I had some material to use yesterday but never got it up.  There is so much great material out there that it’s hard to pick just one item per day.  Some days, as is obvious from my postings on Facebook, I don’t restrain myself.  You will see links below that won’t show up on fb; you can follow them or not as you wish.  The post that I am featuring today, the one that is a must-read, is by Jennifer Rubin who authors the “Right Turn” blog at the Washington Post.  Yes, that’s “right” as in “conservative.” My title above is directed to Trump’s most recent campaign manager hire.  Ms. Conway seems to me to be a decent and intelligent person; I have to think that she didn’t know what she was getting into by accepting this position.  She is also an extremely attractive woman, and I can’t help but believe that she’s getting at least some unwanted attention on that score from the motley crew surrounding the GOP’s dreadful nominee.  Trump has calmed down considerably since she took over, which is one reason why the race is tightening.  The bar is so low that a few days without Trump’s embarrassing himself count as a major victory.  As I said in an earlier post, I see the iron hand of Kellyanne Conway at work. But she won’t follow him into the White House.  And she shouldn’t be helping to get him there.  So I repeat my title and beg, “Kellyanne Conway, please resign now!”  And also–tell us just how dreadful things really are behind the scenes.

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that the world is round, after all.  Breathless TV news coverage to follow.

“Donald Trump: A Con Man Among Heroes”

who have not yet knuckled under to the pressure to vote for Trump.  But I am utterly heartsick over what is happening within evangelicalism in general.  The Value Voters Summit this past weekend was just a rerun of the no-journalists-allowed-off-the-record-but-it-was-recorded-anyway meeting of prominent evangelical leaders in June.  Did you miss that one?  Read about it here and here. (This is now the third time I’ve linked to the article by Rebecca Cusey because it is so good.) Honestly, folks, some of the comments made by supposedly mature adults sound like those of teenyboppers raving about the Beatles. I can understand that there are some thoughtfulpeople who have reluctantly come to the conclusion that they’re going to vote for Trump because they honestly think he’s better than Hillary Clinton.  I can respect that position, even though I disagree.  But what I cannot for the life of me understand is this adoring, uncritical attitude from people who should know better.

Well, folks, who do you want to be President? Your choices have narrowed to a dangerously unstable liberal Democrat and a dangerously steely-eyed one.  Take your pick.  There is no conservative candidate in this race.  I give you two articles, one written yesterday on the conservative website HotAir and one written back in May by David French of National Review. 

“Rush on Trump’s Maternity Leave Plan”
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 “15 Reasons Why Donald Trump Is a Liberal–And a Lunatic Conspiracy Theorist”

Not that anyone has asked me! This is a purely self-indulgent post, so I’m not even putting it on Facebook.  It just struck me, when reading about the whole Clinton collapse kerfuffle, that I have an extremely similar health profile to hers and really, folks, I’m as healthy as a horse. It may indeed turn out that she has serious issues that haven’t been addressed, so I’m just going on what I know.  (“All I know is what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.” Will Rogers)

Here’s what the Democratic nominee and I have in common health-wise:

1)  Seasonal allergies.  You’d think that the potential Leader of the Free World would be getting better medical treatment than I have, but seemingly no such luck.  I have been battling various and sundry symptoms resulting from this condition for decades, and when I hear Clinton’s hoarseness I cringe in sympathy.  I don’t have sneezing or itchy eyes; I have exactly what she has: vocal problems and coughing spells.  Just this week I almost had to hang up on someone because I was caught unexpectedly by a fit. Thankfully I could stave it off long enough to give a polite good-bye, but then I whooped and hollered until the spell passed, just as she apparently did on the plane with the reporters. Right now as I’m typing this the whole back of my throat is sore and scratchy-feeling. I need to go do the nasal rinse thing and then use my nasal spray.  If I do this faithfully my symptoms abate, and then I forget to do those things, and then the symptoms come right back.

I’ve gotten an introduction recently to Laura Ingraham, a right-wing radio talk-show host and commentator. I kept running across references to her in all the reading I’ve been doing about the upcoming election and at first thought she was the same as Dr. Laura, who is, of course, Laura Schlessinger, another talk-show host. So I’ve been doing a little research and ran across this segment from her show in which she makes an equivalent comparison between Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and Abraham Lincoln. A caller brings up how troubling he finds Trump’s personal life and character. Well, she replies,Ronald Reagan was divorced, wasn’t he? You’re not for divorce, are you? The caller is somewhat taken aback. And what about Abraham Lincoln and his suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War? Hmmm? What about that? (The link above is to the conservative website “Hot Air” by Ed Morrissey and includes some excellent commentary of its own.)

I’ve presented a small selection of articles this week that cover a range of opinions about the e-mail controversy and the corruption issue in general: one that severely condemns Clinton, one that sort of condemns her, and one that points out that she’s kind of an amateur in the corruption world compared to her opponent. It could be pointed out that Trump’s misdeeds at least haven’t endangered American security, but then it might also be pointed that he hasn’t had a chance yet.

It would be very tempting for me to say, “Okay, fine. Go ahead and put Trump in the White House. You’ll see that I was right!” But I don’t want to be proven right. I don’t want to be able to say, two years into a Trump presidency, “I told you so!” I see such unmitigated disaster coming if this man is put into power that I can’t sit back and wash my hands of the whole thing. I can’t believe that is the right thing to do, although there are many thoughtful people who are saying that. National Review, a great conservative news outlet, had an article yesterday that takes that very position; you can read it here. But folks, one or the other of these awful candidates is going to be President. And the choice is up to us. Refusing to make a choice is . . . making a choice.

Okay, now you can read the article. Take a deep breath first.

​“Save the Republican Party: Vote for Clinton”

I’ve used the last two posts for articles on the Clinton State Department e-mails and made it very clear that I don’t consider this a trivial matter.  It is not anything of the kind.

Here’s what has happened in the media, though:  the two candidates have each been pigeonholed.  Clinton is corrupt; Trump is a clown.  News that fits into these categories gets a lot of attention; news that doesn’t, doesn’t.  And because Trump is so entertaining, with such a stream of gaffes (although he’s calmed down considerably of late–the iron hand of Kellyann Conway at work, no doubt), the focus stays there.  Meanwhile the poor Clinton press corps has to plod along, trying to make e-mails interesting.  She’s not providing new fodder every day, so there’s nothing for them to do but keep digging on what’s already out there, with periodic dumps of more of the same.  As I say, serious stuff that needs to be addressed.  But what isn’t addressed very much at all is Trump’s corruption.  This may be changing, what with his use of the sickening Roger Ailes as an adviser and the whole Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi campaign contribution/dropping-of-case-against-Trump-“University” case.  Here’s an excellent article from earlier this week on this whole issue:

“Trump’s History of Corruption Is Mind-Boggling.  So Why Is Clinton Supposedly the Corrupt One?”

You’ve all heard the expression “straight from the horse’s mouth, haven’t you? Well, a good source from the horse’s mouth would seem to be the actual FBI memo on Clinton’s misuse of a private server for her State Department e-mails.  This article gives a summary, but if you’re as fascinated by this whole thing as I am, you might want to give the actual document a scan.  I’m going to try to do this; it’s only 58 pages, so it won’t be like trying to go through the 30,000+ document pile.  Yesterday’s article that I posted was scathing; this one is less so, but no one, no matter how liberal, is saying that this is unimportant.  Clinton’s attitude was clearly that she wanted complete control over her communications and was willing to do something that she had to know was unacceptable in order to get that control.