RUTHFULLY YOURS

ObamaCare has suddenly been injected back into the 2016 election debate, on the news of the law’s 25%-plus average premium increase for 2017. Even Donald Trump is talking about it. With only two weeks to go, this is a moment for voters to hold accountable the Democrats who imposed this debacle on the country over voter objections.

Next year’s enormous price increases are merely the latest expression of ObamaCare’s underlying problems, and the dysfunction is undermining the health security of Americans who lack employer coverage. A wave of major insurers have quit the exchanges, and those that are left have raised deductibles and copays and restricted choices of doctors and hospitals. The public is witnessing—and the unlucky are experiencing—the collapse of one progressive promise after another.

At every stage of the ObamaCare saga, liberals said not to worry. Sure, the law was unpopular when Democrats rammed it through Congress on a partisan vote in 2009-10, but voters would learn to love it once the subsidies started rolling. That didn’t happen, and in 2014 President Obama tried to buck up Democrats by saying that “five years from now” people will look back on the law as “a monumental achievement.” Two years later it’s worse.

Nothing could shake the liberal faith in their supposed landmark: Not the Healthcare.gov website fiasco of 2013, or the millions of individual health plans that were cancelled despite President Obama’s promise about keeping them. The left kept the faith as the entitlement subtracted from economic growth, hurt incomes and killed jobs. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber called the critics stupid, and Mr. Obama denigrates anyone who disagrees with him as illegitimate or politically motivated.

Now reality is confirming what the critics predicted. ObamaCare’s regulatory mix—benefit mandates, requiring insurers to sell coverage to all comers, and narrow ratings bands that limit how much premiums can vary by health status—was tried by several states in the 1980s and ’90s. Every one saw the same results that are now unspooling nationally: high and rising costs, low and declining enrollment, and less insurer and provider competition.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to solve these predictable disruptions with subsidies and a mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty. But most people don’t think ObamaCare plans provide value for the money, especially if they are non-subsidized. CONTINUE AT SITE

There was panic in Camp Clinton when President Obama falsely told the public he had not known about then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail until he heard about it “through news reports.”

In reality, Obama and Clinton exchanged at least 18 e-mails through Clinton’s private account and homebrew server system. And we now know, based on investigative reports released by the FBI, that Obama used a pseudonym in at least some of his e-mails with Clinton. Moreover, as I noted in a column ten days ago, top advisers to Obama and Clinton flagged the Obama–Clinton e-mails problem before Obama issued his false denial of knowledge.

Asked by Bill Plante of CBS News in a March 7, 2015, interview when he learned about Clinton’s private e-mail system, the president responded, “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

This assertion spun the Clinton campaign up, according to the latest WikiLeaks disclosure of e-mails hacked from the account of John Podesta. A longtime Clinton aide, Podesta was Obama’s top White House adviser until transitioning to the Clinton presidential campaign, which he chairs, in February 2016.

At 6:15 p.m. on March 7, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Scherwin e-mailed Jennifer Palmieri and several other Clinton campaign staffers, alerting them: “Jen, you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.”

“It also remains a curious artifact of this election that many conservatives are outraged far more by Trump’s obnoxiousness, crudity, and rhetorical excesses than they are by Hillary’s concrete record of premeditated criminality and habitual prevarication — especially given the likelihood that on illegal immigration, defense spending, Obamacare, abortion, the debt, taxes, and regulation, Trump’s published agenda is the far more conservative. Apparently a vicious, insider liberal establishmentarian poses less threat to the republic that does a more conservative outsider fop.”

Donald Trump, in characteristically muddled and haphazard fashion, said he thought the election might end up “rigged” (if he lost). Therefore, he would not endorse the November 8 result if he found that fear confirmed — unless, of course, in Jacksonian fashion, he managed to win.

All hell broke loose, from both the Left and principled conservatives, that Trump’s allegations had somehow undermined the American electoral process itself.

Not likely.

Questioning the integrity of election votes was a national pastime in 1824 (“corrupt bargain”), 1876 (“compromise of 1877”), and again in 1960. Bitching over losing, of course, is not the same thing as armed insurrection in the fashion of 1860, when furor erupted over Lincoln’s election.

Any candidate, whether feeding conspiracies or out of genuine concern for electoral misconduct, can say whatever he or she wishes, without the deleterious national consequences that pundits decry. Bad sportsmanship and manners are not synonymous with constitutional subversion.

“Selected, not elected” was a Democratic talking point after the 2000 Bush victory. In a speech two years after that election, a now sanctimonious Hillary Clinton echoed those “selected” charges against the Bush presidency. But so what?

Every corner of the media is pouring cold water on what they view as the wreckage of the Trump campaign. It is so pervasive that one friend, an ardent Trump supporter, said he listens to nothing but his own thoughts.

The message is to move beyond Trump to building a mandate and a Democrat Congress for Hillary.

Oh, and you people who were crazy enough to listen to Trump and your own values and beliefs might as well forget about it and stay home. And those silly “Trump: Make America Great Again” signs? If they have not already been vandalized, you can put them with your Goldwater buttons and your Bibles.

There will be time after November for denial and disbelief, and then the final grief and eventual hardening to the reality of another unbearable president, should Trump not emerge victorious. But this is not that time.

One can quickly get lost in the weeds of poll samples, weightings, and methodologies, but that is best left to the professionals. The way things are is made obvious even to irredeemable clingers by a statistic contained in one recent poll that found Hillary up by twelve points but also contained the finding on page 24 that Obama voters outnumbered Romney voters in the sample by 46 to 32.

Fortunately, there is competition even among pollsters, and there remain three reputable national polls that consistently indicate a tight race nationally.

While the wizards of talk in their cloistered network studios harp endlessly about the coarse and vulgar Mr. Trump, who just can’t seem to act like a normal politician, there is much more still in play in this election.

The Las Vegas Review Journal, owned by major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, came out this weekend in support of Trump for president, noting that voters “clamor for an alternative” to the corruption “dominating the capital” and that voter “discontent isn’t confined by ideology or political philosophy.”

The political and media elites are outraged beyond measure by Donald Trump’s charge that the election could be rigged. How dare he suggest such a thing, they say, for the system is as honest as the day is long!

It shows he knows he is going to lose, they say. It shows that he has no faith in the American system, and is really a fascist at heart.

In reality, it shows no such thing, but it does show that a conversation about whether this election — and the political system in general — is rigged is one that the elites most desperately do not want to have.

And that is why we must have it.

And, if we’re going to have it in an honest fashion, the question should be framed not as “Is the system rigged?” but as “In what way is the system not rigged?”

First, there is the media.

Richard Nixon complained of media bias as long ago as 1960, but even he never envisioned the state propaganda machine we have today. Even just a decade ago, conservative media watchdogs were tallying up mainstream media stories that were favorable and unfavorable to conservative politicians and issues, and finding that unfavorable ones vastly outnumbered favorable ones — which did, however, exist.

Now, even the idea that anything or anyone not left-of-center would get even the briefest fair hearing in the mainstream media seems quaint.

Another State Department IT aide invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer more than 90 questions Monday during a Judicial Watch deposition. John Bentel, former director of information resource management of the executive secretariat, refused to answer questions about whether Hillary Clinton had paid his legal fees or given him financial incentives during the final deposition in Judicial Watch’s lawsuit over her private emails. According to Judicial Watch, Bentel repeatedly answered, “On advice from my legal counsel, I decline to answer the question and I invoke my Fifth Amendment rights.”

District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered him to testify under oath back in August because he noticed that the record in the case appeared to contradict Bental’s sworn testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Via the Washington Examiner:

Bentel told the House Select Committee on Benghazi in June 2015 that he had no knowledge of Clinton’s private email server.

However, the State Department inspector general later discovered that Bentel “told employees in his office that Secretary Clinton’s email arrangement had been approved by the State Department’s legal staff and also instructed his subordinates not to discuss the Secretary’s email again,” according to the court order.

State Department aide and Clinton employee Bryan Pagliano also asserted his Fifth Amendment rights during Judicial Watch’s deposition back in June.

“The fact that yet another State Department official took the Fifth highlights the disturbing implication that criminal acts took place related to the Clinton email and our Freedom of Information Act requests,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton commented.

Fitton said in a recent Clinton email update that no matter who wins the election, pressure for a criminal investigation into Clinton’s email corruption will continue and a special prosecutor will have to be appointed.

A highly acclaimed expert in election law says that Hillary Clinton may well have broken the law by directing an outside group to put “ducks on the ground” at Trump events and that a criminal investigation may be in order. Elliot Berke, managing partner of Berke/Farah LLP, has been named by Chambers USA as a “Nationwide Best Lawyer” and by Washingtonian as one of “Washington’s Best Lawyers.”

He appeared on Fox News Monday evening to discuss the latest Project Veritas video, which implicated Hillary Clinton in a possible FEC violation.

In the video, longtime community organizer Bob Creamer said that it was Hillary’s idea to have activists dress up in Donald Duck costumes and protest outside of Trump/Pence events. Creamer is a convicted felon and husband of Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky. He has visited the White House 342 times since 2009 and met with Organizer-in-Chief Barack Obama a total of 47 times. Creamer was caught on video affirming that Clinton is aware of “all” of his work and that his group Democracy Partners has a daily telephone call with the Clinton campaign to coordinate efforts.

“In the end, it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground,” said Creamer. “So, by God, we would get ducks on the ground.”

Activists suggested on tape that the goal was to provoke a violent reaction from Trump supporters — a tactic known in progressive circles as “bird-dogging.”

Special Report’s Bret Baier asked Berke if Hillary and company had broken any campaign laws, given that it was Hillary Clinton’s idea to deploy the ducks.

“Any time a candidate, committee or political party is working with an outside group, you get into possible in-kind contributions,” Berke said. “Here, the allegation is the candidate herself may have directed an outside group to engage in this behavior, and if so — this could be an in-kind contribution.”

Which candidate has the best economic plan to get America growing again? This is the most important question of the 2016 presidential campaign, yet think tanks and journalists keep getting the answer wrong.

Donald Trump will cut taxes, reduce regulation, unleash our abundant energy and eliminate our trade deficit through muscular trade negotiations that increase exports, reduce imports and eliminate cheating. These policies will double our economic growth rate, create 25 million new jobs, boost labor and capital incomes, generate trillions of additional tax revenues and reduce debt as a percentage of GDP.

Hillary Clinton’s plan points in the opposite direction. Her tax hikes on businesses and “the rich” reduce incentives to work and invest. She will increase the already staggering $2 trillion annual regulatory burden on the U.S. economy. She vows to put coal miners out of work and oil and natural gas on the back burner—raising energy prices and reducing America’s competitive advantage. After giving us three of the worst trade deals in U.S. history—Nafta in 1993, China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization, the 2012 South Korea fiasco—the Clinton team is primed to pass the worst deal yet—the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would decimate the American manufacturing base.

How this adds up to a better economic plan than Mr. Trump’s is as mysterious as it is counterintuitive. Yet economic pundits keep popping up like bad pennies to make the claim.

One reason is that most think tanks only consider the competing tax plans, not the overall economic plans. This has an inherent Democratic bias because Republican tax cuts viewed in isolation almost always reduce revenues. However, by failing to calculate the substantial positive revenue offsets of growth from the Trump plan’s other reforms, these tunnel-vision “experts” are missing the bigger picture.

Consider the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. It dynamically scored a revenue reduction under the Trump plan of $2.6 trillion and a modest $663 billion surplus for the Clinton plan over the next decade. These numbers suggest the Clinton plan is more fiscally responsible. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton may win the election in two weeks, but the manner of her victory will bedevil her in the White House. Specifically, evidence keeps turning up suggesting that the FBI probe into her emails was influenced by political favoritism and double standards.

The latest news is the Journal’s report Monday that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend of Hillary and Bill, steered money to the campaign of the wife of a top FBI official. Political organizations under Mr. McAuliffe’s control gave more than $675,000 to the 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign of Jill McCabe, the wife of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. Mr. McCabe, director James Comey’s right-hand man, helped oversee the probe into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information on her server.

Some $467,500 of the money came directly from Mr. McAuliffe’s political action committee, Common Good VA, while $207,788 came from the Virginia Democratic Party, which the Governor essentially controls. The funds amounted to more than one-third of all the money Mrs. McCabe raised.

Mrs. McCabe announced her candidacy the same month (March 2015) as the news broke about Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. Mr. McCabe was running the FBI’s Washington field office at the time, and he was promoted to the No. 3 FBI slot not long after the formal FBI investigation began in July 2015.

The FBI said in a statement that none of this is an issue because Mr. McCabe wasn’t promoted to the No. 2 position until February 2016, months after his wife lost her race, and only then did he assume “for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails.”