Meanwhile, the Democrats are in disarray.
IN THE NEWS
Democrat VP nominee Tim Kaine is coming under scrutiny for trying to send a man who confessed to a gruesome double murder in Virginia to Germany where he would have faced a lighter sentence.
The
Daily Beast reports: On March 30,
1985, friends found the bodies of Derek and Nancy Haysom in their home in
Bedford County, Virginia. Derek was 72 and Nancy was 53. Their throats were
slit from ear to ear.
The double murder terrified their small, central Virginia
community. And it could have political repercussions to this day.
At
issue is Tim Kaine’s decision to extradite the Haysoms’ killer, Jens Soering,
to Germany.
The move would have substantially reduced his prison sentence if
Kaine’s successor hadn’t blocked it.
Kaine’s allies say he made the right
decision for the right reasons. But Virginia Republicans say Kaine’s efforts to
extradite Soering could hurt his vice presidential bid—especially given the
tough-on-crime focus of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Hillary
Clinton won’t stop lying about the FBI’s findings in her email scandal.
The
Washington Post Fact Checker reports: One would think
the talking points would change after receiving Four Pinocchios from The
Washington Post Fact Checker, “Pants on Fire” from PolitiFact and “false” from
FactCheck.org.
But, nope, Clinton fell back on a claim that has been roundly
debunked by fact checkers.
FBI Director James B. Comey did tell Congress: “We
have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.” But lying to the FBI is a
criminal act; it’s a rather low bar for truthfulness.
Clinton continues to
twist this statement by Comey into a line that suggests the FBI declared that
her public remarks on the email issues were truthful.
But Comey repeatedly
refused to confirm that when pressed by lawmakers: “That’s a question I’m not
qualified to answer. I can speak about what she said to the FBI.”
When asked
specific questions about certain public statements made by Clinton, Comey did
not endorse Clinton’s claims.
The
Clinton campaign falsely claimed the founder of the Nevada company she visited
yesterday was a Republican that was backing her.
CNN reports: Hillary Clinton's campaign claimed
Thursday that the founder of a local electrical company she toured in Nevada
was both a Republican and a Clinton supporter.
One problem: The businessman,
Dennis Nelson, told CNN that he was not a Clinton supporter and that he didn't
tell the campaign that he was a Republican.
"To tell you right now, as
messed up as everything is, I don't think I could tell you who I am going to
support until a week or two before the election," Nelson said. "There
are so much lies on both sides out there that I don't know. I really honestly
don't know who I will support."
Nelson added that he "never"
told the campaign that he was a Republican and declined to tell CNN if he were
a registered Republican.
Third
party candidates are sapping voters from Hillary Clinton.
POLITICO reports: [T]he Libertarian
Party's presidential ticket - comprised of former GOP Gov. Gary Johnson of New
Mexico and former GOP Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts - appears to draw more
from voters who might otherwise be aligned with Clinton, especially younger
voters.
The same is true of Green Party nominee Jill Stein - though to a lesser
degree, since Stein doesn't earn nearly the same level of support of Johnson.
Here's why Democrats should be concerned: Some soft voters may be moving into
Clinton's camp when asked on a two-way ballot, but defecting to another
candidate when given the option.
"Trump voters are mainly Trump voters,
but Clinton voters are still not quite happy that they're going to end up
voting for her," said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray, who has
studied the role of third-party candidates in pre-election polls.
President
Obama’s $400 million ransom payment to Iran will only embolden them to extract more
money and concessions from the U.S.
The Wall Street Journal editorializes: President Obama
often seems to reside in his own private Idaho on foreign affairs.
So it was no
surprise that at his Pentagon press conference Thursday he forcefully denied
that his Administration had paid $400 million in cash as ransom in January for
the return of five Americans in Iran.
“We do not pay ransom for hostages,” he
said. “We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future, precisely because if we did
we’d start encouraging Americans to be targeted.”
He’s right that paying ransom
for hostages encourages more hostage-taking, which is why U.S. policy has long
opposed doing it.
And Mr. Obama, with his talent for imagining a world that he
would like to exist, may even believe that Iran released the Americans for
reasons other than the pallets of cash the U.S. delivered.
He said Thursday
that the U.S. had disclosed the payments at the time, and that the foreign
currencies were used to avoid violating U.S. sanctions law.
What matters to
American credibility is what the mullahs of Iran believe.
And it’s obvious they
believe that arresting and holding Americans in Iran is a useful way to extract
money and other concessions from the United States.
Their latest demand is for
the U.S. to hand over $2 billion in Iranian funds that have been frozen for the
victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism.
The thugs of the world don’t care what
Mr. Obama believes.
They care only that he shows them the money—then they’ll
release their hostages.
The
U.S. trade deficit climbed again in June, fueled by a growing imbalance with
China.
Marketwatch reports: he U.S. trade deficit
jumped 8.7% in June to a 10-month high of $44.5 billion, reflecting the higher
cost of oil and more imports of consumer goods such as cell phones and drugs.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had expected the trade gap to rise to $43.2
billion from a revised $41 billion in May.
The trade gap with China advanced
to $29.8 billion and hit the highest level since last November. Higher
purchases of electronic and other consumer goods were behind the increase.
ObamaCare’s
markets will be less competitive next year as insurers stop offering coverage
due to mounting losses.
Vox explains: Competition on the
Obamacare marketplaces will decline next year.
There will be significantly more
places in the country where customers have no choice of health insurance
because just one company signed up to sell coverage.
This is the conclusion
that health policy experts have increasingly gravitated toward in recent months
and weeks, as major insurance companies have announced hundreds of millions of
dollars in financial losses on the Obamacare marketplaces.
"Under any
likely scenario, there will be less insurer participation in the exchanges in
2017 than there was in 2016," says Michael Adelberg, a senior director at
FaegreBD Consulting who previously worked in the Obama administration helping
to manage the marketplaces’ launch.
"It seems pretty clear at this point
there will be less competition in the marketplaces next year, particularly in
rural areas," says Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special
initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
President Obama promised when the
marketplaces launched that Americans will find "[m]ore choices, more
competition, and in many cases, lower prices"
A recent analysis shows
that Obamacare’s marketplaces will have twice as many exits as entrants in
2017.
Insurers have tested out Obamacare, and in some cases they’ve lost
hundreds of millions of dollars.
This all leaves the law in somewhat of an
uncertain situation, one in which it’s not clear how well Obamacare will
deliver on the president’s promise of "more competition."
In
Virginia, a Democrat mayor backing Hillary Clinton was arrested in a meth for
sex scheme.
The Washington Post reports:
The
mayor of Fairfax City has been arrested and charged in connection with a what
authorities say was a methamphetamine for sex scheme.
Fairfax City Mayor
Richard “Scott” Silverthorne, 50, was caught in an undercover operation by
police, authorities said.
The scheme involved offers of meth in exchange for
group sexual encounters with men, police said.
In one exchange, police say
Silverthorne provided meth to undercover detectives at the Crowne Plaza Hotel
in Tysons Corner.
Silverthorne is also a substitute teacher for Fairfax County
schools.
