Happy Labor Day weekend

It's Friday heading into the Labor Day weekend, and the Navy's Blue Angels have been rehearsing overhead in downtown Cleveland for the Cleveland National Air Show. Here's a 2-minute preview (from the San Francisco fleet, but the routines are the same):

Cleveland Tea Party wishes everyone a Happy and safe Labor Day weekend.

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Donald J. Trump on Immigration policy

Press conference with Mexico President Neito earlier today

Photo credit: New York Times

Donald Trump met earlier today with Mexico President Peña Neito on the subject of immigration policy, building the wall, and other topics of mutual interest. 

Trump’s anticipated speech tonight on Immigration, from Arizona, is being broadcast live at 9pm (6 pm Phoenix time) on C-Span. If your cable provider does not include C-Span, you can watch a livestream RSBN video via YouTube (h/t Sundance). The video below is from the Phoenix venue covering pre-speech interviews. It will probably segue straight into Trump's speech; I'll post another link if it does not.

Here's a for sure live stream link to the speech (h/t Sundance). As I post this, Trump has just arrived in Phoenix:

Or, if you need an embiggened image, go straight to YouTube here.

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Transparency: the media's double standard

From the Fox News website: 

And the mainstream media is complaining today about the lack of transparency regarding Donald Trump's meeting today with the President Peña Neito of Mexico. 

A YouTube link to the Neito/Trump press conference is here. (Press conference starts around the 31:20 mark.)

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Head-To-Head With Donald Trump: Forbes

photo credit: musicgorilla.com

A contributor to Forbes, Thomas C. Stewart (retired New York investment banker and a former U.S. Naval Attack Commander who flew combat during the Gulf War) wrote about “The Day I Went Head-To-Head With Donald Trump”. It’s a perspective from the negotiating table.

Whenever I hear someone complain that Donald Trump is “not presidential,” I reply, “Compared to whom? Which president are we talking about? . . .

And just what are the qualities that really matter in a president?

The overwhelming majority of Mr. Trump’s detractors have never sat across the table from him to hammer out a multimillion-dollar business deal. I have. So I think I’m in a better position than they are to judge his effectiveness as a top-level executive.

. . .

. . . He went through every element of our proposal with a gimlet eye, challenging our assumptions, forecasts and business models with an exactitude and a level of expertise that was most impressive. It was as if he had a Wharton business professor whispering in his ear.

He wasted no time on civilities. He was brusque, impatient and dismissive of any information that he thought was inadequate, or any detail that he thought did not bear directly on the matter at hand. He cut right to the heart of things.

The senior members of my negotiating team were the products of privilege and Ivy League schools, and were highly successful executives in their own right. They were not used to this kind of treatment.

But for my own part, I had not only been an attack flight officer in the first Gulf war, I had also driven a truck through some of New York’s roughest neighborhoods. So I took it all in stride. Mr. Trump is a New Yorker, I reasoned. Fine. So am I. We can speak the same language—even if that language is rather coarse to some ears. We understand each other.

In the end, I can say that Mr. Trump drove a hard bargain. But he was honest, and he was a square dealer. When we were through—in less time than we had expected—we had reached an agreement that was ethical, profitable and fair to all parties concerned. It was also an agreement that meant good jobs for working people and healthy tax revenues for the local government.

If we didn’t come away from the table liking Mr. Trump, there’s no question that we came away with a lot of respect for him. He was a tough, shrewd, no-nonsense executive who knew how to get things done, and done quickly. He was also an adversary whom no one would want to mess with.

Isn’t that what really matters in a president?

Read the whole thing here.

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Forget Wally. Where’s Hillary?

From Sundance at Conservative Treehouse(also via Lucianne.com):

Hillary Clinton is the first and only nominee for President who never held a press conference during the entire Democrat primary race. . . .

If you look at Hillary Clinton’s campaign calendar –SEE HERE– . . . there are 15 listed events.  However, . . . what you notice is that Secretary Clinton is not actually attending 14 of these events; they are being attended by surrogates.

. . .

The only event Hillary Clinton is actually attending is the last one on September 26th, the debate.

Speculations abound: is it her health? Is the fix in (if so, why is she still fund-raising?) Is she staying out of sight to avoid a further drop in the polls due to the unlikeability factor? Whatever the explanation, it is bizarre behavior in a presidential candidate.

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Three by Mike Lester

Three from a top political cartoonist . . .

All cartoons from http://www.gocomics.com/mike-lester

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More on media bias

art credit: kwizoo.com

If your neighbor or relative relies on, say, the New York Times or ABC news or local TV news for his/her information, you can be 100% sure they are NOT getting the news. I’ve had a tiny bit of success in persuading family and friends to expand their sources of news, as that approach is less confrontational than criticizing particular news sources. 

I always start by suggesting the online aggregators. The Drudge Report is an obvious place to start. Next on my recommended list is RealClearPolitics, not because it is at the top of my own list, but because it posts news and analysis from the far left to the far right, and everything in between. It’s user friendly. The site itself doesn’t provide for reader comments, so it as close to neutral as possible. (I also suggest conservative talk radio - any conservative talk radio -- for those who don't want to go the internet route.)

A voter who begins to realize that the reports they are relying on are incomplete, heavily edited, selective, etc. will perhaps go to the next step and further expand their sources of news. A few people I know have had the ultimate Epiphany when they realized to their shock and horror that The Plain Dealer, The New York Times, CNN [or fill in the blank] are not fair and balanced. (For what it is worth, I don’t rely on Fox much, either.) But if you have any relatives or friends who will tolerate a conversation on the media and news, maybe they’ll consider a suggestion that they try expanding their sources of news, at least for a few days just to see what they find.

Steve Feinstein at American Thinker posted an article (“Pre-Empting the Liberal Media”) on media bias and its role in shaping public opinion. Here are some extracts:

Liberal mainstream media bias for Hillary Clinton is the single biggest factor so far in this election season contributing to her lead in the polls. The nightly news on NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post, the morning and late-night TV shows, CNN, MSNBC, and all the websites associated with these sources are strongly and openly behind Hillary and her “first woman” status. Many so-called journalists have dropped any pretense of objectivity and are quite unashamedly and openly supportive of Clinton, while they derisively dismiss Trump as an unserious nonentity. 

Ostensibly, it is Trump’s presence in this year’s race that has caused liberal bias to be so prominent, but no rational observer could possibly think that the media would show any less favoritism towards First-Woman Hillary if her Republican opponent were Cruz, Rubio, or Kasich.

Hillary has many well-known vulnerabilities and character flaws: her role in Benghazi debacle and the subsequent rewriting of history in order to avoid accountability and blame, her non-accomplishments in every major foreign affairs arena where she played a role as Secretary of State, her private e-mail server and her continual distortions and parsing in an attempt to deflect scrutiny and shift responsibility (“Colin Powell told me to do it!”), and of course, the widening-by-the-day Clinton Foundation corruption controversy.

These factors are completely independent of who her opponent happens to be. . . .

. . . The "circular firing squad" that Republicans have created this year because of Trump -- who won the primaries fair and square, regardless of anyone's personal feelings about him -- is truly idiotic and inexplicable.

The Republicans need to remember who their real opponent is in 2016 -- it’s not the “untraditional Republican” Donald Trump, it’s the liberal media propping up an astonishingly deficient Hillary Clinton.  . . .

The entire article is here.

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