RUTHFULLY YOURS

Conventions are useful for clarifying elections, and this week’s Philly confab notably so. A week of speakers—Democrat after Democrat beseeching the nation to please know that Hillary Clinton really is a good gal—has made something clear: This is, essentially, a one-person presidential race.

It’s Hillary against Hillary. This November is about whether Americans can look at 40 years of Clinton chicanery and nearly a decade of broken Obama promises, and still pull the lever for her. Not that Donald Trump doesn’t matter. He does, in that he can help sharpen those concerns. But Hillary is the main event.

The polls bear this out. Aside from his recent convention bump, Mr. Trump’s numbers have been largely consistent. Whether he leads or trails, and by how much, is mostly a function of voters’ shifting views on Mrs. Clinton. Lately her poll numbers have been devastating.

A CNN survey this week showed 68% of voters say she isn’t honest and trustworthy—an all-time high. CBS found virtually the same number: 67%. In the CNN poll, meanwhile, only 39% of voters said they held a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton. This is lower than any time CNN has polled Hillary since the spring of 1992—before she was first lady.

Mr. Trump’s poll numbers also bear this out. He is currently leading in the Real Clear Politics average despite no real ground game, little real fundraising, little policy message, a divided conservative electorate, and one of the messiest conventions on record. As of June 30, Mrs. Clinton and her allies had raised a stunning $600 million, which is already being spent to trash Mr. Trump. Yet to little or no effect. Mr. Trump is hardly a potted plant, but even if he were . . .

Mrs. Clinton’s problem is Mrs. Clinton. She is running against her own ethical morass. Already she was asking voters to forget about cattle futures and fake sniper fire and Whitewater and Travelgate. Then she chose to vividly revive the public nausea with her self-serving email stunt and her Clinton Foundation money grubbing.

Oh, she tried to roll out the usual Clinton defense: that this was just part of a renewed attack by political enemies. Yet the neutral inspector general of the State Department slammed her handling of official email; the FBI director (who works for Barack Obama) attested that she was careless with classified information; and she was caught on tape telling a series of lies about the situation. All of which makes it tough to blame the vast right-wing conspiracy. Tim Kaine’s many assurances that he “trusts” Mrs. Clinton was the campaign’s public acknowledgment that almost no one else in the nation does.

Hillary is running, too, against the reality of President Obama policies, which she promises not only to continue, but to build on. The president’s glowing appraisal Wednesday night of his time in office bore no relation to the country most Americans see—one in which health care costs more than ever, they struggle to pay the bills, and terror attacks on Western democracies are a weekly event. The state of the country might not be quite so grim as Mr. Trump painted it in Cleveland, but the mood is much closer to that grimness than to Mr. Obama’s forced optimism.

The president’s policies, which Mrs. Clinton now owns, have alienated significant tranches of voters that she needs this fall—in particular blue-collar Democrats. Coal communities are rejecting Hillary outright. Many union workers are too, whether they be Teamsters for Trump, or police officers appalled by the Democratic Party’s attacks on their profession. CONTINUE AT SITE

Democrats in Philadelphia extolled Hillary Rodham Clinton as a tireless warhorse with a lifetime of hard experience who also happens to be fresh and modern and historic. The contradiction shows how hard it is to sell a candidate who has been a national figure for 25 years when the public wants change.

The truth is that Mrs. Clinton accepted the nomination Thursday night as the most predictable Democrat in generations. Democrats have tended to nominate relative unknowns with strategically ambiguous goals, like Bill Clinton in 1992 or Barack Obama in 2008, who ran on hope and change and revealed his true ambitions in the White House.

By contrast, Mrs. Clinton has been clear. She wants to serve as Mr. Obama’s political and policy heir, as she and he now admit. This won’t mean “change” unless the Clintons have an unusual personal definition of that word, as they do for “classified material.” A de facto third Obama term will mean the status quo, only more of it.

Also changeless will be Mrs. Clinton’s political and private character. Voters have seen enough of this national figure since 1992 to understand how she cuts ethical corners and then stonewalls and dissembles when discovered. This is why some 68% of the country believes she isn’t honest or trustworthy.

As divergent in temperament and worldview as Mrs. Clinton and Donald Trump are, her average unfavorable rating (55.4%) is nearly as high as his (56.9%). If voters do decide they’re “with her,” no one can claim they didn’t know what they were getting—the same policies that have produced slow growth and stagnant incomes, and no doubt more scandal.

On July 24, 2016, Hillary Clinton joined Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, her Vice-Presidential candidate for a joint interview by Scott Pelley, correspondent for the CBS News program, 60 Minutes. That interview has been posted under the title, “The Democratic Ticket: Clinton and Kaine.”

During that interview, when asked about her goals she said, in part:

“I want an economy that creates more jobs. And that’s a lot of jobs. I want an economy that gets back to raising incomes for everybody. Most Americans haven’t had a raise. I want an economy that’s going to help lift millions of people out of poverty. Because, given the great recession, we have fallen back in the wrong direction.”

Pelley should have asked how her adamant support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) would help unemployed Americans find jobs and raise the wages of millions of American workers who are fortunate to still have jobs. CIR would result in the dumping of millions of newly authorized foreign workers into an overflowing labor pool that, by Clinton’s own admission, has not seen incomes rise, with millions of people currently live in poverty.

In point of fact, already the number of authorized foreign workers who enter the United States each month exceeds the number of new jobs that are created.

Clinton frequently has called for achieving “wage equality.” When making this goal the topic of her discussions, she invariably links achieving wage equality to raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. If you do the math, this works out to just $21,008 annually. Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour results in an annual wage of $31,200. This is certainly not a middle-class wage.

The question never asked about wage equality is with whom would she make American workers equal?

Think the Soviets were the only ones to invert reality?

—“The Post-Constitutional Election, Part 24,” is here.

The world has left merely-bonkers behind when Clinton, Inc., the most corrupt, corruptible and corrupted political duo in modern history, is held up as the nation’s bulwark against the Russian Bear; when Donald Trump, the man who seeks to save US sovereignty, the military, the 2nd Amendment and to stop Muslim immigration is smeared as “a Russian stooge.”

Welcome to the Democrats’ last stand.

It really is desperation-time for the Left (which includes much of the Right) when the only way to spin the most recent Wikileaks’ email dump showing unabashed MSM-DNC collusion to rig the presidential nomination for Hillary Clinton is to try to ignore the systemic corruption the leak reveals, and instead blast the leak itself as a Russian hack that is evidence that Donald Trump is “Putin’s candidate.”

But let’s imagine that this Wikileak gusher is proven to be a Russian hack. How can any self-respecting intelligence student not at least consider whether Putin is in fact throwing a lifeline of an issue — Trump as “Russian stooge” — to his own ever-pliable but catastrophically damaged candidate, Crooked Hillary?

All leaks aside, however, it is a fact that it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who gave her required approval to the sale of a Canadian company holding 20 percent of U.S. uranium stocks to Putin’s Russia — after nine members of the company’s board kicked $145 million into the Clinton Foundation. (Thank you, Peter Schweitzer.) That’s not “promoting Putin’s polices,” as the rap on Trump goes; that’s executing them.

What Russian strongman could possibly want a President of the United States more pliable, or, as Barack Obama, mentored and advised by a troika of Communist progeny himself, might say, more “flexible” than that?

Only by omitting such a “link” between Clinton and Putin’s Russia (and $145 million for the Clinton Foundation) can the media-political complex possibly paint Hillary as some kind of latter-day J. Edgar Hoover, anti-Communist firebrand — and never, ever the Alinskyite candidate. So omit it they do.

Here’s their storyline:

Supposedly, because of Trump’s (failed) attempts to do business in Russia; supposedly, because, as described, for example, by Anne Applebaum, among Trump’s advisers are 1) Carter Page, who, she writes, has “long-standing connections to Russian companies, including Gazprom, and has supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine”; and 2) campaign manager Paul Manafort, who “worked for many years in Ukraine on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president ousted in 2014,” Donald Trump is “finally” America’s honest-to-goodness “Manchurian candidate.”

Applebaum writes: “But now it is 2016, truth is stranger than fiction, and we finally have a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, with direct and indirect links to a foreign dictator, Vladimir Putin, whose policies he promotes.”

“Finally”? This presumes US presidential candidates and, by extenstion, their administrations, have had no such “links” before. This is like saying FDR didn’t have Harry Hopkins et al (to the max); as if FDR’s Veep and 1948 presidential candidate Henry Wallace didn’t have at least two top Soviet spies in waiting to fill top cabinet posts (FDR alumni Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White); as if Harry Truman, with full knowledge from the FBI, didn’t appoint Soviet agent White to head the IMF; as if Robert Kennedy didn’t have an ongoing “back-channel” relationship with Soviet agent Georgi Bolshakov; as if Bill Clinton didn’t mysteriously vacation in Brezhnev’s Moscow in December 1969 and Prague less than a year after Soviet tanks crushed Prague Spring; as if Obama wasn’t mentored and guided by a troika of Soviet-linked Communist progeny, and more.

PHILADELPHIA — Democrats put in plenty of good words for Hillary Clinton during their convention yesterday but they focused most of their energy on trying to assassinate the character of Donald Trump.

The Left is now going after the Republican nominee with brass knuckles. The latest Democrat attack line accuses Trump of committing treason for asking Russia or any other governments that may have Clinton’s mountain of missing emails in their possession to return them to the United States.

Meanwhile, the prospect of Democrat unity going into the November election fades with every passing hour. Hatred, discord, and disgust are everywhere. The Bernie Sanders people don’t trust the Hillary Clinton people. The Hillary Clinton people are growing increasingly angry at a good chunk of the Bernie Sanders people for not falling in line and backing the nominee. Just as internal dissent is roiling the Republican Party, a civil war is brewing among Democrats. In the end most Democrats will probably support their nominee. The question is what fraction of the party will sit the election out, defect to Trump, or embrace the Green or Libertarian parties. The burning hatred of Hillary is still palpable in many state delegations.

All the convention talking points about how brilliant, kind, compassionate, visionary, selfless, humble, and tough Clinton is are wearing thin as the delegates keep clapping their hands like trained seals in the Wells Fargo Center. Democrats want to take the focus off Hillary, who is both a terrible candidate and a terrible person and throw the spotlight on the sometimes erratic Donald Trump.

That is the current state of the party that invented the politics of personal destruction and that during the Obama years has been laser-focused on fundamentally transforming, that is, destroying, what’s left of America.

Amidst the continuing heatwave, delegates were still deeply divided, caught up in factional fights during Day Three of the Democratic National Convention here. Disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters were still protesting and booing during speeches Wednesday.

And on the way out the door Sanders stuck it to the party with which he briefly aligned himself. After getting what he wanted from Democrats, the self-described socialist abruptly announced he is leaving the party. Despite his pleas from the convention floor for party unity and an impassioned endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Sanders said at a Bloomberg News-hosted breakfast that he will return to the U.S. Senate as an Independent.

“I was elected an Independent,” he told reporters.

So that apparently closes the book on Bernie’s adventures in the Democratic Party.

The Trump-bashing fest was long and loud.

Right now, prisoner #47042-083, Abdurahman Alamoudi, sits in his cell in a federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky.

It’s a long way down from being one of Hillary Clinton’s favorite colleagues. Alamoudi organized White House events during the Bill Clinton administration. Under Hillary’s supervision, he held official positions: Alamoudi was strategically placed at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.

That is, until he was arrested and convicted in a bizarre Libyan intelligence/al-Qaeda assassination plot to kill the Saudi crown prince.

Later, he was identified by the Treasury Department as an Al-Qaeda fundraiser who had operated inside the United States.

Hillary Clinton and Abdurahman Alamoudi were no mere acquaintances. According to an affidavit filed in court by Georgetown professor John Esposito, Alamoudi was asked by Hillary Clinton to arrange the first White House Ramadan iftar dinner in 1996:

Hillary – Alamoudi iftar (Esposito)

It appears that no media outlet has ever asked Hillary Clinton about her relationship to Alamoudi.

Under the Clinton administration, Alamoudi was tasked with founding and developing the Defense Department’s first-ever Muslim chaplain program. Alamoudi himself handpicked the Pentagon’s Muslim chaplain corps.

As I reported in 2010, one of those chaplain trainers was al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

The State Department, during the Clinton administration, appointed Alamoudi as a goodwill ambassador and sent him on six official taxpayer-funded trips to the Middle East. Remarkably, after Alamoudi’s 2003 arrest a federal agent testified in an affidavit about a recording of Alamoudi complaining to an audience that the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania did not kill enough Americans.

Years before he was helping Hillary Clinton arrange official dinners at the White House, Alamoudi had already been known to the FBI for al-Qaeda fundraising.

PHILADELPHIA, PA — Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders may have endorsed Hillary Clinton in the race against Donald Trump, but his supporters are more rabid than ever. On Tuesday, the second day of the Democratic National Convention, after Sanders gave his speech to support Clinton, a group of Sandersnistas made their voices known.

The “Bernie or Bust” crowd actually moved to be more visible to the Democratic delegates as they entered the convention to cast their votes for the nominee.

Here are the 16 photos and videos that best capture the “Bernie or Bust” movement, right as the Democrats were officially nominating Hillary. Enjoy!
18. Hillary is a Mother Fracker!

Michelle Obama’s 2016 speech to the DNC stands in sharp contrast to an essay written in the early 1990s by Glenn Loury titled “Free at Last? A Personal Perspective on Race and Identity in America.” Loury recounts how, as a young black man growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he lacked the courage to stand up for a friend named Woody, who had “a Negro grandparent on each side of his family but looked like a typical white boy.” Woody never chose to pass as a white person yet, when both young men attended a political rally and Woody stood to speak “[h]e was cut short before finishing his first sentence by one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge, who demanded to know how a ‘white’ got the authority to have an opinion about what black people should be doing. That was one of [the] problems, the brother said, we were always letting white people ‘peep our hole card,’ while we were never privy to their deliberations in the same way.” Loury explains that a

silence then fell over the room. The indignant brother asked if anyone could ‘vouch for this white boy.’ More excruciating silence ensued. Now was my moment of truth; Woody turned plaintively toward me, but I would not meet his eyes. To my eternal disgrace, I refused to speak up for him. He was asked to leave the meeting, and did so without uttering a word in his own defense.

In recalling this painful memory of “betraying someone he had known for a decade,” Loury describes how “…this desire to be regarded as genuinely black… dramatically altered [his] life. It narrowed the range of [his] earliest intellectual pursuits, distorted [his] relationships with other people, censored [his] political thought and expression, informed the way [he] dressed and spoke, and shaped [his] cultural interests. Some of this was inevitable and not all of it was bad, but in his experience the need to be affirmed by one’s racial peers can take on a pathological dimension.”

So what does this have to do with Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama? She and her husband have never evolved from their strident, all-consuming race-consciousness and “addiction to indignation.” As a student, “Miss Robinson wrote a senior thesis entitled ‘Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.'” Some excerpts from the thesis include the following:

“Predominantly white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”
“[My Princeton experiences] “will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”
“I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”
“In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community… I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.”

Bill Clinton on Tuesday portrayed his wife as a “change maker” whose life has overflowed with good intentions and commitment to others. No one can spin a yarn like Bill, and for the believers it was a touching portrait. But if it’s true, why do the polls show that 68% of Americans don’t trust Hillary Clinton? That has to do with the rest of the story, which is how the Clintons have used politics to enrich themselves and retain power.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the words you didn’t hear Mr. Clinton speak: the Clinton Foundation. This supposedly philanthropic operation has become a metaphor for the Clinton business model of crony politics. The foundation is about producing a different kind of “change.”

No doubt the foundation does some charitable good, but this is incidental to its main purpose of promoting the Clinton political brand. Since its creation in 1997, the nominal nonprofit has served as a shadow Super Pac, designed to keep the Clintons in the national headlines, cover their travel expenses, and keep their retinue employed between elections.

The payroll has included Huma Abedin, who drew a State Department salary even as she managed politics at the foundation and is now vice-chairwoman of the Clinton campaign. Dennis Cheng raised money for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, then became the foundation’s chief development officer and now leads Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 fundraising. Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff at State, sat on the foundation board. And don’t forget Sid Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton Svengali who was secretly advising Mrs. Clinton at State while drawing a foundation salary. This may not be illegal but the charity here is for the Clintons’ benefit.
The funding for this political operation has come from nearly every country and major company in the world. These contributors have the cover of giving to charity, when everybody knows the gifts are political tribute to a woman determined to be President. Donations to a charity aren’t governed by the same caps or restrictions as those that go to a traditional Super Pac. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren somehow overlooked this in their Monday night riffs against money in politics. CONTINUE AT SITE