Category: Joel Skousen Page 10 of 19

World Affairs Brief, November 11, 2016 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.
Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).
This Week’s Analysis:
Trump Victory Shocks the World
Manipulating the Election
World Reactions to Trump’s Win
Clinton Backers Sore Losers
Can Trump Live Up to His Promises?
Preparedness Tip: Prep Your Bicycle
[…]
MANIPULATING THE ELECTION”
I’ve received not a few emails from subscribers asking, “How could Trump possibly have won given the amount of vote fraud going on?” Another version was, “The margin between Trump and Clinton in several states was small enough that it seems that the voting machines could have flipped enough votes to her for her to win with no one being the wiser. So how could the PTB allow this to happen?”
I think the answer to that is that Trump’s final margin of victory exceeded the percentage of vote fraud that the manipulators dared to use. The reason for that limitation is that vote fraud has to be limited to a few percentage points lest the fraud becomes obvious by statistical analysis of exit polls. Fraud probably accounted for no more than 3%, and that wasn’t enough to counter the surge in vote for Trump.
Computer Voting Machine Fraud: There were reports coming in from many parts of the country documenting the flipping of votes from Trump to Clinton. Here’s a link to a typical example. I’ve summarized below a pattern of manipulation we can see from this type of computer vote flipping:
1) All examples were changing Republican votes to Democratic, never the other way around.
2) The most common machine vote flip was to specific change from a vote for Trump to Hillary.
3) All these results happened in conservative areas of voting–not in areas where Hillary was expected to win handily.
4) Vote flipping was only happening in 1 or 2 out of every 10 machines.
5) Most people were catching the errors and calling vote officials to correct the machines.
The first 4 points above prove that this can only be programming manipulation—not random errors. What is also noteworthy, which you can see in the Pennsylvania news report above, is that election and media officials never drew the conclusion that machines had been tampered with as proof of vote fraud.
Not a single official would even hint that vote fraud was a possibility. That shows some pre-conditioning and bias to defend the superficial “integrity” of the election process. All they could talk about is how the machines were either taken off line or recalibrated to fix the problem. Recalibrating would, of course, take the machine back to its original state and erase the manipulating code.
There is also the potential of vote tally manipulation after voting is complete. Since vote flipping shows up on the screen, where most people catch the error, I think this type of fraud is on the way out. Changing the tally at the end of the process is less visible and can only be detected by a detailed audit of all the vote receipts, which is never done.
That may be the reason why we’ve seen no call by the Clinton campaign for any recounts, even in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania where the margin of victory for Trump was so slim. I suspect that an audit would show significant vote fraud in favor of Clinton, and the PTB don’t want any evidence manipulation of voting computers discovered. The coverup would be messy.
I also suspect that the delay in reporting highly democratic areas in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was to let vote tally officials time to decide if they could get away with fudging the tally in these areas where it wouldn’t arouse suspicion if Clinton had an even bigger lead. And, since the polls gave Clinton a projected lead before the election, this kind of fraud wouldn’t seem out of line with polling data. Ultimately, they may have decided against it for a couple of other reasons:
1) Trump was winning too many other swing states and they’d have to manipulate the end tally of more than one state, which increases the risk of discovery and collusion.
2) Trump was increasing his lead slightly all those swing states even as the votes counted got close to 100%. So, a sudden surge by Clinton to top Trump would force Trump to call for a recount, which might expose the final tally manipulation.
Keep in mind that no major recount has ever been allowed since electronic voting machines have been in place. Computer audits have taken place, and are mandated by law in some locations. And, all have shown computer manipulation of the count, but election officials wave it off as an error, change the final tally to match the computer’s addition, and go on as if everything is OK.
Overall, I would say the Democratic ground game is at least as effective as computer vote flipping in permanently increasing Democratic voters. Helping minorities fill out voter registration papers, and picking them up and transporting them to the polls accounts for many hundreds of thousands of additional votes in swing states where minorities are a high percentage of the population. They don’t bother to do this in areas where conservatives are a majority.
It is also apparent that millions of Hispanic illegals vote each year. In fact, this year Obama committed an impeachable offense by encouraging illegals to vote—telling them that their fears of being deported or being rejected at the polls are unfounded, as Breitbart.com reported.

Obama took time to be interviewed on Friday by a Latino Youtube host. “Many of the millennials, dreamers, undocumented, um, citizens — and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country — are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?” asked host Gina Rodriguez on MiTu, a program on Youtube.com and Facebook. “Not true,” Obama replied.

President Barack Obama’s Nov. 4 suggestion that voting by illegal aliens in the 2016 presidential election will not be investigated is “absolutely shocking,” says the former Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer.

Neil Cavuto [in a separate interview] turned to Brewer for her take on Obama’s bizarre statement. “I can’t believe how blithely the President of the United States, the keeper of our Constitution, and all the rights that come with it, including the right to vote, legal citizens having the right to vote, blithely dismissing that,” Cavuto said. [And that’s the impeachable offense.]

“Shocking. Absolutely shocking,” Brewer said. “He should have absolutely set her straight that if you’re not a citizen, you don’t get to vote. And just because you’re in our country ‘undocumented,’ you’re not a citizen. They want to blur the lines.”

Media Bias: Traditionally, the media is quick to inform people who the “top candidates” are for the presidency as the first step in manipulating public opinion. In the process they exclude those they don’t want to run. Both Romney and Trump defied that system by having enough money and notoriety to inject themselves into the race in spite of the media filtering process.
But once in this race the media had to deal with Trump’s rash comments which were a magnet for media coverage. Personally, I don’t think Trump did this on purpose, as a calculated move. I’m convinced it’s just part of his personality. He’s brash and impulsive and doesn’t have the mental control skills to restrain himself when speaking off the cuff.
At first the media loved it because it gave them an opportunity to bash Trump and embarrass any conservative who took similar positions to Trump’s imprecise way of representing the issues. But after it became apparent that Trump’s popularity increased the more the media attacked him, they were stuck. Trump was now a major force to be reckoned with. Inevitably, their only weapon was to keep up the attacks on Trump as he continued to hand them ammunition every time he opened his mouth.
But here’s the key question: How can conservatives complain about media bias when they themselves are embarrassed by much of what Trump says, and especially his explicit comments about groping women, as the Access Hollywood tapes exposed? Wasn’t the media justified in being critical of Trump?
Yes they were, but that’s not the issue when it comes to bias. There was an easily discernable difference between how they treated Trump’s negative issues versus those of Hillary Clinton.
1) They turned Trump’s verbal gaffs into a drumbeat, repeating them over and over again. There was no drumbeat over Hillary Clinton’s Foundation corruption or the email scandal, despite the big opportunity for analysis that it presented. In fact, whenever they would mention these problems, they would interview someone who downplayed them or excused them.
2) The media went to great lengths to search out and broadcast the minutest details of Trump’s indiscretions. They had paid staffers calling every contestant involved in Trump’s Miss Universe pageant to find any who had a negative experience with Trump. However, when talking about Hillary’s Foundation corruption, they would avoid even a detailed recitation of the charges. They also failed to interview former intelligence officials who were outraged by Hillary’s use of a private email server for classified messages. They would never try to track down, let alone mention, the credible evidence of Bill’s predation on women, nor give air time to one of Bill Clinton’s former mistresses who testified that Bill told her directly about Hillary’s use of cocaine and her preference for women sexual partners.
3) The media selectively interviewed Republican women who were uniformly outraged by Trump’s behavior and broadcast their comments. But moral outrage is easy to showcase in a one sided manner if you don’t also present those women with equivalent opportunities to express moral outrage over Clinton’s misconduct. They never search out Democratic women who might be outraged by Hillary’s use of cocaine, being a lesbian, or using “pay to play” tactics to enrich her Foundation while Sec. of State. Sadly, most Democratic women probably would be tolerant of the lesbian charges, being politically correct.
All of these are indications of heavy media bias toward Hillary Clinton. The day after the election Judy Woodruff of NPR’s News Hour brought on air a cross section of commentators to discuss how Trump won the election.
J D Vance, a writer who specializes in white, working class Americans and how they feel disrespected, started off with a blockbuster—that this sector of America feels vindicated by Trump, in that they knew the “media is corrupt and they were lying about the outcome of the election, and Donald Trump really proved them right… So I think there should be some soul searching among the press who predicted that Trump would lose handily; and of course that didn’t happen… that corrodes some of the trust that people back home have in the media.”
Woodruff excused the media by saying they were just following the polls, which they don’t produce. There was a brief discussion about whether the media was looking for data to affirm their liberal bias.
In the next segment she decided to try and get 3 commentators to help out by addressing whether or not the media was “lying” as JD Vance had suggested. Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post was quick to deny there was any lying or intent to deceive, as would be expected from that very biased mainstream paper –“nothing so venal,” she said. My response would be that manipulation and deception can be more subtle than outright lying, but it’s still manipulation.
One of those invited to participate was Steve Deace, a prominent conservative talk show host from Iowa. He’s been on before because he’s anti-Trump, but this time he turned the tables on the News Hour. Co-host Hari Sreenivasan asked him “how much of this is a disconnect between those who are writing the stories and those out there living them in middle America?”

“I think there is a massive disconnect” “How many people in the news room right here now, at PBS, how many are Pro-Life? How many go to church or to mass at least once a week? How many voted for Trump? There’s a lot of talk of diversity nowadays, but there’s a huge lack of ideological diversity in our newsrooms. And I think that’s creating a massive disconnect, nationwide.”

You could tell his questions hit home, as Judy and Hari had no comeback. Woodruff was noticeable shaken by the clarity of the logic and did not try to deny that they were all anti-Trump. She stammered on about how we try to be neutral and present both sides, but his point was clear. When you are biased to this degree, you can’t present both sides in a balanced way.
Polling Bias: Pollsters are scrambling to explain away how all the mainstream pollsters got it wrong. The Hill.com details just how bad the polling was:

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, had long said the polls were biased against him. His claims — dismissed and mocked by the experts — turned out to be true.

Going into Election Day, a strong majority of pollsters and election modelers forecast that Democrat Hillary Clinton would coast to victory, with many predicting she would sweep the battlegrounds and win north of 300 electoral votes.

The final University of Virginia Center for Politics model had Clinton winning 322 electoral votes to 216 for Trump, with Clinton winning Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all states that she lost.

Liberals lashed out at data guru Nate Silver for giving Trump a 35 percent chance of victory heading into Election Day, claiming he was putting his thumb on the scale for Trump by making the race appear closer than it was.

Of the 11 national polls to be released in the final week of the race, only two — a Los Angeles Times/USC survey and one from IBD/TIPP — showed Trump with the lead. The L.A. Times survey was criticized as “experimental” by industry experts for polling the same pool of people and for the way it weighted black voters.

But for the second consecutive presidential cycle, the L.A. Times and IBD/TIPP surveys were among the most accurate, making them the gold standard going forward.

The rest of the polls showed Clinton with leads of between 2 and 6 points, boosting the Democrat to a 3.3-point national lead in the RealClearPolitics average.

And the battleground data was just as biased against Trump. There were no surveys released this year from Wisconsin that showed Trump with a lead. 

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, deep blue states the GOP candidate has not won in decades, polls showed the race tightening in the home stretch, but only one poll, from Trafalgar Group, showed Trump with the lead.

Election modelers declined to flip either state into Trump’s column, even as the Clinton campaign rushed furiously to defend those states in the final days of the election [showing she knew there were problems]. And Trump won North Carolina by nearly 4 points, despite polls showing a toss-up there. 

But state after state told the same story for Trump and Clinton. White working-class voters — the silent majority that Trump said was being underestimated by pollsters — swarmed for him on Election Day, particularly in the Rust Belt states, and helped him beat the polls.

Clinton could not turn out women, or the Obama coalition of minorities and young voters, in the same numbers to keep pace.

Pollster John Zogby believes that many in the industry weighted their polls too heavily in favor of Democrats, pointing to polls that had an 8- to 9-point advantage for the party, when it should have been in the 4- to 5-point range, he said.

There’s a reason for all this emphasis on weighting. The polling industry has become very crowded and competitive leading to cost cutting measures—meaning using less people and more computer driven “robocalling.” Also, the number of people accessible to pollsters has dwindled dramatically with the increasing number of people with cellphones (where robocalls are prohibited) as opposed to landlines where that is allowed. It’s just too expensive to have phone banks do a lot of telephone polling, so pollsters take the dwindling number of existing respondents and multiple their responses to approximate what they think exists among society. That’s called weighting. This may explain why even the Trump pollsters got it wrong.
However, as pollsters’ databases age, they become more inaccurate and less representative of what’s real. Coupled with the fact that pollsters already play tricks with weighting to fudge the numbers toward the Left, they can easily get it wrong.
Many pollsters excused their performance by saying that millions of Trump voters were “silent” meaning not in their database. That may be true, but that is the pollster’s own fault since they long ago stopped spending serious money on broadening those limited databases.
One of the most serious examples of manipulated polling happened in Utah. The week prior to the election, Utah polls were saying that Evan McMullin, (the Romney and establishment choice to run an independent spoiler campaign against Trump) was nearly even with Trump (22% to 23%). It was all the rage to anticipate how McMullin was going to deny Trump the electoral college majority and throw the race to the House of Representatives, who would pick McMullin.
Nonsense. Trump ended up with almost half the vote, and McMullin got his predicted 23%. How could the polls be right on about McMullin’s numbers and be off by 25 points with Trump? -Pure manipulation.
Third Party effects: With so much dissatisfaction with both Trump and Clinton, third party candidates on both the Left and Right could have had a large effect. It turns out they didn’t. While support for the quasi Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and his globalist VP William Weld was as high as 10% when Trump grabbed the nomination, their final support level came in at only 3.4%.
In like manner Jill Stein of the Leftist Green party claimed 5% support to start but ended up with slightly less than 1%. But that’s not the entire story. I think that’s because the initial outrage against Trump’s tone gave way to heightened fears about living under a Hillary regime. People wanted to see her defeated more than stand on principle. However, combined totals for both third party candidates did cost Trump and Clinton votes in 4 battleground states as MSNBC noted,

In Florida, Hillary Clinton lost by about 1.4% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.

Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Clinton lost by about 1.1% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.

In Wisconsin, Clinton lost by about 1% of the vote – but if Stein’s supporters had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state. In Michigan, Clinton appears to be on track to lose by about 0.3% of the vote – but if half of Stein’s supporters had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.

Those are big assumptions. I’m not at all inclined to think that 50% of libertarians would have countenanced Hillary Clinton.

World Affairs Brief, October 21, 2016 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

This Week’s Analysis:

Debate Disappointment

Is the Election Rigged?

Hillary’s Sexual Liaison’s with Women

The Bogus Shadow Government Claim

The Ill-conceived Battle for Mosul

Russia Reestablishing Old Naval Bases

Two More Bogus Stories on the Net

DEBATE DISAPPOINTMENT

I was very disappointed in Donald Trump’s lack of preparation for this final debate. With few exceptions, all he could do was repeat the worn out cliches he has used in prior debates. In contrast, Hillary came prepared with tens of memorized statements and a barrage of lists citing Trump’s faults. Granted, her remarks were full of typical left-wing jargon– promising benefits and false liberal generalizations that are easy to debunk if Trump had made the least effort to prepare. I worry that Trump, after a year and a half of being in this quest for the presidency, still shows no signs of diligent mastery of the specifics behind his often correct attacks. How can you govern credibly without becoming a careful expositor of the threats and how to fix them? It’s not enough to say you’ll fix it, over and over again. Still, with all Trump’s flaws, it is Hillary that must be defeated.

Here are a few examples of his failure to prepare:

1) Clinton said, “The Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans,” and “This has come from Putin himself.” Trump failed to make her cite any quote from Putin, who denied hacking the DNC emails. She challenged Trump to accept U.S. intelligence findings that Russia is behind the leaks. All he could say was “I doubt it.” In fact, he could have challenged it on the basis that the US government has not presented a shred of evidence indicating how they came to this conclusion, other than to indict Russia based on “we said so.”

Left winger Ron Fournier of The Atlantic whined, “Why would any American, much less a potential president, find it so hard to accept the findings of U.S. intelligence officials and condemn a foreign country for trying to influence a U.S. election?” And by the way, Hillary was wrong when she said 17 agencies. It was two. Trump could have said, “Why should we trust the NSA or its leaders when they denied spying on Americans, after having done so for years, without legal authority?”

With a minimum of help from technical advisors, he could have explained that hackers can falsify their hacking footprint, imitate other hacks with similar software, and even falsify the origin of the hack.

2) Hillary mentioned making the wealthy “pay their fair share” three times in the debate, and Trump failed to counter with the devastating statistic that the top 20% of taxpayers already pay 84% of income taxes. That’s paying MORE than their “fair share.” Instead, he could only bluster about his taking advantage of loopholes which she failed to close while in the Senate, implying that they are bad. Why apologize for deducting losses? Deducting losses and depreciation is a core part of determining income. He failed to defend that essential principle.

3) When challenged on vote fraud Trump could only cite one general statistic about millions of ineligible voters that are registered to vote. He failed to counter the notion that states and local communities oversee the process with great care. He should have said, “with computer programming fraud, election officials will never know that an election is being altered because they almost never allow a recount of the paper ballots… and when they do, as in the required audit of Chicago Democratic primary, they found that hundreds of votes had been altered by the computer program and the election commission simply adjusted the tally for all those false votes rather than declare that computer fraud had occurred. So, I reject the notion that local communities are a safeguard of our election process.”

4) On the subject of the war against ISIS, instead of repeating his bluster about how he knows more than the generals and how he’s going to stamp out ISIS, he could have shown his specific knowledge of the subject by detailing how the US in Iraq has allowed ISIS to escape when they helped Iraq conquer Fallujah, and how they are already allowing them to escape in the battle for Mosul. He should have said, “As president, I will make sure ISIS is surrounded and eliminated so they can’t escape to fight somewhere else.” That would have made heads nod in agreement.

5) He failed to properly counter Clinton’s arguments for abortion about this being an exclusive right of women, and not something government should be involved in. Had Trump made even a modicum of preparation, he could have blasted Clinton’s argument that “the fetus has no constitutional rights.”

“Sorry Hillary, but it is the roll of government to stop people from killing their own children. You may not consider a fetus a child, but it is a separate human being with separate DNA and a separate spirit. Government’s duty is to protect life, including that of children from a mother’s wish to kill it for convenience. Yes, a woman has a right to engage in voluntary sexual relations, but she is not free from accepting the consequences of that act when a new life is created.”

6) He was not prepared with quotes to show how Hillary was lying when she said multiple times that she honored the Second Amendment and agreed that it was an individual right (the Hiller case). He failed to show how regulations can amount to a denial of the Second Amendment, as in the case of Washington DC which banned all private ownership of guns. But worst of all, he failed to counter Hillary’s lie that the seminal Hiller case was about the reasonable DC restriction on letting handguns be accessible to children. It was much more draconian than that.

7) He failed to counter Hillary’s claim that Trump’s intent to deport would take years of police going house to house, and to schools, deporting parents and separating families. As I have pointed out in prior briefs, he could have proposed a period of temporary amnesty giving them time to self deport, with heightened penalties for staying—which would cause many to leave on their own. He should have pointed out that there was no reason for illegal parents to leave their children behind just because the courts have falsely declared them citizens by being born here. “Take them home with you.”

Trump failed to counter Clinton’s claim of “wanting to get everyone out from the shadows” and working. He should have pointed out that this sounds noble, but this kind of amnesty creates a magnet for millions more to come.

8) Trump failed to counter Clinton’s claim that giving corporations a tax break will cause trillions in deficits. He should have mentioned that turning America into a haven of low taxes will repatriate the trillions of dollars put into offshore financial accounts, and will cause corporations to move back onshore.

9) Trump failed to prepare with details countering Hillary’s claim to be a defender of women’s rights against abuse. Here is the most devastating video on Hillary’s hypocrisy on support women who have been abused. This is a game changer. Why isn’t the Trump campaign using it?

What Trump did partly right:

1) He rightly brought up the dramatic revelations that the Clinton campaign had paid protestors to create violent confrontations at the Trump rallies, but he failed to cite one of the Veritas Project videos which would have pointed the audience to the undercover work they did, infiltrating as Democrats and secretly recording campaign leaders admitting to dirty tricks. He should have said, “Everyone ought to see these videos to see just how corrupt and undemocratic the Clinton Campaign is.”

2) He rightly stated that he would select justices that interpret the constitution as it was designed by the Founders. But he failed to attack the generalizations that Clinton presented as violations of the limits on government in the constitution, inventing “women’s rights” on abortion which aren’t in the document. She gave him a huge opportunity to take apart her expansionist philosophy when she said,

“But I feel that at this point in our country’s history, it is important that we not reverse marriage equality, that we not reverse Roe v. Wade, that we stand up against Citizens United, we stand up for the rights of people in the workplace, that we stand up and basically say: The Supreme Court should represent all of us.”

No, the Supreme Court is tasked to represent the constitution which is the Supreme Law restricting both the executive and Congress from passing laws that violate the constitution’s restrictions on what government can arrogate to itself. He reluctantly inferred that judges he would pick would overturn Roe vs. Wade, which isn’t guaranteed at all. He did defend against late term abortions.

3) He correctly vowed to pick justices that would uphold the Second Amendment. Trump correctly pointed out that “In Chicago, which has the toughest gun laws in the United States, probably you could say by far, they have more gun violence than any other city. So we have the toughest laws, and you have tremendous gun violence.” But he should have added, “Gun restrictions on the law abiding don’t do anything to stop crime by thugs and criminals, who get any weapon they want outside of the law.”

4) Trump reiterated his intention to build the wall, but then he waffled on deporting all illegals by saying, “And once the border is secured, at a later date, we’ll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad hombres here, and we’re going to get them out.”

5) In the most condemning statement of the night, I think Trump was correct to hold off saying he would accept the results of the election until he saw what kind of vote fraud was involved. But, the next day Trump had second thoughts and now says he will abide by the election results, “if he wins.”

What the Moderator did right: Chris Wallace was, by far, the most balanced and fair of any moderator so far—probably because of all the flak his predecessors got from extreme bias.

1) Wallace cited specific evidence from Wikileaks showing how Hillary had used her position at the State Department to give special access to donors of her foundation, after promising Congress that she would divest herself of any contact with the Foundation during her tenure. Clinton dodged the question, and he brought her back to answer it again, but when she dodged it the second time, he failed to press her further. But his carefully worded statement and initial question was so condemning that she was damaged by it. The Daily Caller had this report on another major find:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arranged a $12 million donation from Moroccan King Mohammed VI to her family’s charity in 2014 in return for the Clinton Global Initiative hosting its international meeting in the North African Muslim nation, according to an email made public Thursday by Wikileaks.

2) Wallace pressed Clinton to explain why she publicly opposes trade policies that she privately embraced during paid speeches before well-heeled audiences like Goldman Sachs. She evaded that question too.

3) After Clinton claimed she was for border security, Wallace noted that she had never explained what she would do for border security. Wallace also cited the Wikileaks speech when she said she was for open borders in all of North America. Clinton lied in return, saying “I was talking energy,” but that isn’t to be found in the leak.

However, his biggest mistake of the night was not following up on Trump’s correct citing of the Clinton campaign hiring protestors to do violent acts. He could have cited the statements from the Veritas Project and asked her directly, “Did your campaign hire people to violently protest at Trump rallies and did your campaign pay to bus them in and out? It would have been good to see her squirm. Watch this blockbuster exposee here.

On the hot topic of Clinton’s support for a no fly zone in Syria, she refused to answer the direct question as to whether she would shoot down Russian aircraft and risk war. Here’s an excellent review of the eight major lies Hillary told during the debate by Edmund Kozak.

As for appearances, Hillary appeared to have days of medical preparation prior to this debate. None of her wrinkles were visible meaning that she had to be using dermal fillers. Even her hands were filled out. Not a hair was out of place. And, she wore white giving the appearance of the “good guy.” These medical interventions were intended to make her look young and healthy and to undermine the rumors about her bad health.

She also appeared to be reading some of her answers from notes on the podium. This isn’t necessarily proof that she had any questions beforehand, but that has happened in prior debates. Both candidates were given the six major topics.

In the end, what worries me most about Trump’s performance is that with it being so close to the final election vote, Trump shows no more mastery of any of the crucial subjects than he did when he started. He’s winging it on almost every topic, and almost never addresses any topic in a specific, accurate or credible manner. That isn’t to say his basic slash and burn claims are all wrong. The system is rigged. Hillary is corrupt and a liar, but without an accurate presentation of the facts, Trump can never get beyond his populist base.

And above all, I simply don’t have the confidence anymore that he will reach the proper conclusions on specific policies—including his hard core policies of immigration, global trade and refugees. I think he’d end up making bad compromises on them all, just like he’s starting to waffle on deportation. He got the nomination for saying he would “send them all home.”

Still, it would be fun to see the globalists squirm, trying so hard to manipulate him. Sadly, I don’t think we’re going to get that chance. All the mainstream polls show Clinton with a 5-9% lead ahead of Trump. Only the Rasmussen poll shows Trump slightly ahead: “The Rasmussen survey found that 87 percent of voters have locked in their votes. Among these, 48 percent support Trump and 46 percent back Clinton.” I’ll discuss how polls are manipulated in the next section.

World Affairs Brief, October 21, 2016 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.
Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).
This Week’s Analysis:
Debate Disappointment
Is the Election Rigged?
Hillary’s Sexual Liaison’s with Women
The Bogus Shadow Government Claim
The Ill-conceived Battle for Mosul
Russia Reestablishing Old Naval Bases
Two More Bogus Stories on the Net
DEBATE DISAPPOINTMENT
I was very disappointed in Donald Trump’s lack of preparation for this final debate. With few exceptions, all he could do was repeat the worn out cliches he has used in prior debates. In contrast, Hillary came prepared with tens of memorized statements and a barrage of lists citing Trump’s faults. Granted, her remarks were full of typical left-wing jargon– promising benefits and false liberal generalizations that are easy to debunk if Trump had made the least effort to prepare. I worry that Trump, after a year and a half of being in this quest for the presidency, still shows no signs of diligent mastery of the specifics behind his often correct attacks. How can you govern credibly without becoming a careful expositor of the threats and how to fix them? It’s not enough to say you’ll fix it, over and over again. Still, with all Trump’s flaws, it is Hillary that must be defeated.
Here are a few examples of his failure to prepare:
1) Clinton said, “The Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans,” and “This has come from Putin himself.” Trump failed to make her cite any quote from Putin, who denied hacking the DNC emails. She challenged Trump to accept U.S. intelligence findings that Russia is behind the leaks. All he could say was “I doubt it.” In fact, he could have challenged it on the basis that the US government has not presented a shred of evidence indicating how they came to this conclusion, other than to indict Russia based on “we said so.”
Left winger Ron Fournier of The Atlantic whined, “Why would any American, much less a potential president, find it so hard to accept the findings of U.S. intelligence officials and condemn a foreign country for trying to influence a U.S. election?” And by the way, Hillary was wrong when she said 17 agencies. It was two. Trump could have said, “Why should we trust the NSA or its leaders when they denied spying on Americans, after having done so for years, without legal authority?”
With a minimum of help from technical advisors, he could have explained that hackers can falsify their hacking footprint, imitate other hacks with similar software, and even falsify the origin of the hack.
2) Hillary mentioned making the wealthy “pay their fair share” three times in the debate, and Trump failed to counter with the devastating statistic that the top 20% of taxpayers already pay 84% of income taxes. That’s paying MORE than their “fair share.” Instead, he could only bluster about his taking advantage of loopholes which she failed to close while in the Senate, implying that they are bad. Why apologize for deducting losses? Deducting losses and depreciation is a core part of determining income. He failed to defend that essential principle.
3) When challenged on vote fraud Trump could only cite one general statistic about millions of ineligible voters that are registered to vote. He failed to counter the notion that states and local communities oversee the process with great care. He should have said, “with computer programming fraud, election officials will never know that an election is being altered because they almost never allow a recount of the paper ballots… and when they do, as in the required audit of Chicago Democratic primary, they found that hundreds of votes had been altered by the computer program and the election commission simply adjusted the tally for all those false votes rather than declare that computer fraud had occurred. So, I reject the notion that local communities are a safeguard of our election process.”
4) On the subject of the war against ISIS, instead of repeating his bluster about how he knows more than the generals and how he’s going to stamp out ISIS, he could have shown his specific knowledge of the subject by detailing how the US in Iraq has allowed ISIS to escape when they helped Iraq conquer Fallujah, and how they are already allowing them to escape in the battle for Mosul. He should have said, “As president, I will make sure ISIS is surrounded and eliminated so they can’t escape to fight somewhere else.” That would have made heads nod in agreement.
5) He failed to properly counter Clinton’s arguments for abortion about this being an exclusive right of women, and not something government should be involved in. Had Trump made even a modicum of preparation, he could have blasted Clinton’s argument that “the fetus has no constitutional rights.”
“Sorry Hillary, but it is the roll of government to stop people from killing their own children. You may not consider a fetus a child, but it is a separate human being with separate DNA and a separate spirit. Government’s duty is to protect life, including that of children from a mother’s wish to kill it for convenience. Yes, a woman has a right to engage in voluntary sexual relations, but she is not free from accepting the consequences of that act when a new life is created.”
6) He was not prepared with quotes to show how Hillary was lying when she said multiple times that she honored the Second Amendment and agreed that it was an individual right (the Hiller case). He failed to show how regulations can amount to a denial of the Second Amendment, as in the case of Washington DC which banned all private ownership of guns. But worst of all, he failed to counter Hillary’s lie that the seminal Hiller case was about the reasonable DC restriction on letting handguns be accessible to children. It was much more draconian than that.
7) He failed to counter Hillary’s claim that Trump’s intent to deport would take years of police going house to house, and to schools, deporting parents and separating families. As I have pointed out in prior briefs, he could have proposed a period of temporary amnesty giving them time to self deport, with heightened penalties for staying—which would cause many to leave on their own. He should have pointed out that there was no reason for illegal parents to leave their children behind just because the courts have falsely declared them citizens by being born here. “Take them home with you.”
Trump failed to counter Clinton’s claim of “wanting to get everyone out from the shadows” and working. He should have pointed out that this sounds noble, but this kind of amnesty creates a magnet for millions more to come.
8) Trump failed to counter Clinton’s claim that giving corporations a tax break will cause trillions in deficits. He should have mentioned that turning America into a haven of low taxes will repatriate the trillions of dollars put into offshore financial accounts, and will cause corporations to move back onshore.
9) Trump failed to prepare with details countering Hillary’s claim to be a defender of women’s rights against abuse. Here is the most devastating video on Hillary’s hypocrisy on support women who have been abused. This is a game changer. Why isn’t the Trump campaign using it?
What Trump did partly right:
1) He rightly brought up the dramatic revelations that the Clinton campaign had paid protestors to create violent confrontations at the Trump rallies, but he failed to cite one of the Veritas Project videos which would have pointed the audience to the undercover work they did, infiltrating as Democrats and secretly recording campaign leaders admitting to dirty tricks. He should have said, “Everyone ought to see these videos to see just how corrupt and undemocratic the Clinton Campaign is.”
2) He rightly stated that he would select justices that interpret the constitution as it was designed by the Founders. But he failed to attack the generalizations that Clinton presented as violations of the limits on government in the constitution, inventing “women’s rights” on abortion which aren’t in the document. She gave him a huge opportunity to take apart her expansionist philosophy when she said,
“But I feel that at this point in our country’s history, it is important that we not reverse marriage equality, that we not reverse Roe v. Wade, that we stand up against Citizens United, we stand up for the rights of people in the workplace, that we stand up and basically say: The Supreme Court should represent all of us.”
No, the Supreme Court is tasked to represent the constitution which is the Supreme Law restricting both the executive and Congress from passing laws that violate the constitution’s restrictions on what government can arrogate to itself. He reluctantly inferred that judges he would pick would overturn Roe vs. Wade, which isn’t guaranteed at all. He did defend against late term abortions.
3) He correctly vowed to pick justices that would uphold the Second Amendment. Trump correctly pointed out that “In Chicago, which has the toughest gun laws in the United States, probably you could say by far, they have more gun violence than any other city. So we have the toughest laws, and you have tremendous gun violence.” But he should have added, “Gun restrictions on the law abiding don’t do anything to stop crime by thugs and criminals, who get any weapon they want outside of the law.”
4) Trump reiterated his intention to build the wall, but then he waffled on deporting all illegals by saying, “And once the border is secured, at a later date, we’ll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad hombres here, and we’re going to get them out.”
5) In the most condemning statement of the night, I think Trump was correct to hold off saying he would accept the results of the election until he saw what kind of vote fraud was involved. But, the next day Trump had second thoughts and now says he will abide by the election results, “if he wins.”
What the Moderator did right: Chris Wallace was, by far, the most balanced and fair of any moderator so far—probably because of all the flak his predecessors got from extreme bias.
1) Wallace cited specific evidence from Wikileaks showing how Hillary had used her position at the State Department to give special access to donors of her foundation, after promising Congress that she would divest herself of any contact with the Foundation during her tenure. Clinton dodged the question, and he brought her back to answer it again, but when she dodged it the second time, he failed to press her further. But his carefully worded statement and initial question was so condemning that she was damaged by it. The Daily Caller had this report on another major find:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arranged a $12 million donation from Moroccan King Mohammed VI to her family’s charity in 2014 in return for the Clinton Global Initiative hosting its international meeting in the North African Muslim nation, according to an email made public Thursday by Wikileaks.
2) Wallace pressed Clinton to explain why she publicly opposes trade policies that she privately embraced during paid speeches before well-heeled audiences like Goldman Sachs. She evaded that question too.
3) After Clinton claimed she was for border security, Wallace noted that she had never explained what she would do for border security. Wallace also cited the Wikileaks speech when she said she was for open borders in all of North America. Clinton lied in return, saying “I was talking energy,” but that isn’t to be found in the leak.
However, his biggest mistake of the night was not following up on Trump’s correct citing of the Clinton campaign hiring protestors to do violent acts. He could have cited the statements from the Veritas Project and asked her directly, “Did your campaign hire people to violently protest at Trump rallies and did your campaign pay to bus them in and out? It would have been good to see her squirm. Watch this blockbuster exposee here.
On the hot topic of Clinton’s support for a no fly zone in Syria, she refused to answer the direct question as to whether she would shoot down Russian aircraft and risk war. Here’s an excellent review of the eight major lies Hillary told during the debate by Edmund Kozak.
As for appearances, Hillary appeared to have days of medical preparation prior to this debate. None of her wrinkles were visible meaning that she had to be using dermal fillers. Even her hands were filled out. Not a hair was out of place. And, she wore white giving the appearance of the “good guy.” These medical interventions were intended to make her look young and healthy and to undermine the rumors about her bad health.
She also appeared to be reading some of her answers from notes on the podium. This isn’t necessarily proof that she had any questions beforehand, but that has happened in prior debates. Both candidates were given the six major topics.
In the end, what worries me most about Trump’s performance is that with it being so close to the final election vote, Trump shows no more mastery of any of the crucial subjects than he did when he started. He’s winging it on almost every topic, and almost never addresses any topic in a specific, accurate or credible manner. That isn’t to say his basic slash and burn claims are all wrong. The system is rigged. Hillary is corrupt and a liar, but without an accurate presentation of the facts, Trump can never get beyond his populist base.
And above all, I simply don’t have the confidence anymore that he will reach the proper conclusions on specific policies—including his hard core policies of immigration, global trade and refugees. I think he’d end up making bad compromises on them all, just like he’s starting to waffle on deportation. He got the nomination for saying he would “send them all home.”
Still, it would be fun to see the globalists squirm, trying so hard to manipulate him. Sadly, I don’t think we’re going to get that chance. All the mainstream polls show Clinton with a 5-9% lead ahead of Trump. Only the Rasmussen poll shows Trump slightly ahead: “The Rasmussen survey found that 87 percent of voters have locked in their votes. Among these, 48 percent support Trump and 46 percent back Clinton.” I’ll discuss how polls are manipulated in the next section.

My favorite political analyst, Joel Skousen:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neU451qSjAE

Jeff Rense

My favorite political analyst, Joel Skousen:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neU451qSjAE

Jeff Rense