WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2016
Today’s Good News And Bad News
From Our Local Political Junkie We’ll Call “Cincy Dave”

TONIGHT’S DEBATE
Tonight is the third and final presidential debate, which is scheduled for 9 PM. This is Trump’s last big chance to do anything to help himself so he is likely to throw anything and everything at Hillary to see what sticks. Hillary, as before, doesn’t have to win but just keep from making any bone-headed errors. She will try to look presidential while The Donald goes into his act. There is no way to anticipate what he might say or do. He’s surely getting a lot of bad advice from his campaign manager, the Breitbart guy, who has never run a campaign before, and of course has never been a candidate for anything before. If Trump “wins” the debate, it will be a minor miracle but even then, it will mean very little because most people have already made up their minds about these two candidates and quite a few have already cast their votes. However, it is fun to continue the baseball analogy, first put forth by Trump’s co-manager Kellyanne Conway when she called him “the Babe Ruth of Debating.” The Babe Struck out in his first two plate appearances and this is likely his last. Now, it is the bottom of the 9th with two outs. The count is no balls and two strikes. A home run or even a grand-slam home run won’t do it because the team is 9 runs (or 9 percentage points) behind. The only glimmer of hope is that if he can get on base and the rest of the team can bat around and bring him to the plate again. Yogi said, “it ain’t over till it’s over” but that only applied to baseball. The difference here is that this ain’t baseball and, like most other sports, there is a clock. It’s now down to 20 days and counting, plus there are no time-outs. But then again, you never know what might happen. It has been a very strange election year and there may be more to come. There’s still time for an October (or November) surprise.

JERRY SPRINGER
For tonight’s debate, The Donald has a couple of new Springer Show tricks. He has invited Obama to be there. Not the president – the president’s half brother, who is now estranged from the president and supporting Trump. He and the president were once close but they had a falling out of some sort. It is assumed that he will be seated in the front row. What this is supposed to accomplish is anyone’s guess. Maybe Trump’s campaign managers think having someone named Obama, no matter how unimportant, on their side is going to give him some advantage. Also, he has invited the mother of one of the Benghazi victims, Patricia Smith, to the debate. The purpose here is a little more clear, it is an attempt to throw Hillary off her stride. But just like the Springer-style trick at the last debate, inviting some of Bill’s bimbos, it is likely to fail. There is little doubt that these stunts are the brainchild of Trump campaign manager, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart guy. We will be paying careful attention to see if the Fox News moderator, Chris Wallace, shows if he in on the stunt. By having Wallace as the moderator, one thing is certain – Hillary won’t be getting any help from him, although The Donald might. This could be in the form of getting softball type questions vs. hardball questions for Hillary. She has been preparing for at least 16 years, if not 50 years, so she ought to be ready for anything.

BAD NEWS FOR TRUMP
People Magazine has an article about six people corroborating Natasha Stoynoff’s story of being attacked by Trump at his Mar-A-Lago estate. So now he has six more liars to defend against. Hopefully for Trump, some of them may be too ugly to be believed.
More here: 

ASSANGE INTERNET CUT OFF
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for several years to avoid arrest on charges of rape and espionage. Now Ecuador has cut off his internet connection. Rumors are that the U.S. pressured Ecuador to cut him off but the State Department denied it. Almost no one believes them. Although the head of the organization has been cut off, it probably won’t prevent them from continuing to cooperate with the Russians in their activities, so we can expect Wikileaks dumps to continue. 

TRUMP PROPOSES TERM LIMITS
The Donald wants to “drain the swamp” in Washington by imposing term limits on congress. Many people might like the idea of term limits but it can never happen, because Congress itself would have to pass a proposed constitutional amendment which would kick a lot of them out of their chosen careers. Few members of congress, new or old, are going to vote themselves out of a job. Even if that could happen, there is the huge problem of getting three-fourths of the states to ratify such a scheme. Their legislatures are composed of the same kind of career politicians, with their own ambitions to move up or at least make a good living by just going to the capital a few dozen times a year. Consequently they too would have little incentive to pass such an amendment. It is an idea whose time will never come.

TODAY’S STATE POLLS
This huge batch, taken entirely after the “locker room” tape shows about the same thing as other recent polls – Namely, that The Donald is in deep trouble. When Arizona and Georgia are up for grabs, any Republican presidential candidate is probably doomed. If these are to be believed, the next 20 days of campaigning are a complete waste of time for him.

— More Good News And Bad News Tomorrow —