come back to the Republican party after the election?

It depends on three unknowns.