Where Does the Presidential Race Stand?

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A week out from their first debate, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is considered the winner in her initial encounter with Republican opponent Donald Trump. As reported by Politico, Clinton’s poll-confirmed victory — such as those by Fox News and The Washington Post and ABC News — has helped increase her lead over Trump in a slew of state and national polls.

But Politico also noted that while Clinton appeared to trounce Trump in the debate, her election advantage remains “a low-to-mid-single-digit” nationally and in most battleground states.

The Real Clear Politics (RCP) average of polls shows a similar story, with Clinton’s lead being just 2.5 points. Huffington Post’s trend tracker, meanwhile, shows Clinton with a 5.2-point lead, even as a Los Angeles Times poll shows Trump with a five-point lead.

While the RCP and Huffington Post methods have their strengths and drawbacks, the race as a whole has been much tighter than predicted by many political insiders.

An example of the reaction by many of those same insiders is a Monday piece by Politico’s Glenn Thrush. He is critical and mocking of Trump — describing the race as one where “the unloved candidate trumps the hated one, the polls say.” He also described Trump as “the most outrageous and detested presidential nominee in recent memory” who “still gets his 38 to 43 percent in virtually every national poll.”

But while Trump may not be liked by most of America, wrote Thrush, Clinton doesn’t fare much better:

Meantime, a vast swath of the United States still can’t stomach Clinton. In the course of one mid-September day in deep-blue Maryland, I had a doctor pull his stethoscope off my chest to declare, “I’m a life-long Democrat and I don’t know what the h*** I’m going to do” and an African-American cabbie, who idolizes Barack Obama, muse about sitting this one out.

Nate Silver’s analysis currently gives Clinton a 70 percent chance of victory right now, and while things could change, the post-debate polls make it clear that each candidate would have to do a great deal to swing the race one way or the other. Here are a couple of things that could quickly change the dynamics of the race:

Trustworthiness

Neither candidate is trusted, with Trump facing attacks on his business practices throughout his career. Clinton, meanwhile, has been hammered with scandals surrounding her family’s charitable foundation and her activities as Secretary of State, to say nothing of the baggage she carries from past Clinton scandals.

A major scandal about either candidate could swing things as the race closes. Monday’s announcement, for example, that Trump’s Foundation has been issued an order to stop fundraising because it didn’t file proper paperwork probably doesn’t rise to the occasion, and who knows what Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will be revealing about Clinton in a video announcement now set for Tuesday.

While the top groups investigating Trump’s background have liberal bents — such as The New York Times with its non-story on Trump’s taxes on Saturday, or the New York state Attorney General who issued the fundraising order against Trump — a federal investigation into the Clinton Foundation is being done by Preet Bharara. Bharara is a Democrat who worked for Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) in Washington but has shown no qualms about targeting high-ranking state Democrats and Republicans alike.

If he was to find something of significance in his Clinton Foundation investigation, it would be hard for Clinton to claim Bharara is a partisan hack, something Trump’s campaign is claiming about the Times’ editors and the New York Attorney General.

Health

Clinton’s health has been questioned even by some Democrats, especially in light of secrecy surrounding a recent bout of what the campaign said was pneumonia and dehydration.

Clinton performed very well during the debate, appearing energetic and on point, while a sniffling Trump looked nonplussed during much of their 90 minutes onstage.

Debates

Two solid debate performances by Trump probably won’t change the equation on their own, but the echo chambers of the media could sway voters who after last week’s debate performance and subsequent attacks on a former Miss Universe winner (including a 3:00 a.m. Twitter outburst) may be hesitant to trust Trump’s decision-making capabilities.

A physical collapse by Clinton during any debate could be devastating.

The Ever-Lurking October Surprise

A Muslim terrorist attack could help Trump, as could another Dallas-style revenge attack against police. Conversely, Clinton could politically benefit from an unjust police shooting, or a racist “lone wolf” attack like the one in 2014 in Charleston.

If the economy improves, the headlines could benefit Clinton. Conversely, given the slow growth of the U.S. economy in recent years, a perceived or actual downturn could harm Clinton.

Even the weather could play a role, as Mitt Romney found out in 2012 with Hurricane Sandy. At this hour, Hurricane Matthew is set to strike Haiti, which could draw attention to the Clintons’ post-earthquake antics in that impoverished nation. Also, during Louisiana’s recent floods, Donald Trump gained much needed credibility with his visit, while Clinton stayed home. If Hurricane Matthew affects the U.S., Clinton won’t make the same mistake again. And her steadiness and experience might contrast well with the political novice.

Tracking the storm should serve as a good reminder that while statistics and historical precedent can point to the way things are likely to go, no one knows what’s going to happen until landfall — or election day. (For more from the author of “Where Does the Presidential Race Stand?” please click HERE)

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Obama Administration Is Willing to Break the Law to Save Obamacare

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President Barack Obama’s signature health care law is failing and his administration will go to seemingly any length to prop it up.

You know the famous quote from “Animal Farm” that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others?” This was George Orwell’s attempt to point out the hypocrisy that many politicians preach equality, but then give favors to only a few.

Well, for the Obama administration, it turns out that the health insurance companies participating in Obamacare happen to be “more equal” than taxpayers—even to the point where the administration is willing to break the law to help them stay in Obamacare.

To see what I mean, consider the Transitional Reinsurance Program. Section 1341 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, authorizes the secretary of Health and Human Services to collect payments from health insurance companies and group health plans to stabilize health insurance markets during the transition to Obamacare’s exchange-based coverage.

The transitional period is set, by law, to cover the plan years 2014 through 2016. However, section 1341 also requires HHS to collect payments from those companies to cover specified amounts and to deposit that money in the general fund of the United States Department of the Treasury.

The requirement to deposit a portion of the collections essentially earmarks that money for deficit reduction. The statute explicitly says that the collections for Treasury cannot be expended on the program. In other words, it cannot go back to the insurers unless Congress provides another appropriation redirecting those funds.

However, HHS has decided to ignore this requirement altogether by allocating all of the collections toward covering the losses of insurance companies. The administration’s decision to redirect all of the collections to the insurers and none to Treasury came only after Obamacare was up and running and the administration found out that it wasn’t collecting as much as expected from the unprofitable insurers.

Not only is favoring a select few over the taxpayers unethical, but according to a recent legal opinion issued by the Government Accountability Office, it’s also illegal. The GAO’s legal opinion is important given its statutory authority to issue legal decisions on the availability of appropriated funds by federal agencies under the Budget and Appropriations Act of 1921 (P.L. 67-13).

According to the GAO:

The fact that HHS’s collections ultimately fell short of the projected amounts does not alter the meaning of the statue. Addressing similar circumstances, courts have held that an agency has an obligation to ‘effectuate the original statutory scheme as much as possible.’ … In such cases, courts have held that a pro rata distribution of funds would most closely adhere to Congress’s original allocation … We do not see any flexibility under section 1341(b)(4) to all HHS to expend the pro rata share of collections attributable to the Treasury … Instead, these collections must be deposited in the Treasury.

Furthermore, that GAO concluded that HHS’ selective reading of the law is “driven solely by the factual circumstances present here, namely, lower than expected collections.” But this unfortunate outcome is not reason to ignore statutory requirements:

… HHS’s position selectively ignores one of the statute’s purposes—which is collecting funds for the Treasury—giving effect to only one of the statute’s purposes—stabilization of health insurance premiums … We agree that a purpose of section 1314 is to provide premium stabilization in the initial years of PPACA’s health insurance reforms. However, this is not the sole purpose of section 1341. Congress clearly intended that the program established under section 1341 would generate collections for the Treasury.

This goes to show that this administration is willing to do just about anything, even breaking the law, to prop up the failing Obamacare. (For more from the author of “Obama Administration Is Willing to Break the Law to Save Obamacare” please click HERE)

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Virginia Hasn’t Stopped Noncitizens From Voting, Watchdog Finds

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More than 1,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Virginia and cast nearly 200 ballots in elections before being purged from voter rolls, according to a government watchdog group.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation released its findings Tuesday from only eight of Virginia’s 133 voting jurisdictions. So, the group suggested, the problem of noncitizen voting could be more widespread.

Virginia is making no effort to prosecute offenders, said J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer who now is president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

“Virginia election officials don’t seem to care that thousands of ineligible aliens have corrupted their voter rolls by illegally registering to vote,” Adams said in a written statement. “Even worse than doing nothing about it, they are trying to cover it up.”

A total of 31 of the 1,046 registered voters who were noncitizens voted between 2005 and 2015, casting 186 ballots, the organization found.

Virginia has been a battleground state in recent elections. Two races for state attorney general—in 2005 and 2013—were determined by fewer than 1,000 votes statewide. So, voter fraud opponents argue, even a few illegal votes can carry a lot of weight.

It is a federal crime and a violation of Virginia law for noncitizens to vote. The federal penalty for an ineligible voter found to have cast a vote could be a fine or imprisonment for no more than one year. Under Virginia law, it is a Class 6 felony for an ineligible voter to vote, punishable by not less than one year of imprisonment and not more than five years.

The foundation’s report says:

In our small sample of just eight Virginia counties who responded to our public inspection requests, we found 1,046 aliens who registered to vote illegally.

The problem is most certainly exponentially worse because we have no data regarding aliens on the registration rolls for the other 125 Virginia localities. Even in this small sample, when the voting history of this small sample of alien registrants is examined, nearly 200 verified ballots were cast before they were removed from the rolls. Each one of them is likely a felony.

The report asserts that the Virginia State Board of Elections, the panel that oversees the state’s Department of Elections, directed local election officials not to provide information to the legal foundation.

The Department of Elections did not respond to phone messages and email inquiries Tuesday from The Daily Signal.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation sought information from 19 cities and counties in the state, but got the data from only eight.

Prince William County had the largest number, 433, of noncitizens purged from the rolls by election officials. Loudoun County was next at 310, followed by Stafford County with 128, the city of Alexandria with 70, Bedford County with 35, Hanover County with 28, the city of Roanoke with 22, and the city of Fairfax with 20.

The report says:

In the eight jurisdictions that provided us with lists of aliens recently removed from their voter rolls, we discovered that 31 noncitizens had cast a total of 186 votes between 2005 and 2015. The most alien votes were cast in 2012 followed by 2008, the year President Obama was elected to his first term.

The report goes on to criticize the state’s lack of verification for citizenship in voter registration:

There is plenty of blame to go around. One culprit, however, is glaringly obvious—federal and state voter registration forms, which ask registrants to affirm their citizenship with nothing more than the check of a box. No documentary proof of citizenship must be shown. It is nothing more than an honor system, one that is unquestionably failing to keep noncitizens from voting.

Alexandria General Registrar Anna Leider, who is in charge of elections and voter registration in the city, previously told The Daily Signal that the city provided the Public Interest Legal Foundation with all the information required by law.

After it cleans the voter rolls, Leider said, a jurisdiction is not required to check for past voting activity—whether the name removed is a noncitizen, someone who died, or someone who moved outside the jurisdiction. (For more from the author of “Virginia Hasn’t Stopped Noncitizens From Voting, Watchdog Finds” please click HERE)

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Mark Levin Blasts ‘Know-It-All’ Obama and His Leftist ‘Racial Obsession’

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“This racial obsession … bordering on hatred … runs deep in the veins of Barack Obama,” said Mark Levin during his radio show Tuesday night.

His remarks came in response to a recently surfaced documentary of Barack Obama visiting Kenya in the 1990’s. The video shows know-it-all Obama assessing racial tension in the country and complaining about white privilege.

“This has nothing to do with blacks, and everything to do with left-wing Americans,” Levin said. “And there [Obama] is, ‘I just wish blacks in Kenya had more confidence’ … well how does he know blacks in Kenya don’t have confidence? I mean, seriously, who the hell is he?!”

Listen below to hear the full clip:

“Here’s another place that [Barack Obama] wanted to fundamentally transform,” Levin quipped.

It seems everywhere Leftists go all they see is societal tension and racial disharmony that ONLY they can fix. (For more from the author of “Mark Levin Blasts ‘Know-It-All’ Obama and His Leftist ‘Racial Obsession'” please click HERE)

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Clinton Estate Tax Plan Would Affect Many Families, Not Just the Very Rich

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Hillary Clinton’s newly proposed top estate tax rate of 65 percent on $1 billion estates can sound innocuous enough to the average taxpayer. Last year only a handful of estates would have been large enough to have been affected. If that was all there was to the new Clinton estate tax announced in September, most families would be wiser to focus on other things.

But Clinton’s 65 percent estate tax is really just the tip of the iceberg. She also wants to lower the level at which estate taxes become payable to only $3.5 million. By contrast, Donald Trump would eliminate the estate tax.

In addition, Clinton’s website says she would end the current law pertaining to capital gains—which her website calls an “egregious loophole”—whereby inheritors of assets bought decades ago only owe tax when they sell them, not when they inherit them. Under her plan, a much larger capital gains tax than now would be due, and it would be due at death.

A person mourning a loved one might have no choice but to sell inherited assets to pay capital gains taxes. Clinton’s website states that “[Her estate tax plan] will include exemptions to ensure this change only affects the high-income families who by far benefit the most from this loophole, and protects middle-class families.” However, no details as to the exemptions have been announced. (For more from the author of “Clinton Estate Tax Plan Would Affect Many Families, Not Just the Very Rich” please click HERE)

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EXPOSED: The Corrupt Clinton Foundation You’ve Never Heard Of

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Three months after leaving the White House in 2001, former President Bill Clinton arrived in India to cheering throngs to help those who had just lost a million homes in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that killed 20,000 and injured 166,000.

In classic Clinton style, he solemnly promised that his new nonprofit — called the American India Foundation (AIF) — would rebuild 100 villages. Rajat Gupta, his millionaire co-chairman, pledged $1 billion for the victims.

It never happened. Years later, AIF’s annual reports were reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation and show only seven villages were partially rebuilt by Clinton’s group, and a mere $2.7 million of $53 million raised over a decade went to the earthquake victims.

The rest went for completely unrelated projects, including “accelerating social change,” fighting AIDS, “sustainable development,” and working for “digital equalizers.”

Paltry aid for the victims notwithstanding, Clinton handsomely profited from the charity as AIF’s top officers poured more than $13 million into the Clinton Foundation and others generously gave to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns. (Read more from “EXPOSED: The Corrupt Clinton Foundation You’ve Never Heard Of” HERE)

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New Lawmakers’ Project Aims to Support Religious Institutions

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A new project has been launched to show the need of religious institutions, which are in danger of losing influence in society as they face challenges to their existence today.

“We need our faith-based institutions,” Republican Study Committee Chairman Bill Flores, R-Texas, said at the launch of the America Without Faith project at the Hillsdale College Kirby Center in Washington, D.C., in September.

The project, launched by the largest conservative caucus in Congress, the Republican Study Committee, aims to reinforce the importance of religious institutions’ role in civil society. These institutions have a long history in the maintenance of civil society, and have played an important role in solving problems such as drug addiction, illiteracy, hunger, homelessness, and supporting families living below the poverty line.

It was created “to help members of Congress and religious liberty advocates communicate about how important the work of faith-based groups are for our nation today,” the RSC said in a press release.

“I think we’ve seen the president [Barack Obama] of the executive branch try to belittle or embarrass Christians in particular and to say that we’re ignorant and that therefore we’re discriminatory. … I think by trying to marginalize us and intimidate us that he’s taken that sort of mindset and pushed it through the entire government bureaucracy,” said Flores, who will oversee the project. “It’s up to us as Americans to try to start rolling that back.”

Since the inception of America, religious institutions have played a foundational role in the country. They’ve been a boon to preserving a strong civil society, but now, according to the RSC, they exist on “shaky ground” as targets of both cultural and governmental forces have formulated strategies to create friction in their ability to do their work.

“Over the past decade they have faced repeated challenges to their very existence, including threats to revoke their tax-exempt status,” says the RSC.

“There are strong cultural forces afoot that want America to become a more and more secular nation,” Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute said at the Hillsdale College event. They pose a “risk of politicizing philanthropy,” Husock warned, adding, “America is the most generous and charitable country on earth, but our public policies could put an end to that.”

Flores, a supporter of Yellowstone Academy, a nonprofit faith-based institution with 350 students in Houston, Texas, talked about the difference in success rates between the federal government and religious-based institutions.

According to Flores, less than 20 percent of students graduate from public high schools in that part of Houston. However, “the first class of students that came in as 4 year olds at Yellowstone just graduated from high school in May with a 98 percent graduation rate,” he said.

“No federal bureaucrat can make that happen,” Flores added. “No federal bureaucrat can institute that sort of change in a community that’s been struggling for decades.”

A strong correlation exists between religious practice and a vibrant civil society, because “religious practice promotes the well-being of individuals, families, and the community,” wrote Patrick F. Fagan, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Research on Marriage and Religion at the Family Research Council.

“Regular attendance at religious services is linked to healthy, stable family life, strong marriages, and well-behaved children,” Fagan, a former senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, added. “The practice of religion also leads to a reduction in the incidence of domestic abuse, crime, substance abuse, and addiction.”

“Why punish the organizations that are serving their communities, providing free social services, and helping our economy?” Alison Howard, director of alliance relations at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal aid group, said in a statement provided to The Daily Signal.

“Religious institutions should be free to live out their mission in society without threat of punishment by the government and the political elite,” she added.

Gridlock in Washington, Flores said, makes it impossible to introduce new legislation to stop these forces from eroding the influence of faith-based institutions. Although, for him, all hope is not lost.

“The best way to have this happen is for this message to get out to real world America, to the grassroots of America, and everybody says ‘Aha, we have got too close to that tipping point, it’s time to start pulling back,” Flores concluded, highlighting the urgency of the problem. (For more from the author of “New Lawmakers’ Project Aims to Support Religious Institutions” please click HERE)

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‘Men Without Work’: America’s ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ of Unemployment

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America is in the midst of an ongoing crisis that predates the war in Iraq, with devastating, far-reaching consequences exceeding those of the 2016 presidential election. Some 10 million able-bodied men between the ages of 20 and 64 are missing from the workforce today.

Work rates for prime-aged adult men in this country have been falling for most of the post-World War II era. In his newly released book, “Men Without Work” from Templeton Press, AEI political economist and demographer Nicholas Eberstadt explains the economic, historic, and cultural precedents for this modern tragedy.

“Romans used the word ‘decimation’ to describe the loss of a tenth of a given unit of men,” Eberstadt writes. “The United States has suffered something akin to a decimation of its male workforce over the past 50 years.”

He adds, however, that “unlike the dead soldiers in Roman antiquity, our decimated men still live and walk among us, though in an existence without productive economic purpose.”

Hiding in plain sight

Politicians, economists, and the mainstream media have failed to detect this aggressive cancer and diagnose its symptoms, and so the problem has remained largely untreated, metastasizing within our borders for the last half century.

In “Men Without Work,” listed are recent examples of when the mainstream media failed to capture this problem “hiding in plain sight”:

The Jobless Numbers Aren’t Just Good, They’re Great (Bloomberg, August 2015)

The Jobs Report is Even Better Than It Looks (FiveThirtyEight, November 2015)

Healthy Job Market at Odds with Global Gloom” (The Wall Street Journal, March 2016)

June’s Super Jobs Report (Atlantic Monthly, July 2016).

Further, it points out that U.S. economists and policymakers seem to have formed a bipartisan consensus that the nation’s economy is either at or near “full employment,” when “we are, in reality, living through a period of extraordinary, Great Depression-scale underutilization of male manpower.”

But if circumstances are so dire, why haven’t we noticed the effects? Eberstadt offers two explanations for why this “quiet postwar collapse of male work” did not lead to political outcry/crises or chronic issues of worker shortage in various industries. The first is the progressive and exponential growth of women in the workforce after World War II. The second factor is the voluntary exodus of men from the workforce.

The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR), the common statistical tool used to gauge economic health and growth, only accounts for the number of people who are either employed or actively seeking employment. What it doesn’t account for, however, are the individuals who are unemployed and not actively looking for work. Because this drop in male employment is caused by a “willing outmigration,” it flies under the radar (as far as official government statistics are concerned).

Invisible men

Who are these invisible “men without work”? Based on a variety of demographical factors, Nicholas Eberstadt concludes that they are most likely to be 1. less educated; 2. never married and without children; 3. native born; and 4. African-American. But, he clarifies, the task of predicting who is more likely to become a not-in-the-labor-force (NILF) male isn’t that simple:

“No matter their race or educational status, married men raising a family work more, and never-married men without children or children in their home work less. No matter their ethnicity or race, prime-age men who come to this country work more than those here by birth.”

He notes that while that wedding rings and green cards don’t ensure “innate advantage in the competition for jobs,” decisions to marry or migrate “point to motivations, aspirations, priorities, values, and other intangibles that do so much to explain real-world human achievements.”

Free from the time commitments of family, work, work travel, and job searching, NILFs have more spare time than any other category of Americans (Eberstadt estimates this to be an additional 2,150 hours a year compared to employed men). What’s shocking, however, is how little of this extra free time is spent “helping others in their family or community.”

Based on data from 2014, these men spent less time engaged in religious and volunteer activities. By contrast, the amount of time this group spent on socializing, relaxing, and leisure — e.g. gambling, tobacco and drug use, listening to the radio, and arts and crafts “as a hobby” — amounted to a full-time job.

Quiet catastrophe

“Americans may be the hardest working people of any affluent society in the world today, yet no other developed nation simultaneously floats such a large proportion of its prime-age men entirely outside the labor force … ,” AEI’s Eberstadt observes.

One possible reason for this, he suggests, could be greater social toleration for unemployed able-bodied men who subsist on the produce of others, be they family, wives or partners, or the government. And though well-informed people are bound to disagree about the causes of this uniquely American problem, the consequences are manifold.

In addition to the economic consequences of an underutilized male work force, there are social repercussions of this modern catastrophe — such as family breakdown, increased dependency on government-funded programs like welfare and disability, and increased economic dependency of able-bodied men on women. Political consequences include male withdrawal from civic engagement, community participation, and voluntary association.

Finally, the additional costs associated with the human need for purpose, as opposed to mere “work,” are noted. Foremost, it is the loss of self-purpose and accomplishment, and the inevitable loss of self-esteem and respect of others that emanate from perpetually idle hands.

“Men Without Work” admits that as of now, there is no clear or simple solution to this “grave social ill,” but there are at least three areas of focus that can help to propel the country in the right direction:

1. “revitalizing American business and its job-generating capacities”;

2. “reducing the immense and perverse disincentives against male work embedded in our social welfare programs”;

3. “coming to terms with the enormous challenge of bringing convicts and felons back into our economy and society.”

Nicholas Eberstadt calls for collaborative problem solving, and stresses that a bipartisan effort is needed to eradicate this modern “social emasculation” and bring these men “back into the workplace, back into their families, and back into civil society.” (For more from the author of “‘Men Without Work’: America’s ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ of Unemployment” please click HERE)

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Queen of Political Opportunism: 5 Things You Don’t Know About Hillary

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Americans feel like they know everything there is to know about Hillary Clinton — and Donald Trump for that matter.

But there are five things you may not know about Hillary.

1. Pakistan

Hillary criticized Senator Obama’s position when he advocated for attacking terrorists havens in Pakistan before she took credit for advising him to send Seal Team 6 into Pakistan to capture and kill Obama Bin Laden. Clinton lies and hypocricy should not shock anybody, yet this duplicitous claim has gone under reported.

PolitiFacts reported back on February 27, 2008:

At the Democratic debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on Feb. 26, 2008, Sen. Hillary Clinton stole a line from Sen. John McCain and President Bush.

Clinton said that last summer, Sen. Barack Obama “basically threatened to bomb Pakistan, which I don’t think was a particularly wise position to take.”

Clinton’s line echoes recent comments by McCain, who told reporters Feb. 20 that Obama “suggested bombing Pakistan,” and Bush, who said in a Feb. 17 TV interview that he didn’t know much about Obama’s foreign policy except that “he’s going to attack Pakistan and embrace (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad.

This was one of those issues that raised Republican eyebrows when Senator Obama argued that if he had actionable intelligence that bad guys were hiding in Pakistan, he would use it and not hesitate to act on it. A position that is reasonable and had many Republicans siding with Obama over McCain.

It was truly bizarre that Sen. McCain, R-Ariz. (F, 32%) and Hillary Clinton would hit him on that statement because it was the right position — and that hypothetical became reality when Hillary was secretary of state.

Obama’s position was mapped out on August 2007 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and said (as quoted by PolitiFacts):

I understand that (Pakistan) President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.

Hillary criticized that statement, yet she repeatedly bragged that she advised President Obama to go into Pakistan to get Bin Laden. According to a Washington Post account “Through weeks of sometimes heated White House debate in 2011, Clinton was alone among the president’s topmost cabinet officers to back [the Osama Bin Laden raid].” I guess she supported the raid before she opposed it.

Too bad Hillary was not as decisive during the Benghazi attacks when Americans were at risk. She seems to have run away from that disaster and you will not find heroic chapters in any of her books detailing her tough choices when it comes to Libya. All of her decisions with regard to the Libyan war and the Benghazi attacks were wrong.

2. Flip Flop on Marriage

Hillary was for traditional marriage before she became a self-proclaimed champion for gay marriage. What a profile in courage!

In 2004, Senator Hillary Clinton spoke on the Senate floor and said the following when voicing opposition to a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one woman and one man:

I believe that marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond, between a man and a woman. I have had occasion in my life to defend marriage. To stand up for marriage. I believe in the hard work and challenge of marriage. I take umbrage at anyone who might suggest that those of us who worry about amending the Constitution, are less committed to the sanctity of marriage. To the fundamental bedrock principal that it exists between a man and a woman going back into the mists of history as one of the founding, foundational institutions of history, humanity and civilization and its primary principal role in during those millennia are those raising and socializing of children into society where they are about to become adults.

Wow — she would be jailed as a deplorable hate monger for saying those things today.

Can you imagine if Donald Trump said those words during the last debate? Hillary would have called him a homophobic, anti-gay bigot. Only a Clinton could be 100% pro traditional marriage in 2004, then completely flip flop ten years later and make believe that she always supported gay marriage.

3. Clinton Tax Avoidance

Although the Clinton campaign is apoplectic that Trump will not release his returns and evidently used a massive capital gains loss as a way to avoid paying taxes, Hillary seems to have done the exact same thing. From Zero Hedge:

While not on the scale of Trump’s business “operating loss”, Hillary Clinton – like many ‘wealthy’ individuals is taking advantage of a legal scheme to use historical losses to avoid paying current taxes.

I guess that makes her smart to avoid paying taxes, but a hypocrite for hitting Trump for taking advantage of the same tax law that she took.

4. Senator Clinton’s List of Accomplishments

Hillary Clinton acts as though she has had a long and distinguished career as a politician, yet her time as senator resulted in very few accomplishments.

According to a National Review Online piece from July 28, 2016 written by Nicole Goeser and John R. Lott, Jr.:

In her eight years in the Senate, just one of Hillary’s bills got enacted into law. This bill designated the U.S. courthouse at 40 Centre Street in New York City as the “Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse.”

Pretty lame record of accomplishment.

5. Hillary Changed Her Name for Political Purposes

How does President Hillary Rodham sound? Before Hillary changed her name to adopt Bill Clinton’s last name, she had been a good feminist and refused to take his surname. One could not be a Clinton without flip flopping on an issue as central to a person’s being as one’s last name.

According to a U.S News and World Report story from January 30, 2007:

When Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were wed on Oct. 11, 1975, she kept her maiden name, not realizing it would become a controversial decision. After her husband’s defeat for re-election in the 1980 Arkansas gubernatorial election, she changed her surname to Clinton. Voters had questioned their marriage’s stability.

Shocking to think that in 1975 Rodham and Clinton had marital problems. Who knew?

These five facts are yet five more reasons that confirm American’s belief that Hillary Rodham Clinton is untrustworthy, duplicitous and dishonest. Clinton has flip flopped on issues from the Bin Laden raid to her own last name. (For more from the author of “Queen of Political Opportunism: 5 Things You Don’t Know About Hillary” please click HERE)

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The NY Times’ Transparent (and Hypocritical) October Surprise of Trump’s Tax Returns

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There’s only one news story popping up for the Sunday morning circus and it’s the long anticipated October surprise from The New York Times. Late Saturday evening they released a partial set of state tax documents belonging to Donald Trump which show a nearly one billion dollar business loss he took more than twenty years ago. As Business Insider explains, this factoid allows them to speculate that The Donald may have paid no federal taxes for nearly twenty years.

Donald Trump may have avoided paying federal income taxes for 18 years, according to tax records obtained by The New York Times and published on Saturday night.

The documents indicated that Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995, providing him with a deduction so large it could have eliminated his obligation to legally pay annual federal taxes by up to $50 million for nearly two decades, tax experts told The Times.

The fire under all of this smoke is, of course, barely enough to light a cigar, but that’s not the point of the story. You’ll notice a constant set of phrases in all of the coverage of this “bombshell” release. They include things such as, might have and could have or may not have paid. That’s because the actual document only shows a massive loss which Trump claimed in 1995. What’s been established is that the loss in question opened the door to Trump potentially not owing any federal taxes over a considerable period of time because of the $916M loss. What’s also mentioned in decidedly muted tones is that if Trump wound up not owing any federal tax, that it was completely legal.

Let’s assume for a moment that Trump took full advantage of the tax laws in the way being described. (And frankly I’d start questioning his sanity if he didn’t.) This means that the Times has “caught” him following the tax code to pay the smallest amount of tax possible under the law. I mean, it’s not like anyone else does that, right? If Trump were A Good Person he would have massively overpaid his taxes and then we could all celebrate what a wonderful fellow he is, just like the people who handle the tax returns of the New York Times. Oh, wait… in 2014 the Gray Lady paid zero taxes and received millions in refunds despite having declared a substantial profit. (Read more from “The NY Times’ Transparent (and Hypocritical) October Surprise of Trump’s Tax Returns” HERE)

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