Doug Santo

Salena Zito:

“…In the aftermath of Tuesday’s news that both former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen were found on the wrong side of the law in separate court cases, the question asked most frequently by the press, Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans is, “Where do Trump voters go now?” The answer is the same that it has always been since they first started asking it Nov. 9, 2016: With Trump.

This new conservative populist coalition is not the fluke the political class hoped it was. Donald Trump did not cause it, he is just the result of it, so no matter what he does, it continues. It is predicated on them, not him.

The coalition is a strike at not just tone deafness in both Congress and the White House but also high levels of incompetence, negligence and shoddy performance at agencies, as well as inept social services, a bloated and incompetent bureaucracy, endless wars and multinational agreements and treaties that don’t benefit average people.

These voters knew who Trump was going in, they knew he was a thrice-married, Playmate dating, Howard Stern regular who had the morals of an alley cat. They were willing to look past all of that because of how institutions had failed their communities for three consecutive presidencies.

Right now the value of Trump to the Trump voter is he is all that stands between them and handing the keys to Washington back over to the people inside Washington. That’s it. He’s their only option. You’ve got to pick the insiders or him.

So the question becomes: Can the Democrats pick someone who is Trump? Someone who just says, “I don’t trust anybody in Washington either. They all suck. The Democrats sucks, the Republicans suck and Trump’s a crook.”
If they could pick a Trump for their side, then Trump could have a problem. But as it stands we only really only have two parties; the party of the governing elite and the party of Trump.

That is why they stick with him…”

https://nypost.com/2018/08/22/why-trumps-supporters-wont-care-about-cohen-and-manaforts-convictions/

Michael Barone:

“…When you lose a game, particularly a game you had good reason to expect you’d win, do you try to figure out how to play better? Or is your first reaction to demand changes in the rules?

In the case of the Democratic Party, it’s the latter. Perhaps that comes naturally to a party that takes some pride in having advocated changes in rules that everyone today sees as unfair (even those, like racial segregation laws, that they enacted themselves). But sometimes it’s wiser to change the way you play than to denounce long-established rules.

The Democrats argue that they’ve been winning more votes but don’t control the federal government. They’ve won a plurality of the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but have elected presidents in only four of them. That darned Electoral College— “land,” as one liberal commentator puts it — gave the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.

Of course, the Gore and Clinton campaigns knew that the winner is determined by electoral votes, not popular votes. But that hasn’t stopped many Democrats from calling for changing the rules to election by popular vote.

Or from complaining about the composition of the Senate. A majority of senators, writes ace election analyst David Wasserman, represent only 18 percent of the nation’s population. That’s because under the Constitution, each state elects two senators, and a majority of Americans today live in just nine states.

It’s suggested that the framers didn’t expect population to be so heavily concentrated in a few states. Actually, it was similarly concentrated in big states 50, 100, 150 and 200 years ago. And when the framers met in 1787, small states demanded equal Senate representation precisely from fear that the big states would dominate them. . . .

It’s true that the Electoral College works against a party whose voters are geographically and demographically clustered. For the Framers, that was a feature, not a bug. They feared domination by a concentrated bloc of voters with no broad support across the country.

A party which wants to win more elections might take note of that and look to broaden its support base, rather than plead for impossible constitutional changes and fiddle with fixes that might produce unanticipated negative consequences…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/democrats-will-do-better-playing-by-the-rules-than-denouncing-the-rules

Watch Lanny Davis on television talking about Michael Cohen’s plea deal. It is pure politics, but it was a criminal prosecution. A political prosecution now being used by Davis for political purposes. This is the state of our corrupt Department of Justice and FBI and MSM. It is a disgusting disgrace. The president should use this fiasco in every media opportunity, every rally, every time he speaks to the nation. The corrupt government bureaucracy will do everything in their power in an attempt to remove Trump from office and the democrat media will go along. 

Mark Penn:

“…Here we go, from Russia with love to campaign finance with love.

Why was Michael Cohen investigated? Because the “Steele dossier” had him making secret trips to meet with Russians that never happened, so his business dealings got a thorough scrubbing and, in the process, he fell into the special counsel’s Manafort bin — the bin reserved for squeezing until the juice comes out. And now we are back to 1998 all over again, with presidents and presidential candidates covering up their alleged marital misdeeds and prosecutors trying to turn legal acts into illegal ones by inventing new crimes.

The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini-crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals of Trump meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who doesn’t try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump (while acting as his lawyer) to corporations for millions of dollars, and didn’t pay taxes on millions…”

http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/402959-cohens-plea-deal-is-prosecutors-attempt-to-set-up-trump

Trump Derangement Syndrome in full effect!

Toure on Trump:

“We don’t need to hear him say the ‘n’ word to know he’s racist. He has one of the longest resumes of racist behavior and rhetoric of anyone in this entire country.”

He then added:

“This is the king of birtherism. This is the man who’s attacking the NFL constantly. This is a man that stands on black people’s necks so that he can appear taller to white people. White nationalism and white entitlement were at the basis of his campaign. We don’t need anymore evidence — the jury is in.”

And a bit later, as he reacted to Stewart downplaying the issue of racism as a societal problem, Toure said:

“In Corey’s presentation, part of what I hear is part of why black people are not dealing with the GOP at this point. He is talking about that we are obsessed with race, right? And he has this color blind approach that everybody will rise. And that’s not the case, right?

“We know that this is a white supremacist country, and we have to deal with that every day in how we relate to the police, in how we relate to jobs, in how we relate to the criminal justice system and everything.”

Rich Noyes, the research director the Media Research Center explains our weekly pick: “Even as polls from sources as varied as Rasmussen Reports and the NAACP show Donald Trump’s approval rating has significantly increased among African Americans since the 2016 election, MSNBC is not only slamming the president as a ‘racist,’ but condemning the entire United States as a ‘white supremacist country.’ But it was only a few years ago that MSNBC celebrated the historic racial progress signified by the election, and re-election, of an African American president — hardly the act of a ‘white supremacist’ country. Trashing the United States as a nest of racists is untrue on its face, and the mark of a radical blame-America-first leftist.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/liberal-media-scream-msnbc-expert-calls-us-a-white-supremacist-country

This masterful tweet from the president is sure to have the media crowd boiling over with Trump Derangement Syndrome!

“…Just watched former Intelligence Official Phillip Mudd become totally unglued and weird while debating wonderful @PARISDENNARD over Brennan’s Security Clearance. Dennard destroyed him but Mudd is in no mental condition to have such a Clearance. Should be REVOKED? @seanhannity7:06 PM – Aug 20, 2018…”

Stephen Moore:

“…Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no.

The answer to that question is the U.S. of A. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never ratified the Kyoto Treaty some two decades ago. We never enacted a carbon tax. We don’t have a cap-and-trade carbon emission program. That environmental villain Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord that was signed by almost the entire rest of the civilized world.

Yet the latest world climate report from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy finds that in 2017, America reduced its carbon emissions by 0.5 percent, the most of all major countries. That’s especially impressive given that our economy grew by nearly 3 percent — so we had more growth and less pollution — the best of all worlds. The major reason for the reduced pollution levels is the shale oil and gas revolution that is transitioning the world to cheap and clean natural gas for electric power generation…”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/21/whos_the_cleanest_of_them_all_137850.html

Hollywood weirdos going to be weird. You can’t make this up!

“…The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight.

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

That claim and the subsequent arrangement for payments are laid out in documents between lawyers for Ms. Argento and Mr. Bennett, a former child actor who once played her son in a movie…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/asia-argento-assault-jimmy-bennett.html

Michael Goodwin:

“…This month marks the two-year anniversary of one of the most important articles ever written on journalism. On Aug. 7, 2016, after Donald Trump formally secured the Republican nomination and the general election was underway, New York Times media columnist James Rutenberg began with a question:

“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

Under the Times’ traditional standards, the right answer is that you wouldn’t be allowed to cover any candidate you were so biased against. But that’s not the answer Rutenberg gave.

Instead, quoting an editor who called Hillary Clinton “normal” and Trump “abnormal,” Rutenberg suggested “normal standards” didn’t apply. He admitted that “balance has been on vacation” since Trump began to campaign and ended by declaring that it is “journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment.”

I wrote then that the article was a failed attempt to justify the lopsided anti-Trump coverage in the Times and other news organizations. It was indeed that — and more, for it also served as a dog whistle for anti-Trump journalists, telling them it was acceptable to reveal their biases…”

https://nypost.com/2018/08/18/the-medias-hatred-of-trump-is-only-hurting-itself/

Related:

Glenn Reynolds:

“…The problem for journalists is that unbiased objective coverage, though it might actually be more damaging to Trump in the long run, doesn’t allow for virtue-signaling. And they value the approval of their peer group for having the correct attitudes more than they value anything else…”

Despite the President’s tax cuts—or because of them!

“…Perhaps you’ve read that the federal budget deficit is rising again, and that’s true. But what you probably haven’t heard is that the main reason is spending, not falling revenue from tax cuts.

The Congressional Budget Office released its budget summary for July this week, and the deficit for the first 10 months of fiscal 2018 reached $682 billion, up $116 billion from a year earlier. Federal spending increased by $143 billion for all the usual reasons—especially Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

But revenues were higher as well—up $26 billion. Corporate income taxes were down substantially as expected in the wake of the tax reform that cut the corporate rate and added 100% expensing. But individual income taxes increased by $104 billion, or 7.9%, despite the cut in individual tax rates…”

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/08/wsj-personal-income-tax-revenues-are-up-79-despite-trump-tax-cuts.html

Kurt Schlichter:

“…If we had a real media and not the world’s most pompous Democrat transcription service, the CIA’s blown Chinese spy ring disaster would be front page news but hey, Omarosa! In any case, the only consulting anyone should do with the members of this class of unmitigated failures whose incompetence brought us 9/11, Iraq, Libya, ISIS, and a future where we would all be wise to learn Mandarin, is to ask their opinion and then do the opposite – Costanza style. Let’s look at our elite’s track record of success. Don’t worry – it won’t take long…”

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/08/20/pulling-their-clearances-is-only-the-start–its-time-to-stamp-out-elite-privilege-n2511233

Step aside, Sister Jean. pic.twitter.com/Mazk5IUoN3

— Cut4 (@Cut4) August 19, 2018

This is a masterpiece of character development in a movie.

Former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova picks up on the previous post from Hannity.

Hannity is usually too one sided for me, but in this case, he has summarized the available evidence with respect to the actors responsible for DOJ/FBI CIA malfeasance during the last presidential election. This is an important video if you want to understand the Obama Administration’s attempt to derail the Trump candidacy, and later, presidency. These people should be under criminal investigation. The Trump-Russia collusion investigation is a manufactured lie.

A good article that correctly captures an important aspect of Trump’s appeal.

Julie Kelly:

“…One reason Donald Trump won the presidency is that Americans are tired of being ignored by the ruling political class.

A poll taken several months before the election revealed that neglected voters overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump above any other candidate: “Voters who agreed with the statement ‘people like me don’t have any say about what the government does’ were 86.5 percent more likely to prefer Trump. This feeling of powerlessness and voicelessness was a much better predictor of Trump support than age, race, college attainment, [or] income,” wrote Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.

This is the Trump appeal that the ruling political class refused—and still refuses—to acknowledge. It is why Republicans were willing to overlook his personal peccadillos, and why voters in 206 counties who twice chose Barack Obama helped elect Donald Trump. It is why rural moms, union toughs, small business owners, and soybean farmers fill steamy Midwestern assembly halls during summer’s peak to rally around a thrice-married, brash, egotistical Manhattan billionaire who is the working class’s most unlikely champion. It is why Republican candidates across the country are bragging about their Trump-BFF status in tight primary races…”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/18/the-untouchables-vs-the-deplorables/

THE SHORT LIFE OF THE #METOO MOVEMENT: Minnesota Democrats endorse Ellison amid abuse allegation.

“…The takeaways found by Zogby Analytics: 

1. Republicans are doing much better than they were a few months ago when it comes to the congressional generic.
2. Republicans continue to make big gains with independents, small city voters, and union voters. President Trump is doing well enough among his base-men, older voters age 50+, Walmart Shoppers, NASCAR fans, voters without college degrees, rural voters, small city voters, plus, voters in general are happy with their current finances, and optimistic about the next four years for the economy.
3. Since our last poll in June, the president has consolidated his lead over Democrats when it comes to who voters trust on issues of growing the economy and security.
4. President Trump will need to get his numbers in the mid-forties percentage wise regarding who voters trust more “growing the economy and keeping America safe” among voters age 25-34, women, and independents. Trump will also need to receive strong support from his base to prevent Democrats from making serious gains in the November congressional midterm elections.
5. Trump’s doing alright regarding his job approval rating, and is much more trusted with “growing the economy and keeping America safe” than Democratic leaders. He is also benefitting from a decent economy, a low unemployment rate and an inflated stock market. All of these factors can change pretty quickly. From now until November lots of things can change, and there is always lurking an “October surprise”, which could hurt Republicans…”

1https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trump-trusted-more-than-democrats-to-boost-economy-keep-us-safe