Drudge’s headline: “O’KEEFE: Hillary PERSONALLY ordered ‘Donald Duck’ troll campaign…”

Here is the video:

Key quote:

JAMES O’KEEFE: The connection between Creamer, President Obama and Hillary Clinton is undeniable, as are the campaign law violations. If it looks like a duck, if it talks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. They broke the law.

Last week, Hillary denied a connection to Creamer and AUFC (Americans United for Change).

The video demonstrates that Hillary Clinton Was PERSONALLY Involved with the Trump Ducks (Taxes) idea and the use of Donald Duck, making the contention that there was coordination between her, her campaign, and other groups an open-and-shut case. Indeed, the video demonstrates that it was her idea.

Other comments are hopefully coming later.

Topside update: Most current info — IBD Tied; Rasmussen, Trump +2, LA Times/USC, Clinton +1.3.

___________________________

The Tweet:

The strategy (click to see a larger view in a new tab or window):

And of course, the press is playing along:
- New York Times — “Victory in Sight, Clinton Seeks to Help Other Democrats Win”
- Associated Press — “Clinton Turns Focus to Down-Ballot Candidates in Final Days”

There are at least a couple of problems with all this presumption:

- IBD/TIPP, which was the most accurate poll in 2012, has Trump up by 2.

- (UPDATE: This item appears to be bogus, as suspected below, with motivation unclear) — Then there’s this —

It’s 10 days old, which is a lifetime in politics, and it’s conceivably bogus (but if it is, someone worked awfully hard to create it, harder than most scammers are willing to work). But … this is ostensibly from a guy who was on TV Sunday insisting that all is well. SO ASSUMING IT IS BOGUS, if they’re so confident and this is a false flag, why are they wasting their time with it?

This open thread is meant for commenters to post on items either briefly noted below (if any) or otherwise not covered at this blog. Rules are here.

From Bogota, Colombia:

Oct 22, 2016 / 05:20 pm

For two days this week, a shopping mall in Bogota, Colombia was transformed into a “Confess-a-thon,” as 120 priests administered the Sacrament of Reconciliation to shoppers and those passing by.

Priests from all over the country flocked to the Gran Estación Mall on Oct. 18-19 for the Confession event. This is the second time that the initiative has taken place. Last October, the first Confess-a-thon was held at the mall, with great success. Some 70 percent of the country is Catholic.

The Colombian Conference of Catholic Bishops said that the event is a sign of the Jubilee of Mercy that “is inspired by what the pontiff has asked for, to be a Church that reaches out, as a sign of the presence of God.”

The event took place during the Faith Cup, a soccer tournament among priests to help build fraternity and outreach.

The bishops’ conference stated that the first day of this year’s Confess-a-thon began around 5:00 p.m. Some people looked at the priests with surprise and curiosity. Others lined up to take part in the sacrament.

Gladys Lopez was among those who went to Confessions. She said that it was an opportunity to unburden herself.

“You come totally convinced that God is giving you the chance to have a clear conscience and to be able remove those things that are weighing us down in our lives, and it’s an opportunity that everyone should take advantage of,” she said.

Luz Estella Rey said that it had been a long time since she had experienced this sacrament and said that she felt “very grateful, with no fear of doing something scary.” She also emphasized that the appearance of the priest she confessed to “conveyed a lot of peace and made me feel at peace.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

I hope I’m right when I contend that most people in Oregon aren’t as dumb as the writer of a photo caption in an article found at Oregon Live, the web site of the Oregonian, apparently is (or, one hopes, is only pretending to be).

The caption’s writer, commenting on a 2.5 percent gross receipts tax — not an income tax, but a tax off the top on sales — claims that “One question Oregonians have about a corporate tax measure on the November ballot is whether it would increase costs for consumers.” He further notes that grocery stores “are one industry that could raise prices to cover the cost of the tax.” The idea that Oregonians won’t (excuse the expression) eat the cost of the tax imposed if what is known as Measure 97 passes, either through higher prices or other means, becomes more absurd the more one learns about the details of the tax.

(more…)

Friday morning, Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo had a tense one-on-one interview with Ezekiel Emanuel, one the two major architects of Obamacare (the other one is the infamous Jonathan “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage because of the stupidity of voters” Gruber).

Bartiromo had a good grasp of Obamacare’s problems as she challenged Emanuel on its poor results and President Barack Obama’s misplaced priorities during his first two years in office. She also wasn’t afraid to get in Emanuel’s face with bitter sarcasm after he baldly and falsely claimed that health care costs — not health care inflation, health care costs — “have come way down compared to George Bush.”

(more…)

… oh wait.

Donald Trump is actually doing minority outreach. He has Brunell Donald-Kyei as his campaign’s Vice Chair for Diversity Outreach. She’s persuasive and passionate:

Pull quote: “We’ve got to stop thinking of black, and white, and purple and Arab. We’ve got to start thinking as Americans. And that’s what Donald Trump is saying. We’re Americans. America first.”

Rommney, McCain, Bush 43 and Bob Dole never had this kind of vocal support.

This open thread is meant for commenters to post on items either briefly noted below (if any) or otherwise not covered at this blog. Rules are here.

Awesome — and watch how long the man holds the note on “free”:

Oh, the result of the game was pretty nice too.

Thursday evening, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Socialist government arbitrarily suspended the recall effort against “President” Nicolas Maduro, demonstrating beyond any doubt that the South American country now functions as a dictatorship.

Given its gravity, this news, described in coverage at the Wall Street Journal as “a crisis of democracy,” is not getting the visibility it should be receiving.

(more…)

From South Bend, Indiana:

Oct 21, 2016 / 03:50 pm

Catholics should look to Mary to be part of a religion that fights for truth, rather than assimilating to the popular culture, said Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia.

“If we want to reclaim who we are as a Church, if we want to renew the Catholic imagination, we need to begin, in ourselves and in our local parishes, by unplugging our hearts from the assumptions of a culture that still seems familiar but is no longer really ‘ours,’” Archbishop Chaput said.

“This is why Mary – the young Jewish virgin, the loving mother, and the woman who punches the devil in the nose – was, is, and always will be the great defender of the Church,” he added.

Archbishop Chaput addressed the 2016 Bishops’ Symposium at the University of Notre Dame on Wednesday. He spoke on “Remembering Who We Are and the Story We Belong To.”

He began his talk referencing an illustration, reportedly from the Middle Ages, of the Blessed Virgin Mary punching the devil in the nose. “She doesn’t rebuke him. She doesn’t enter into a dialogue with him. She punches the devil in the nose,” he said.

The illustration is apt, he explained, because, according to the Christian author C.S. Lewis, “Christianity is a ‘fighting religion’ – not in the sense of hatred or violence directed at other persons, but rather in the spiritual struggle against the evil in ourselves and in the world around us, where our weapons are love, justice, courage and self-giving.”

The problem is that many U.S. Catholics have abandoned this “spiritual struggle” and have assimilated too much into the popular culture “that bleaches out strong religious convictions in the name of liberal tolerance and dulls our longings for the supernatural with a river of practical atheism in the form of consumer goods,” he said.

Catholic Politicians have done this by following their own “ambitions and appetites” rather than being loyal to the Church, he noted. Laypersons and members of the clergy have done this through a “silent apostasy” of not standing up for the truth when they need to do so.

“For [Pope] Benedict, laypeople and priests don’t need to publicly renounce their baptism to be apostates. They simply need to be silent when their Catholic faith demands that they speak out,” he said, “to be cowards when Jesus asks them to have courage; to ‘stand away’ from the truth when they need to work for it and fight for it.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

This open thread is meant for commenters to post on items either briefly noted below (if any) or otherwise not covered at this blog. Rules are here.

Did NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell ask Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton a softball question fed to her by a leading Clinton campaign official Wednesday evening? It sure looks that way.

The concern is utterly reasonable because of Mitchell’s track record of running interference for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and liberal politicians and causes in general.

(more…)

This open thread is meant for commenters to post on items either briefly noted below (if any) or otherwise not covered at this blog. Rules are here.

From Fox Sports, on something the Chicago Cubs baseball player Anthony Rizzo did during Game 5 of the National League Championship Series:

There’s more, however, to what makes Rizzo so important. The man is the fulcrum of the team, the organizer of team parties and dinners, a well-mannered gentleman and a cancer survivor who knows all about proper perspective when it comes to the stock market ride that is postseason baseball. The national television audience gained a window into Rizzo’s emotional ballast to the team when microphones captured a sweet chat between Rizzo and home plate umpire Angel Hernandez during Game 4.

Rizzo apologized to Hernandez for assuming a ball four call on his at-bat against Baez—he dropped his bat and began jogging to first—only to have Hernandez call it a strike. “No worries,” Hernandez said to him, and then complimented Rizzo on his deportment. In the heat of battle, the sportsmanship sold baseball better than any slick advertisement.

Readers can go to a video which picked up the conversation here.

Here’s more from Rizzo at that link, from a postgame interview:

Q. The TV cameras picked up what people on social media are calling a cool moment of sportsmanship between you and Angel Hernandez. Can you just talk about that?

RIZZO: Yeah, well, the umpires, all of the umpires they’re out here at the highest level doing their best, and we’re competing at our best and they’re competing. So on a pitch that I disagreed with and to think it was a ball and then him call a strike, I don’t like showing up the umpires. They’re out here working their tails off 162 like we are. There is no home for them. They’re on the road the entire season. So just to let him know that, hey, my fault there. I probably should have waited a little longer to not just assume it was a ball. That’s just the way I am. They’re working as hard as we’re working, and it’s just different perspectives.

How utterly refreshing.