America Is on Route to Choose Liberty and a Constitutional Republic

ELECTION DAY MINUS 5. What you need to know now about Hillary and Progressive Democrats before you vote. • • • BREAKING POLL NEWS. With a week to go until election day, Donald Trump has seized control in North Carolina, according to an exclusive Raleigh, North Carolina, WRAL News poll released Tuesday. SurveyUSA polled 659 people statewide Friday through Monday who have already cast their ballots or are likely to vote in the election and found Trump with a 51% to 44% lead over Hillary Clinton. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.9 percentage points. In a WRAL News poll released three weeks ago, Clinton led Trump 46% to 44%. The latest poll was conducted after the FBI notified members of Congress that it was reopening an investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while Secretary of State. Meanwhile, an Elon University Poll released Tuesday but conducted before the FBI announcement found Clinton and Trump in a dead heat in North Carolina. • 33% of respondents in the WRAL News poll ranked trustworthiness as the most important consideration in voting for President. Positions on issues were rated most important by 40%, while experience and character were far behind at 17% and 8%, respectively. Trump has flipped the gender gap, cutting Clinton's 12% lead among women down to 7%, while widening his dominance among male voters from 9% to 23%. He also has erased her lead among voters 50 and older, moving from a 5% deficit to an 11% advantage, while maintaining his slight lead among voters ages 18 to 49. Clinton's sizable lead in North Carolina's metro areas also has eroded since early October. Her 64% to 27% lead among urban voters three weeks ago is down to 53% to 43%, and her 9% lead in the suburbs is now a 2% deficit. Meanwhile, Trump has extended his lead among rural voters from 18% to 26%. The WRAL News poll also questioned people about the potential for voter fraud, given North Carolina's voter ID law that has been overturned in the federal courts and Trump's claims that the election will be rigged in Clinton's favor -- 13% of respondents said in-person voter fraud occurs often at their particular polling site, and another 32% said it sometimes happens. • The mainstream media will probably 'forget' to mention this key polling result in favor of Trump. • • • DEMOCRATS NERVOUS AS HILLARY'S POLLS FALL. Democrats are anxious over Hillary's falling poll numbers. They try to focus on the polls that show no change in the race in which Clinton had held a sizable advantage. Sometimes they show polls that give Trump only a slight advantage. Democrats argue that the impact of Comey's announcement will be limited given the polarized nature of the nation, the divisive candidates and the number of people who long ago made up their minds who they're voting for. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman told TheHill : “I honestly think that the universe of persuadable voters is very small. While there are some things that can even persuade people who are not ‘persuadable voters,’ I don’t think this is one of them. People have been exposed to information about emails for some time and there is hardly anyone who hasn’t already come to some view.” But, at the same time, Mellman added, “Is [the email issue] a topic one would like to be talking about? Certainly not.” • There can be no doubt that Trump has narrowed the gap. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website now gives the GOP nominee a 30% chance of winning in its “polls-plus” projection, up from a recent low of 14.7% on October 17. In the RealClearPolitics national polling average, Clinton’s lead stood at 2.2% on Tuesday afternoon, down from more than 7% on October 18. Those findings force some Democrats to admit that Clinton’s margin might be narrower than they once thought. Democratic strategist Robert Shrum said there “may be some” impact from the Comey announcement : “The momentum was all with her, and I think it could slow the momentum." • • • REPUBLICANS ARE ENERGIZED. Democrats have good reason to be anxious one week before election day. The ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll found Trump leading Clinton by 1% among likely voters. A move into positive territory. KEY, the poll also found that “strong enthusiasm” for Clinton had decreased by 7% in recent days. The FBI’s news has given a new outlook to Republicans, many of whom were resigned to a Trump defeat that might cost them the Senate majority just a week ago. And, the Trump campaign is reminding early voters that they can change their vote in many states if they have changed their mind because of the Friday Comey re-opening of the Hillary email investigation. GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak told TheHill : “At a minimum, it has put Hillary back on defense for the closing 10 days of the race, and that’s hugely significant. It has also brought back all these questions about Hillary’s trustworthiness and honesty....I didn’t think the race was competitive on Thursday, and now I do.” • • • HUMA ABEDIN'S ROUTINE TRANSFER OF CLASSIFIED HILLARY EMAILS TO HER UNCLASSIFIED LAPTOP. Democrats cannot be happy about the news that FBI agents in April confronted Huma Abedin with an email she received in 2010 warning her that her Yahoo email account -- where she’d “routinely” stored State Department messages, including ones containing classified information -- might have been compromised. The revelation is in a summary of the FBI’s interview with Abedin, conducted on April 5. Abedin told agents “she was not sure that her email account had ever been compromised,” according to notes of the interview that was part of the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s unsecured and unauthorized home email server. Abedin served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and is currently vice chair of her presidential campaign. Abedin's answer worried agents who feared classified government material had been hacked. Yahoo is notoriously vulnerable to hacking. In 2014, for example, a half-billion Yahoo accounts had been hacked by an unidentified “state-sponsored actor” in the biggest data breach in history. FBI worries about Amedin's Yahoo emails rose this month when investigators found 650,000 emails on a laptop Abedin shared with her former-congressman husband, Anthony Weiner, a suspect in an interstate child pornography case. Reportedly, many of the messages were from Abedin’s humamabedin@yahoo.com and other accounts. FBI investigators believe thousands of those messages were sent to or from the private server that Clinton used for State business, and are reviewing them to see if they contain classified information. • The New York Post first reported last week that Abedin told investigators in her April 5 interview that she “routinely forwarded emails from her state.gov account to either her clintonemail.com or her yahoo.com account so that she could print them.” She explained that “it was difficult” to print from the State printer, so she printed the documents at home. A FELONY IF PROVEN. Abedin divulged that information when agents confronted her with several sensitive government emails she forwarded to her personal accounts, including one dealing with Pakistan. But, it looks like the FBI never followed up on the revelation, and never seized her massive personal stockpile of State emails until last weekend -- and then only after New York FBI agents investigating Weiner informed headquarters of their coincidental discovery. • Weiner didn’t have the security clearance to have access to such potentially classified information. Nor did more than a dozen other people who came into contact with the Clinton email archive, which contains at least 2,093 currently classified emails and at least 193 that were classified at the time they were sent. Before reviewing the new trove of emails, the FBI in its initial investigation found that at least 32 classified email chains passed through both Clinton’s and Abedin’s personal accounts. One was classified Top Secret/SCI, while nine were classified as Secret when sent. Abedin got a Top Secret clearance in 2009 -- it is a felony for persons with such a security clearance to remove classified information from government control and send and store it on an unauthorized computer system. It’s also a felony to provide classified material to anybody without proper clearance. • FBI Director James Comey has testified that as many as 10 individuals who maintained Clinton’s private server did not have the requisite security clearance to handle such classified information. In addition, Clinton directed at least three of her Williams Connolly lawyers without security clearance to sort through more than 60,000 of her emails. When House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz asked Comey in July : “Did Hillary Clinton give non-cleared people access to classified information?” Comey replied, “Yes.” • With the discovery of the Weiner laptop, the limits of the classified spillage are enormous. If the famously reckless Weiner had access to such information, anybody could have it. What state secrets are out there for anyone to see? These are serious security breaches, yet neither Clinton nor Abedin has been prosecuted for their gross negligence. Maybe that will change now. Maybe Weiner will cooperate with FBI investigators and testify against his wife to save himself. Maybe Abedin will be compelled to cooperate with the FBI against Hillary to save herself. The chain of Clinton Hacks who have routinely protected Hillary could come unraveled. Perhaps justice will prevail. • • • EVEN HILLARY'S LAWYERS WERE CARELESS WITH CLASSIFIED EMAILS. Hillary Clinton's lawyer may have allowed hackers to obtain all her emails by reviewing the contents of her private server on a laptop tied to Chinese cyberspies, a House Republican recently charged. The Washington Examiner reported that Heather Samuelson was one of the Clinton aides who sifted through the private email server used during Clinton's tenure at the State Department, and helped decide which would be designated as personal messages and which were work-related. And that is when the potential Chinese hacks may have taken place, because she used two laptops made by Lenovo, a company with ties to the Chinese government that has sold laptops for years with malware pre-installed on the computer. House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) wrote to FBI Director James Comey after learning the make and model of Samuelson's computer : "It seems clear that Secretary Clinton and her associates played fast and loose with our national security, and yet no one -- not a single person involved in this harmful fiasco -- has been held accountable." The Washington Examiner says that State Department officials have been banned from using Lenovos since 2006. In 2015, the company admitted to installing a program called "Superfish" on 43 different computer models, "specifically the models used by Heather Samuelson for reviewing classified emails," Goodlatte emphasized in his letter to Comey. Lenovo started installing Superfish in 2010, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The program is designed to place ads on users' computers, but it could easily be used by hackers to attack a computer remotely. "Websites, such as banking and email, can be spoofed without a warning from the browser," the DHS warned in February 2015. Samuelson sorted through the emails in 2014, before Lenovo was caught installing the malware. That timing, wrote Goodblatte, raises the possibility that "Secretary Clinton's emails were obtained by the Chinese government -- the State Department, FBI or any other agency had redacted Top Secret and Special Access Program (SAP) information : "This information is so highly classified that even congressional oversight committees were not able to review the emails." Goodlatte asked Comey to describe whether the FBI investigated Samuelson's laptops in the course of the Clinton probe and he hinted that they should do so now, if it had not been done before : "While we understand that you agreed to destroy one of the laptops at the end of your investigation, pursuant to Ms. Samuelson's immunity agreement, do you still have in your possession either of Ms. Samuelson's Lenovo laptops?" • • • PODESTA LAWYER NOW AT DOJ AND INVOLVED IN THE NEW HILLARY EMAIL INVESTIGATION. Fox News reported Tuesday that the Justice Department official in charge of informing Congress about the newly reactivated Hillary Clinton email probe is "a political appointee and former private-practice lawyer who kept Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta 'out of jail,' lobbied for a tax cheat [Mark Rich] later pardoned by President Bill Clinton, and led the effort to confirm Attorney General Loretta Lynch." Lawyer Peter Kadzik, confirmed as assistant attorney general for legislative affairs in June 2014, represented Podesta in 1998 when independent counsel Kenneth Starr was investigating Podesta for his possible role in helping ex-Bill Clinton intern and mistress Monica Lewinsky land a job at the United Nations. Podesta sent an email to Obama aide Cassandra Butts in 2008, saying : “Fantastic lawyer. Kept me out of jail.” The Podesta email is one of those hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account and posted by WikiLeaks. After FBI Director James Comey informed Congress on Friday that the FBI was reviving its inquiry when new evidence linked to a separate investigation was discovered, congressional leaders wrote to the Department of Justice seeking more information. It was Kadzik who replied : “We assure you that the Department will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible." • Fox News reports that "Kadzik had been an attorney with Dickstein Shapiro LLP for 18 years before he represented Podesta in the Clinton/Lewinsky investigation. He was hired in 2000 as a lobbyist for tax cheat Marc Rich, who was controversially granted a pardon by President Bill Clinton during Clinton’s final days in office. Kadzik got the job “because he was ‘trusted by [White House Chief of Staff John] Podesta,’ and was considered to be a ‘useful person to convey [Marc Rich’s] arguments to Mr. Podesta,’” according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report. Peter Kadzik is the Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs at the DOJ." Podesta and Kadzik maintained their relationship after Kadzik was appointed as an AAG. In a May 5, 2015 email, Kadzik’s son, PJ, wrote to Podesta seeking a job on Hillary Clinton’s newly launched presidential campaign. “I have always aspired to work on a presidential campaign, and have been waiting for some time now for Hilary [sic] to announce so that I can finally make this aspiration a reality,” PJ Kadzik wrote. Podesta said he would "check around," but it's unclear what came of the request. Kadzik was also a dinner guest of Podesta and his wife, Mary, on October 23, 2015 -- the day after Hillary Clinton testified before the House Benghazi committee. Representative Trey Gowdy said on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday that he wasn't "concerned" about any potential conflicts of interest. Gowdy said : "Peter Kadzik is not a decision maker, he is a messenger." Perhaps Gowdy should reconsider. • • • MORE OBAMA DOJ REFUSALS TO COOPERATE WITH CONGRESS. While not directly related ot the presidential campaign, a recent response to Congress by Attorney General Loretta Lynch indicates that the DOJ would continue to refuse to cooperate with Congress under a Hillary presidency. AG Lynch recently declined to comply with a probe into the Obama administration's secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year to avoid incriminating herself, according to The Washington Free Beacon. Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Kansas Representative Mike Pompeo wrote in a letter that Lynch chose to "essentially plead the Fifth," after the Republican lawmakers presented her with questions about the cash payment. In a DOJ October 24 letter to Congress, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded for Lynch, refusing to answer the questions and telling the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly revealing details about the payment. Kadsik -- there is the Kadsik name again -- wrote : "Disclosure of this information beyond members of the House and Senate and staff who are able to view them could adversely affect the diplomatic relations of the United States, including with key allies. Rubio and Pompeo answered : "It is frankly unacceptable that your department refuses to answer straightforward questions from the people's elected representatives in Congress about an important national security issue. Your staff failed to address any of our questions, and instead provided a copy of public testimony and a lecture about the sensitivity of information associated with this issue. As the United States' chief law enforcement officer, it is outrageous that you would essentially plead the Fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries." They attached the questions again and requested that Lynch send answers by November 4. Representative Pompeo attacked Obama and the DOJ about the issue : "Who knew that simple questions regarding Attorney General Lynch's approval of billions of dollars in payments to Iran could be so controversial that she would refuse to answer them? This has become the Obama administration's coping mechanism for anything related to the Islamic Republic of Iran -- hide information, obfuscate details, and deny answers to Congress and the American people." To refresh our memories, Obama keeps details about the Iran deal in a secure facility, and any lawmakers who have clearance to view them must give up cell phones and are not allowed to take notes, according to the Free Beacon. • • • The American Thinker on October 28 published an article titled "The Cost of Historical Amnesia in America" by Richard Winchester. It raises troubling auestions about the current ability of America to understand its own historical place in history : "When sizable portions of a people forget their history, they risk losing contact with their nation’s essence, what its best qualities are, and where it ought to be headed. They may soon cease to inhabit an independent political entity. There’s evidence that a loss of historical memory is a growing problem in America. Furthermore, political developments suggest there will be even more problems involving the loss of knowledge about essential American history in the future." Winchester cites a YouGov poll, commissioned by the recently established The Victims of Communism Foundation. The foundation publishes an “Annual Report on US Attitudes towards Socialism.” The first such report appeared on Monday, October 16, 2016, dealing with the youngest birth cohort in the American electorate -- the Millennials, or those aged 34 and younger. One of the most surprisings report findings is the lack of historical memory in Millennials : 32% of them believe that George W. Bush killed more people than Josef Stalin. According to the report, 42% of Millennials “were unfamiliar with” Mao Zedong, 40% claimed not to know who Che Guevara was, and 33% drew a blank when asked about Vladimir Lenin. • As Winchester says, ignorance has consequences. Twenty-five percent of the Millennials, for example, viewed Lenin favorably. Although 57% of Americans overall held unfavorable views of communism, only 37% of Millennials did. And, 55% of Millennials said communism was a problem in the world today, compared with 80% of Baby Boomers, and 91% of the oldest birth cohort. Worse, although 65% of Americans aged 65 and older held favorable views of capitalism, only 42% of Millennials had favorable views of capitalism. Finally, and perhaps most shocking, 45% of people aged 16 to 20 -- who will soon enter the electorate -- said they would vote for a socialist, and 21% would cast a ballot for a communist. [Maybe now we know why so many young people love Bernie Sanders.] • Conservative Americans will say that what the report reveals is the consequence of America’s public education system, in which left-wing teachers and textbook authors systematically denude students of critical information about their country’s and the world’s history. But, Winchester writes : "Fairness dictates that we acknowledge that young Americans’ lack of historical knowledge probably goes back some way. In the early 1980s, for example, the polymath Ben Stein wrote an article in the now defunct journal Public Opinion that detailed a critical lack of knowledge among California “Valley Girls,” especially ignorance of Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and anti-Semitism. When informed of Hitler’s campaign against European Jewry, and especially the Holocaust, one young woman gasped, 'Why would he do that?' As astonishing as these examples, which could easily be multiplied, are, recent developments in the US, especially those surrounding the history of slavery, the Civil War, and the South between the end of Reconstruction (1877) and the mid-1960s probably portend worse historical amnesia yet to come." • We are well aware of the Progressive Left’s campaign to use slavery as a cudgel to browbeat ordinary people into silence, silencing them as Progressives seek to fundamentally transform the US. Winchester says the "left-wingers’ campaign has been to cover-up, and if possible, to erase, some aspects of the “South’s peculiar institution,” such as the fact that some slaves were owned by African Americans, or that some blacks served in Confederate armies between 1861 and 1865, while trumpeting other facets, such as the claim that slavery is America’s “original sin,” or that all whites bear the guilt associated with slavery, or that Abraham Lincoln was a racist....Will future public school children be innocent of any knowledge that the US endured a four-year long Civil War, in which at least 650,000 people died? Could it be that public school children in the future will not learn that America may be the only country to tear itself apart to rid itself of what virtually everyone these days regards as anathema? One does not have to approve of either slavery or the Confederacy to appreciate that they are an ineradicable part of America’s past, and must be remembered." • • • Dear Readers, you may ask what this has to do with Hillary Clinton's emails. Everything. Her followers -- supporters seems too mild a word -- are literally 'brainwashed.' They do not believe facts because they have been trained to see any negative fact about Hillary as part of the 'lies' told by what for 25 years Hillary has called "the vast right-wing conspiracy." And, this has consequences. Young Americans and Americans fed at the federal entitlement trough for generations will cease to understand what America and its leaders should represent. They will believe the latest distortion fed to them by Progressive leaders bent on destroying the constitutional fabric of America -- bent on making it just one more globalist one-world banana republic. Ben Stein warned us : "If history teaches anything, it is not just that those who won’t learn about the past will have to repeat it. It is that those who know nothing, or very little, of the past, won’t know what’s worth preserving." This election is called the last chance to save America. That is not an exaggeration. If Americans wait until 2020 or 2024 to take back America's Republic and Constitution, Millennials and entitlement stakeholders in Progressive mumble-jumble will be able to out-vote those who remember what America was and should continue to be. If the majority of Americans come to the 2016 polls believing that their lives and fortunes will improve by electing another Democrat to the presidency, the work of the Founders and all who have come after them will be lost forever. If America fails in 2106, we will know that neither responsible liberty nor self-government are possible in this world. Think deeply about it as you prepare to vote.