Luke Ford

Dick Morris writes:

History will undoubtedly say that the Comey announcement that the FBI is reopening its investigation into Hillary’s emails that turned the 2016 race around and brought Hillary down. But that’s a false narrative. And to grasp what is happening, we must put it aside and concentrate on the real reasons Trump began to overtook Hillary in the week leading up to Comey’s announcement on Friday, October 28th.
Polling suggests that Trump’s gains predate Comey’s announcement. Most dramatic was the heavily Democratic biased ABC poll that began the week giving Hillary a 12 point lead and ended the week with Mrs. Clinton clinging to a one point margin. Most ABC interviews were conducted well before Comey spoke.
So what happened?
• Trump’s negative ads began to hit in swing states. Until this week, Hillary’s attacks on Donald had been dominating the airwaves for months. But, during the past ten days or so, his negative ads — devastatingly effective — began to make their impact felt.
• ObamaCare premiums increases began to hit. While the full impact of the price hikes won’t be felt until after November 1st — in time for the election — the early notices that they would go up by an average of 25% with many even higher, had a big impact on the race. And Trump moved adroitly to exploit the increases in his speeches.
• Before the Comey bombshell, the drip-drip-drip of WikiLeaks emails had been taking a daily toll on Hillary’s vote share. The coup de grace was the memo from Doug Band that was written in response to Chelsea’s accusation that she had not done enough for her father. Stung by the first daughter’s charges, Band ticks off the deals that led to a $60 million personal profit for Bill Clinton, a list that vindicates the direst of the pay-for-play accusations.
• Hillary’s illness prevented her from campaigning more vigorously and her campaign staff, obtuse as ever, failed to give her new issues and material to use on hitting Donald. Once they ran out of abused women to complain about Trump, they had nothing to say.

Sun Sentinel: Faced with ever-increasing traffic jams, South Florida’s public officials have come up with a plan: Make it worse.

Instead of fixing the problem, government officials are deliberately adding to it in hopes we’ll all walk, ride the bus or take the train.

“Until you make it so painful that people want to come out of their cars, they’re not going to come out of their cars,” Anne Castro, chair of the Broward County Planning Council, said during a meeting last year. “We’re going to make them suffer first, and then we’re going to figure out ways to move them after that because they’re going to scream at us to help them move.”

A Sun-Sentinel analysis of South Florida’s roads and development plans reveals how planners are creating neighborhoods in urban areas where gridlock is the norm.

• Cities are approving high-density housing at a rapid pace, bringing thousands more vehicles into urban areas.

• The state Legislature has fostered the problem by allowing cities to approve development without regard for the effect on traffic.

• Some cities are deliberately reducing the number of lanes on major roads to make room for bike lanes and wider sidewalks, while cramming more cars into a smaller space.

The growing congestion in part led Broward and Palm Beach counties to ask voters to approve a penny sales tax increase in the November election. A portion of the tax would be dedicated to mass transit and other ways of getting around.

It’s a gamble. Will people ride bicycles or walk to work in South Florida’s heat, rain and lightning storms? Or ride buses that often run late and make for long, inconvenient rides?

“It’s a big experiment,” said Robert Poole, a Plantation resident and an engineer with the Reason Foundation, a public policy research group in Washington, D.C. “We won’t know for another 10 years if it’s going to work.

“If it doesn’t work, we’re going to have some big white elephants on our hands — and even worse congestion.”

Forecast: More gridlock ahead

What South Florida planners want is to create bustling urban neighborhoods, with apartments, condos, offices, restaurants and shops.

If they succeed, it will be “so busy it’s not pleasant to drive here,” said Nick Uhren, executive director of the Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization. And planners say that’s a good thing, he said.

“A robust, healthy downtown is a sign of a healthy, vibrant economic community,” he explained. “[Cities] don’t want to say no to development because of traffic congestion.”

Comments: Weiner strikes me as the kind of snake who would save up incriminating material on others as a useful bargaining chip for getting out of jams; just another type of sleazeball found in the Clinton entourage. It will be amusing if the Clinton mafia is finally destroyed by one of their proteges; a corrupt creature brought on board because they thought him a useful tool in furthering one of their lesser deceptions, a beard for Hillary’s mistress.

When I teach a criminal justice course I will tell my students that the original L&O is entertaining and not a totally bad depiction of reality, although there’s still a lot of nonsense inserted for dramatic effect, e.g., the courtroom proceedings would result in instant disbarment for most lawyers.. The spinoffs, particularly, SVU, are total crap, full of sensationalism, having almost no contact with reality, and spinning a lot of SJW nonsense. The cops and lawyers both would go to prison in real life for some of the nonsense in the scripts. I watched one episode in its entirety and since then have seen SVU only when forced to, e.g., when visiting with a friend whose idiot wife is addicted.

* I am convinced that one of the biggest factors in creating the current “Rape Hysteria-Hoax” environment has been Law & Order: SVU. The show is wildly popular amongst women, and its first-run ratings do not show it’s real reach: women (especially those on their periods) will sit and watch a five or ten hour marathon on USA/Netflix/DVD on a Saturday or Sunday and have their heads filled with so much nonsensical, hysterical, outlandish b.s. rape-stories presented as “ripped from the headlines” (i.e. as true) that it warps their world view. (I have known several women from very different walks of life and ages who do this regularly, and if you doubt it, bring up SVU in your next conversation with any woman and she will tell you she’s a huge fan.)

If men binge-watched pornography in such lengthy sessions, we’d think something seriously wrong with them. Well, this is just victim-porn for girls.

SVU goes beyond most female-centered, sensationalized drama by almost always having the setup of blamelessly-innocent, treacly victim (almost always female) and Evil White Male baddie who is both 1) well over the top; and 2) fabulously Machiavellian at hiding his tracks and protecting himself in/from the system. And the leads continuously repeat how no matter what, the woman is not at fault. If you wonder how young women can think they can walk around half-naked and drunk and go home with a guy and agree to have sex with him and STILL claim it’s rape, SVU has to be a culprit in destroying any sense of responsibility or agency in them.

If the availability of 24-7 internet pornography can warp men in a bad way, I think SVU and its ilk have done the same in many women. Everything about that show makes me sick.

Comment: Transportation officials are deliberately making driving more unpleasant, trying to force people to use public transportation. They openly admit it:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-traffic-gridlock-20161028-story,amp.html

The ultimate goal of such social-engineering projects, as Steve has pointed out many times before, is to make suburban living undesirable, even intolerable, and concentrate whites in urban areas where folks have dogs instead of kids and vote for Democrats.

(The irony is that Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties are already heavily Democratic. Even the Miami Cubans aren’t solidly Republican anymore.)

“Until you make it so painful that people want to come out of their cars, they’re not going to come out of their cars,” Anne Castro, chair of the Broward County Planning Council, said during a meeting last year. “We’re going to make them suffer first, and then we’re going to figure out ways to move them after that because they’re going to scream at us to help them move.”

“Make them suffer” … “rub their noses in it” … what makes utopian leftists so blatantly sadistic?

• Cities are approving high-density housing at a rapid pace, bringing thousands more vehicles into urban areas.

• The state Legislature has fostered the problem by allowing cities to approve development without regard for the effect on traffic.

• Some cities are deliberately reducing the number of lanes on major roads to make room for bike lanes and wider sidewalks, while cramming more cars into a smaller space.

So the unelected public officials who are supposed to be serving the public are spending taxpayer dollars on “making [us] suffer,” so they can force everyone to take the bus.

I’m in Dade, not Broward, but I can report that the buses are as crappy as ever. Many key thoroughfares are served by routes with once-an-hour service, at best. (If the bus doesn’t show up, you have to wait another hour for the next one. And if that one doesn’t show up … you get the idea.) The Metrorail and Metromover cover only a tiny sliver of the county.

Meanwhile, revenues from the ever-increasing exorbitant tolls are earmarked for such useless projects as the construction of ugly walls lining the expressways that block your view of anything but the road. As these walls sprout like weeds, driving to work becomes ever more soulless and depressing.

COMMENT: * In US urban planning, the vague jargon “stakeholders” comes up a lot. (It’s usually paired with its twin “sustainability” which can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.) Often it’s used when reps from a quasi-governmental Regional Planning Agency swoop down on a sleepy, sedate, “white bread” town/suburb and try to convince the locals through faux-collaborative “visioning” presentations that there needs to be dense, mixed use cluster development in town. Rosy pictures of a pedestrian-friendly utopia are projected on screen, cars largely banished due to “traffic calming” street restructuring.

(If y’all like conspiracy theories, here’s an article about Regional Planning persuasion techniques that could be described as attempts at “manufacturing consent.”)

Who the stakeholders are is vaguely defined. The townsfolk and local business owners are the obvious acknowledged ones. Not discussed are the outside developers, social justice agitators, and government agencies looking to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing and spice up the peaceful whitopia.

Classic bait-and-switch: A proposed 200-unit development that is implied will be built to meet a stated need for aging Boomers to downsize and stay in town, with secondary priority given to other longtime town residents…

Then later: Actually, these units are for stakeholders in need, wherever they may be from. It would be racist to reserve any units for you privileged whites. New arrival Rigoberta has three Zika-head babies, and Dashawn and his mother Caprice need housing just as much as any of you. And making them pay market rent (or any rent) is just wrong.

If the locals see the scam and resist, the threatening mantra is uttered: Change is coming and you all have to get used to it.

* Government provided roads for fast car traffic create negative externalities for the neighbors (pollution, noise, deadly inattentive drivers) so those neighbors now ask the government to find methods to reduce those externalities. It’s not social engineering, it’s just politics.

WIKIPEDIA: Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe (especially Northern Europe), but less so in North America.

In its early development in the UK in the 1930s, traffic calming was based on the idea that residential areas should be protected from through-traffic. Subsequently, it became valued for its ability to improve pedestrian safety and reduce noise and air pollution from traffic.

For much of the twentieth century, streets were designed by engineers who were charged only with ensuring smooth traffic flow and not with fostering the other functions of streets. Traffic calming initiatives have grown to consider other design functions as well. For example, it’s been shown that car traffic severely impairs the social and recreational functions of public streets. The Livable Streets study by Donald Appleyard (1981)[2] found that residents of streets with light traffic had, on average, three more friends and twice as many acquaintances as the people on streets with heavy traffic which were otherwise similar in dimensions, income, etc.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Last night, rotund pollster Frank Luntz hinted that there’s a bombshell about Trump coming out Wednesday, from the NeverTrumpers camp, and my gut says abortion is to what he was alluding.

* I’ve been waiting for the Dems to bring forth some woman to claim that Trump raped her… however, the media reported the “Trump kissed me” accusation by the porn star as “sexual assault,” so maybe that was already it.

* One reason to suspect that that might be so is the unrelenting Overism they’ve been pushing. The point of Overism is to kick someone when they’re down so that they can’t get up again. If you’ve got a huge additional sucker punch lined up, I don’t think you feel much need to do that. You let them crawl off the ground and then knock them out for good.

I also don’t think the media is very good at waiting until they see the whites of their enemy’s eyes until they shoot. Frankly, they fight like a group of hysterical women, impulsively grabbing hair, scratching faces, and tearing off clothes, which isn’t a pretty thing.

I don’t think strategy and discipline come naturally to a feminized profession. What comes naturally is complete decompensation in the face of real frustration — which, I think, the FBI thing has induced in them.

* America doesn’t have one homogenous deep state.

You’re seeing some of that now with the CIA versus the FBI. You’ve got an ex-CIA tool trying to sabotage Trump in Utah, and you’ve got four FBI offices swarming on the Clintons.

There’s no one with his hands on all the levers of power. Maybe the closest to it was the Clintons, with their allies in the media, Wall Street, the national security state, Silicon Valley, etc. But you can see that’s slipping.

Part of the problem seems to be that they’ve had so many on their side for so long that they just got sloppy (forwarding government emails to a Yahoo account?). Part of it is probably Hillary’s pandering to Black Lives Matter. How do you think cops and FBI agents feel about that?

* The FBI story will suck all the oxygen out of news reports until at least Thursday – Friday and by then it’ll be too late for whatever they come up with to have full effect. W’s DUI would have had time to sink him if they hadn’t waited until the weekend before election day

Everything they’ve thrown against Trump has worked to a point but then Trump bounces back.

The Capt Khan story which started August 1 was a big nothing that the media blew out of proportion (“he insulted a gold star father” talk about DILLIGAF)

The Alicia Machado story from the first debate on September 26 was another nothing story More than anything it shows the Clinton campaign’s incompetence in choosing such a flawed candidate as their “Trump is a misogynist” poster child.

The Trump as Russian agent angle is laughable to any sane thinking person. Especially coming from someone whose husband visited Moscow in 1969 at the height of the cold war.

The “Trump is endangering our democracy” by refusing to accept the election results attack after the third debate on October 19 was particularly idiotic.

The series of indecent proposal bimbo eruptions that have come out after the p*ssy grabbing tape all have blended into that story and have had less effect than they hoped.

The p*ssy grabbing tape would be perfect for the Dem’s right about now, too bad they used it too soon. You’ll recall it came out October 7, the same day as the first of the Podesta wikileaks. The Dems (or maybe Ryan and other never-Trumpers) thought this would be the killshot to end Trump but he weathered the storm and after the second debate on October 10th it became old news.

* I had the misfortune to stumble upon Meet the Press while flipping through the channels on my rabbit-ears-only TV. My gaydar went into overdrive as soon as I took one look at the Hillshill that Tim Russert’s smarmy son was interviewing. It made me wonder whether she demands that all of her male minions take estrogen supplements, or something.

So I looked him up, and, sure enough…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_Mook

Mook is the first openly gay manager of a major presidential campaign.

There’s a word for women who seek out the company of fabulously catty gay men … fag hag. (Fag is only homophobic, and hag is only sexist, when uttered by straight men.)

Trump and his entourage are markedly more hetero.

We’re far more likely to find a dead girl buried in the foundation of one of Trump’s buildings than a live boy in one of his beds.

* Suspect when the last big bad revelation of Trump’s misbehavior was a porn star, there isn’t much ammo left. No doubt they’re beating the …bushes…for something, anything.

* I was actually mostly writing-off the Huma-Hillary rumors as just so much gossip when I thought they went back as an item only to around the time of Hillary’s Sec. of State days. But Huma was plucked while technically still a teenager and Hillary was an active, still-under-50 First Lady! And I have to admit it was around her run for Senate in 2000 that Hillary was at her by-far most physically attractive- still healthy, and finally in the hands of top-notch stylists, she looked like a true ice queen femme fatale- a sort of MILFy Brigette Nielson. So I can definitely see the still-vital Clinton homing in on this exotic young flower for plucking and long-term relationship opportunities, but I cannot imagine a 60+, decrepit Hillary monthly playing the field with young girls she could not possibly make any connection with simply to satisfy her carnal appetites.

A too-little noted aspect of this relationship among us visually-oriented, red-blooded guys is what was in it for Hillary from an emotional/intellectual stand-point (which is even MORE important to the typical woman than the just-physical aspects)? Meaning, after she had plucked this little flower, what could this pretty, but silly little girl have had to offer a mature woman with years of experience at the highest echelons of power? I would venture that Hillary craved the mentor-apprentice relationship with Huma, but that she also thought Huma’s exotic background would give her unique insights into an important but little-understood region of the world, and thus impart some measure of power to the always greedy-for-everything Clinton. I would also strongly venture to say that the marriage to Weiner was in very strong part driven by Hillary’s need to impart more shared experience to her true love. How could Huma ever be an effective emotional sponge for Hillary and all her bitching about what it’s like to be with a charming, ambitious, but sexually-reckless man until Huma was married to one herself? Women really cannot tolerate too much daylight in terms of life experiences between each other, especially the closer they are.

* The White House has just released statements indicating their neutrality and supporting Comey and the FBI. This looks like Obama has decided that Hillary’s mess is too big for him to handle, and he’s cutting her loose before she and Weiner soil his reputation while he’s on his way out of office.

I’ve also noticed that Yellen’s Fed didn’t bother to dump billions of dollars’ worth of paper gold all at once on the Comex market today like they’ve been doing every day for the past few weeks. They’ve been trying very hard to shove investors out of gold (the traditional stock market crash haven) and back into stocks in an attempt to prop up the market for Hillary, because a crash would get Trump elected.

The Deep State appears to have passed the word around and consulted among its members, and they’ve decided that helping Hillary is way too toxic and destructive to their own careers at this point.

The rats are leaving the sinking ship.

* Harry Reid completely lied about Romneys tax returns in 2012 in order to drive the news cycle. He did so using the immunity against slander provided by the floor of congress. If the media had any credibility they would emphasize this in any article about a comment from Reid.

Republicans should have an attack dog like Ted Cruz go on the floor of the senate and say that Reid is a child molester who has homemade child porn in a safe in his home in Vegas and he should prove it doesn’t exist or resign immediately.

It would be an outrageous attack, and the media would be forced to cover it. And they’d also be forced to cover why republicans made the charge in the first place.

* I love how since at least the Nixon days, liberals and the press have concern-trolled the GOP into doing the “honorable” thing and turning on their own in exchange for a few scraps of strange-new-respect while never once feeling the least bit of compunction to do likewise themselves. From Howard Baker and other Congressional Republicans turning on Nixon in exchange for a few post-retirement pats on the head from THE NYT, to voting against the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, to rolling out Goldwater in support of gays in the military, to McCain’s not standing-in-the-way-of-history by making a thing of where Obama cynically went to church, to Justice Roberts letting Obamacare stand so as not to be labelled a judicial “activist” by THE NEW REPUBLIC, to just this year putting a hold on their old white man bashing long enough (but not a second longer) to let Romney summon some of that retro father-knows-best gravitas and kick a little at Trump.

Given the staggering, Third World level corruption of the Clintons, and it only being a matter of if they can ever be charged on some technicality for all the crimes they have already been proven to have committed, isn’t it time for the other side of the aisle to demonstrate some honor too and dump these scumbuckets? Sadly, I think we are at the point in our country where this is absolutely, and very purposely, the last time the IQ of the average voter is sufficient to even grasp, let alone get outraged over, something as intellectually demanding as Watergate or the Clinton Foundation’s pay-for-play.

* The most effective October surprise of all time was the revelation in 2000 on the Friday before election day of George Bush’s drunk driving conviction. Polls before the revelation had Bush up by 3%-4%. In the actual vote, Gore won by 1%. The Friday surprise was especially effective because (1) it was based on undeniable documentary evidence and (2) it was the last thing voters heard before the polls. It’s worth noting that this was the best dirt that the Democrats had on Bush, and they quite deliberately saved it for the very end of the campaign.

The Democrats certainly have not run out of dirt on Trump. They must be saving something for the last minute, and there’s a good chance that whatever they have is more damning than anything that has come out yet. Remember: All of the so-called scandals that they have revealed so far are actually trivial — “Trump called me fat”; “Trump said ‘pussy’” — they have been a big deal mostly because the media have made them a big deal. My own guess is that Hillary’s campaign must have something better than that.

Assuming they’ve got something good, it’s probably something that he said or did on the thousands and thousands of hours of video- and audio-tape that he has left behind in his career. Who knows, though? Bribery? Mob dealings? Maybe a false accusation of child rape.

My best guess about how this plays out:

The media spend the rest of this week spreading the message that there is nothing new at all in the emails on Weiner’s computer and that Comey is a Republican stooge who is attempting to improperly influence the election.

By Friday morning, Hillary and the media are claiming that, since an entire week has gone by and the FBI has not yet disclosed any proof of criminal activity, this was obviously a false alarm. Time to move on.

Later Friday, Hillary’s campaign hits us with its last scoop of anti-Trump dirt. The media spend the weekend beating the drums about it. They go completely silent about the Weiner scandal, which is officially old news. Trump’s campaign has no time to organize a response, and even if they could get their act together, the media would freeze them out and refuse to give their defense any air time.

The last-minute blitz tips the election to Hillary. Obama shuts down the FBI investigation and issues pardons all around. Hillary takes office and unleashes the hounds of hell on her political enemies, starting with Trump and Comey.

MORE COMMENTS:

* My theory is Weiner is about to go to jail, lose custody of his child and be divorced. What does any criminal in that situation do? He strikes a deal. He has dirt on his wife and Clinton so he strikes a deal with the FBI to inform on bigger fish. He has given the FBI consent to search the laptop without a warrant. If everything works out for him charges dropped or reduced for cooperating. His soon to be exwife ends up in jail for 30 years and he gets sole custody of his child.

* My initial take on this was that by letting her off the hook in the summer, Comey retained more hooks on Hillary than if they had indicted her. Until the statute of limitations expires and/or every last email is recovered, he can always keep finding “new evidence”. There was a story in the NY Post around a week ago to the effect that there were a number of places that the emails could have been mirrored that the FBI never tried that hard to get to (they never served a single warrant on anyone, unheard of in a criminal investigation). At the time, it looked like they were going easy on her (and this was driving the field agents nuts) , but maybe in retrospect Comey was just keeping his powder dry.

In this era of cloud based services and routine backups and widespread hacking, it never made sense to me that even someone as evil and obsessive-compulsive as Hillary could really have found and destroyed every last copy of her emails. It’s almost impossible. It’s not like the old days where Nixon could erase 18 minutes of the one and only tape that existed. Hillary only THOUGHT that she had erased the emails. I’m sure that she is technologically incompetent due to her age and overall incompetence. The yes men she hired would have been way too intimidated to tell her the truth – would you tell Stalin that you had “defied” his direct order to find and destroy all copies? If they don’t turn up on Weiner’s laptop, they will turn up somewhere else.

* If Weiner had already seen counsel, chances are it was a divorce attorney not a criminal one. After the business with a minor, it was criminal. My guess is that Huma did that same as well, probably even before Weiner.

Huma Abadin’s income was probably set to rise exponentially. Being the right arm of who would have been the most powerful person in the world would have given her opportunities that could have enriched her well beyond measure. Weiner’s fortunes were not looking good. Jail and excommunication from society, he would have a hard time. That meant that it was now or never for her to divorce him. She would have been the one to pay alimony and child support, and it would have been huge and women don’t like that. But with him conveniently in the slammer, custody would not be an issue and who could blame her for leaving him? And who knows whom Huma has been seeing? It would have been very easy for her to cut his throat unless of course, Weiner had a card up his sleeve.