All across the American media pollsters and pundits are gazing at their navels and wailing about why Donald Trump was elected president of the United States when everything they did for more than a year was geared to preventing exactly that outcome.

What did we do wrong? What did we miss? Why did the voting public not believe our polls and commentaries in sufficient numbers to make Hillary Clinton president? Woe is us; we are going to have to convene panels and study groups and committees to examine our polling methods to make sure this never happens again.

This is merely a continuation of the rubbish these people were spewing ever since 2015 when they ignited a firestorm of opposition to Trump by claiming that any other GOP candidate would do better against Clinton than he would. But what so many either ignored, or didn't understand, was that Trump also ignited a firestorm of anti-establishment fervor that was sufficient to overcome all the odds and send him to the White House.

Yet today, even some allegedly conservative national outlets are decrying the leftist bias of the "main stream media" as if it is anyone else but them. While the more astute of the pollsters were issuing mea culpas and promising to do better the next time, and others were simply ignoring their failures or trying to look the other way, the simple fact of the matter is that they can prevent a similar failure the next time by just doing their jobs.

What was missing from this presidential election was the application of professional standards, as poll after poll succumbed either to their own biases or pressure from the leftist media to make sure that their numbers consistently put Clinton above, beyond and out of Trump's reach.

I became suspicious of the 'polls' when they also began to show that President Obama's favorability ratings were climbing above fifty percent. This despite domestic discord, a continually weak economy, jobs numbers that were never good and often relied on part-time and seasonal swings to appear even anemically improved, repeated terrorist attacks on our own soil, and an all-out war against the police.

So I started looking into the methodology of the polls and what I found was that they were nearly universally slanted to the Democrats. In poll after poll by either national or local media outlets, often coupled with colleges or universities, the pollsters surveyed a preponderance of Democrats, well in excess of their actual percentage in the electorate, while sampling smaller numbers of Republicans and virtually ignoring independents.

But except for occasional outliers, independent voters dominate the electoral landscape, so their absence in appropriate percentages from the bulk of the polls rendered the results virtually meaningless. The 'polls' were in fact surveys, because they contacted people by random, with no means of ascertaining whether those being interviewed were who they said they were, either by personal identity or political preferences.

I wrote about this several times prior to the election and concluded that Trump would win. I am not taking a victory lap here because I wasn't involved in the election, but I am pointing out that it is possible to delve into the methodology of this propaganda and ascertain whether it is accurate or a blatant attempt to sway public opinion.

In one of the most laughable of the polls, released just before Election Day, FOX News gave Hillary Clinton a lead of 4 percent over Trump, and identified respondents' political persuasion by asking them not how they were registered, but did they think of themselves as Republicans or Democrats. WHAT?? Both major parties were over-sampled in this poll while independents barely broke double digits.

There is a straightforward, far more accurate way to do a real POLL of political beliefs and I learned it at class given by a veteran political strategist nearly two decades ago. Start with the fact that every state has lists of registered voters by name, address and party registration, or lack of it in the case of independents.

The parties have further breakdowns on how many times each respondent has voted. If you want 'likely voters' you contact people who have voted in four out the last four elections of the same type – presidential elections, gubernatorial elections, congressional elections or local municipal elections.

Then you contact sufficient numbers of each party or independents to reflect their actual percentages in the area you are polling. For a more accurate result you should get a total of at least 1,000 respondents.

But the media didn't do that. Their polls were abominations and clearly intended to drive more people to the Democrat candidate while making the Republican appear to be struggling with a minimal base. Fortunately for Trump the public doesn't trust the media.

Nonetheless, these 'polls' were reported as fact when in reality they were fantasy. The upshot of what we now see as an all-out effort to usurp the electoral process is that dozens if not hundreds of reporters, editors, producers, columnists and pundits for America's major news organizations have squandered their reputations, their rapport with the public, and most important the trust of their viewers and readers.

Restoring that trust may be extraordinarily difficult if not impossible. It's only two years until the next national election. Better get started.

The American media, across the spectrum, in all forms, has never been so unreliable, so biased, so propagandized and untruthful as in the past 18 months of presidential campaign coverage.

Regardless of whether we are reading establishment newspapers and magazines, viewing television news outlets, cable and network, or listening to talk radio, we have been inundated with lie after lie, all of which were intended to maintain the establishment grip on Washington, D.C., and the political bureaucracy.

The basis for this not-so-astounding claim on my part is the overwhelming use of surveys loosely defined as "polls" which drove every single news cycle regardless of the nature of true news that far too often was relegated to secondary status. Even when a major event did occur, such as the terrorist attack on a gay club in Orlando, Florida, the media ultimately got around to what it would mean in the polls.

If you want to know when the media is lying to you – aside from newscasters moving their lips - you simply have to look for any segment that starts with the words "according to recent polls." If you like you can substitute "just released" or "brand new" or words of that nature for 'recent.'

Before a single candidate announced for the presidency, the media and the major political parties had already decided that Democrat Hillary Clinton would face Jeb Bush, who would vanquish his Republican primary opponents with aplomb. After a hard-fought campaign Bush would be ever-so-closely edged out by the woman who would be the first female president of the US.

Hillary Clinton

And the media already had the polls to prove it! But far too often, those "polls" did not include a representative sampling of Republican, Democrat and Independent voters in the percentages by which they were registered in the area where the sample was taken, much less those who could be relied upon to vote. In fact, many of the early polls didn't even ascertain whether the respondents were registered voters, and often included a random sampling of several hundred "adults."

In other words, they were meaningless. Yet the polls drove the news and the intent was that the news then would drive the polls.

Two things stepped in the way; the campaigns of Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who ran as a Democrat alternative to Clinton, and Republican Donald Trump who ran as an alternative to the establishment. After a well-run campaign in which the media undermined him at every opportunity, in coordination with the Democrat National Committee, and hurt him as much by the issues it didn't cover as those it did, Sanders went down to pre-ordained defeat, with Clinton the anointed successor to Barack Obama.

Then to the horror of his one-time supporters Sanders found the sudden wealth to purchase a third home, a $600,000 mansion, and instantly became a Clinton supporter. In fact, as the campaign progressed, Sanders had his nose so far up Clinton's rectum that he morphed into a political caricature of Pinocchio, pausing only to beg of Clinton, "Tell me another lie, tell me another lie!"

But Trump, who was under fire from the first question he fielded in the first primary debate, turned the tables on virtually everyone, including the media and the political establishment which for the purposes of this article means that unholy conglomerate of D.C.-centrist insiders and self-anointed "elitists" from both major parties. He bested 16 other primary opponents, many of whom had so little support that they weren't even allowed on the same stage with him.

Donald J. Trump

Trump had enough money to fund his own campaign without having his legs cut out from under him by biased news reports that are intended to stop the flow of donor cash that for other candidates funds the campaign ads that are the life blood of the media. And Trump, unlike any of his predecessors going back to Dwight Eisenhower, showed that not only did he not need the ads, he also had the personal toughness to withstand the unrelenting, usually false assaults on him by the media and its stooges, props and sycophants.

So here we are on the cusp of the 2016 presidential election with the media universally proclaiming the race is a "dead heat" with Hillary Clinton just a few points ahead of Trump, but within the "margin of error." Bull. I have reviewed the methodology of virtually every poll done in every "battleground" state where the decision supposedly will really be made – because according to the media mantra, every voter in every non-battleground state is so predictable that they really don’t need to pay attention to them on Nov. 8. These polls say she will eke out a narrow victory, just as planned at the outset.

Really? I've got news for you. Many so-called predictable "blue" states are in the media's list of Clinton guaranteed electoral votes only because they are using the same bogus polling methodology in the final days that they were using months ago. And these polls still are over-sampling Democrats while under-sampling Republicans and Independents, usually by double digits.

Yet even with the deck stacked in that manner Trump is close, tied, or within the "margin of error," which tells me that the media is trying, right up to the last minute, to keep the election within a razor-thin margin that would preempt large-scale calls for recounts and investigations of voter fraud. "Oh, so close. Sorry guys. But you did give it a good try." And an anti-establishment candidate will never be heard from again in our lifetimes.

More to the point, people writing about or broadcasting these lies know exactly what they are doing but keep telling us with a straight face that a majority of American voters still prefer a candidate who some are saying committed treason, to a capable businessman who sometimes makes thin-skinned people feel uncomfortable.

Before every news organization and college looking for extra income started doing "polls" there were two major polling organizations in the US; the Gallup Poll and the Harris Poll. Interestingly, neither of these organizations does polling on presidential races, although they will poll issues surrounding those races.

One reason why is the incredible unpredictability of the electorate, and to do an accurate poll of political preferences you have to get the names and contact information for people who actually are registered to vote, and usually do, an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. You have to have their party affiliation or lack of it, and the frequency with which they go to the polls in similar elections going back at least 4 cycles to have any chance at accuracy.

And even then you can be blindsided because, as is the case this year, millions of people registered to vote in the Republican primaries and you can see from the turnout at his events that they are there for Trump. But they aren't on the lists of people who have voted in similar elections so they don't get polled; although that really wouldn't matter since the media model is to get sufficient responses to verify its pre-selected outcome, not to find out what people are really thinking.

So they 'poll' a few or several hundred people, get the response they wanted, then claim to know exactly where the race stands, within a supposedly acceptable margin of error. Want to know what the The Harris Poll thinks of margins of error? Check this out.

The Harris Poll avoids the words “margin of error” as they are misleading. All that can be calculated are different possible sampling errors with different probabilities for pure, unweighted, random samples with 100% response rates. These are only theoretical because no published polls come close to this ideal.

Also, Gallup samples generally are at least 1,000 respondents and sometimes much larger. Only rarely do they go into the 500-1000 range, but many media polls routinely sample less than 500 alleged voters, and then claim to know the mood of the country.

So I don't look for a Hillary Clinton victory on Tuesday because even though she has plenty of supporters who are willing to look past her personal history, her husband's history, her foundation's activities, her support for so many anti-American positions on myriad issues, and her abject failures as a public official, there are far more Americans who have had it with her and the political establishment.

Thus, barring a massive outbreak of voter fraud, which is possible, I admit, I believe the real polls put Trump over the top. And if that prediction comes true I hope one of his first acts is to put the so-called media, those pusillanimous purveyors of lies, divisiveness and hatred on notice that they will be the last people in town to get a heads up on anything, whether it be breaking international news or a brief on the D.C. Zoning Commission's upcoming decision on an application to build a dog house.

Several times over the past decade I have derided the gentlemanly manner in which Republican candidates have approached campaigning, whether it is on a local, state or national level.

I see politics as a blood sport, not a gentlemanly – or ladylike – contest, whether the candidates are running for president or alternate for a municipal commission. I understand human nature and at some level in all of our psyches we want to win, regardless of how "nice" we try to be in public.

But the Republican Party for some time now has been enforcing a "nice guy" mantra where GOP candidates are to refrain from taking off the gloves and smacking the daylights out of their opponents, regardless of how vicious that opponent may be. Somewhere along the line the general public was supposed to attach itself to the anti-bullying point of view that has made total wimps out of generations of school kids who are blindsided by reality when they get out in the working world and don't know how to defend themselves.

The nice guy approach didn't work and I am not the only person who feels this way. In fact I was reminded of some of my earlier columns recently when conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh brought the subject up on his show. Limbaugh made the point that out here in the real world some of us had been calling for street fighters and brawlers and now we have it.

For instance, when John McCain was getting slapped around by Barack Obama in 2008 I decried his Marquis de Queensbury approach writing about it here.

Four years later, I wrote about it here when Mitt Romney was facing off against Obama in 2012.

Unfortunately my predictions came true in both races and when all was said and done the GOP "nice guys" were down on the pavement, crying about their opponent being "unfair," while Obama and his cronies were dancing over them singing "I won, I won, I won," and taking the country right down the proverbial drain.

In both cases the GOP candidates put up a clean and "gentlemanly" fight, and in both cases they got their asses kicked. In Romney's case, he lost because Republicans didn't come out to vote for him, even though Obama amassed about 4 million fewer votes in 2012 than he had in his 2008 victory over McCain.

Donald J. Trump

Then came Donald J. Trump. He let the world and the political establishment know from the very start that he wasn't playing games and he would not fight clean or even fair. He started out his first debate telling Rand Paul that he didn't even belong on the same stage and that was one of gentlest things he said in the primary season.

He spent the next several months kicking his opponents, numbering 16 at the beginning, off the stage, one by one. In the end, he stood alone, victorious, ready to take on Democrat Hillary Clinton and her behind-the-scene partners, establishment Republicans who are outraged that the rank-and-file haven't toed the party line and selected their fair-haired candidate, as well as the entirety of the US media establishment.

Throughout the primaries there was not one television network or major print news outlet that covered his campaign fairly or accurately. Even before he vanquished his last Republican primary opponent, the media was trumpeting alleged "polls" that showed he would be far behind Hillary Clinton if she was successful in stealing the Democrat nomination.

From the beginning the media – through use of their fake polls – attempted to direct the primary voters to their preferred candidates – Clinton and Jeb Bush – and from the beginning Republican and Independent voters told the media and the establishment to pound sand and voted overwhelmingly for Trump. It has since been proven that those "polls" were as bogus as the current crop of garbage that form the core for any print article or electronic segment.

Trump, for his part, led his supporters from the front, telling the unified media and GOP establishment lackeys that he wasn't taking their crap, wasn't knuckling under to their threats and attacks and was going to do his own campaign, his way. And here we are, a week from the election with even the bogus pollsters cracking and reporting that the race is "tightening," and that in many states Trump is even ahead.

What a pant load, Trump has been ahead all along.

Trump got to this point by sticking steadfastly to the street fighters' credo, that of continuing the fight and never backing down, even when you get hit hard, even when you get bloodied, even when you get knocked down. Whatever the other side throws at you, you take it, shake it off and keep fighting.

Because to a true street fighter, the only real loss comes from backing down, wimping out, begging for mercy when you still had fight left in you.

Trump has of course been bloodied, what with the combined forces of the media, the Democrats, and the so-called "elitist" Republican establishment aligned against him and launching coordinated assaults against his candidacy. But each time he came back swinging, and therein lies the 'secret' to his overwhelming popularity.

He didn't wimp out, he took the shots and even on the rare occasions when he was rocked, he came right back. Joe Biden can talk all he wants about being a bad ass but he can only dream of possessing a fraction of Trump's true toughness.

In less than a week most Americans will go to the polls and it will surprise no one if Trump comes out the victor. The Clinton machine is still trying to find something, anything, that will halt the Trump juggernaut, but time is preciously short and they have shot all their ammo.

The elitists called for Trump to step down in early October when a putrid little media ass kisser who secretly taped Trump making some unflattering comments more than a decade ago, released the tape to the Clinton campaign. He did it in the summer, but Clinton held on to it and used it for her "October surprise."

However, the real surprise came when Trump stood up, apologized for his past indiscretion and kept right on swinging. And his popularity grew.

The total lack of understanding of the real nature of the beast was never more apparent than the drivel emanating from GOP establishment types who believed Trump would meekly step down. That is what they would have done, but that's also why wimps of that nature never actually run for anything because their precious little feelings would get hurt in the first moments of the engagement, and they'd run home crying, jump into bed and pull the covers over their head until the monsters went away.

But Trump? He hung tough and sure enough, the media was finally forced to confront the fact that their attacks only made Trump stronger.

Now, Hillary Clinton is backed into a corner, taking massive shot after massive shot. Her legs are buckling, her supporters are trying to help her by attacking Trump from outside the ring, and yet, every day she sags a bit closer to the deck. I seriously doubt that she has the wherewithal to find some kind of inner strength to mount one last successful counterattack.

Should Trump win it all next Tuesday, and I believe he will, there is one thing his enemies should remember. Street fighters will fight all alone if necessary, because that is what street fighters do.

But they also remember who backed them up and who stood against them when the fight was on. Trump will make good on his promises to reunite America in an atmosphere of greatness. But at the same time, he won't forget the candy asses who stabbed him in the back from the day he declared his candidacy to this very moment.

Frankly, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.

There were a number of stupid things said at the third and thank God final presidential debate of the 2016 election year, but the hands down stupidest was Hillary Clinton's claim that Donald Trump is a puppet of Russian honcho Vladimir Putin.

For starters, there is no solid evidence that anything of the kind is happening, except the release through Wikileaks of thousands of embarrassing and possible actionable emails from Clinton and her cronies running from insults to criminal conspiracies. The Clinton campaign and the wider Democratic Party are both screaming loudly of Russian interference, which is what people do when they know that the ginned up polls showing her ahead of Donald Trump aren't accurate and she actually is losing.

Second, although she claims that 17 US intelligence officials say Putin is interfering with our election, and that he really, really, really likes Trump more than her – something that any sixth grader would understand as a threat to their class standing – the truth is that starting with the FBI and going outward, the Obama Administration simply isn't trusted and anything they say is highly suspect to most intelligent Americans.

But to hear her go on and on about the Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was like reverting back to the Cold War days when the Russians really were coming and they really liked the Democrats far better than any Republican. This time around Clinton seems to have taken on the characteristics of infamous Red baiter Joe McCarthy, the late senator from Wisconsin who turned commie hunting into a national pastime.

But McCarthy was a Republican and although he was eviscerated by the 1950s media, which had far fewer communists in key positions than today's media, he also was right. In a famous incident from that time McCarthy, in a speech before Congress held up a list of dozens of suspected communists who he said were working inside the US government.

He was roundly criticized for his comments, but as was later revealed in several books on the Venona Cables, he was right and virtually everyone on his list, nearly 5 dozen I believe, was in fact a communist agent. The Venona Cables were messages transmitted between the Soviet Union and its spies in the US,  which the communists thought were immune from decoding.

But through a series of events in WWII, the code was broken and US intelligence agencies began deciphering them, a task that continued until the Jimmy Carter presidency when he ended it. The upshot of the work on the Venona Project was that the identities of many Soviet spies working in the US government including the State Department, the Treasury, the OSS which was the forerunner of the CIA, and even the White House were discovered.

McCarthy didn't live anywhere near long enough to do a victory round on his claims of widespread communist infiltration but it would appear that Hillary Clinton did that for him Wednesday night. She literally looked like a 50's era red baiter, warning of a newly emerging Red Scare, and claiming that Trump is a mere puppet for Putin.

That claim might have had some traction if not for the fact that Trump wants to beef up the US military, the Justice Department and other agencies that would pose a major threat to any Russian attempts at infiltration or manipulation. Putin has pretty much had his way with the Obama Administration, including making Clinton herself look like a world class chump on the international relations, so why would he want to give up on a good thing?

Backing Trump would be a lose-lose situation for Putin because he would be facing an unknown factor who just might get his jollies facing up to the old Russian bear. Clinton on the other hand, well, why not back Clinton? At least she can be manipulated, and quite often wouldn't even know it.

Nonetheless, as asinine as it appeared Clinton's ravings did take me back in time to a much simpler and joyful era, when we knew that the Russians were our enemies seven days a week and nothing was going to change that. It sort of made me feel – young again.

Does anyone remember I Led Three Lives? Now that was a TV show!

Hillary Clinton

The mainstream media is trying to hide Hillary Clinton's deplorable performance at the presidential debate Wednesday night by focusing on Donald Trump's comment that he will wait until election night before deciding whether to accept the outcome.

One of those streaming voter opinion polls that was on TV during the debate showed massive, overwhelming support for that position from Republican and Independent voters, while the Democrats didn't like it much, which means the media didn't like it much. So what? Too bad.

Why would any sane office seeker concede their position on anything weeks before a vote when one of the mainstays of their campaign is that the process is rigged and voter fraud is widespread? The media was reporting across the spectrum in the days leading up to the debate that Trump had no proof of his accusations, which in itself is an outright lie.

There already have been reports of illegal aliens and long-dead people voting in early voting states so how much more "proof" does he need? Hopefully, by drawing early attention to the issue it can be curtailed.

Donald Trump

But there is a bigger matter to discuss here; what happens when candidates should withhold their concession and instead meekly accept an outcome that not only is fraudulent but by its nature disenfranchises millions of voters?

Case in point is not the extended claims by Democrat Al Gore in 2000, who simply could not believe that the country didn't think he was as cool as he thought he was, but rather the unfortunate decision by Richard Nixon in 1960 not to contest the election night results and to concede to John F. Kennedy. Nixon had been presented with credible information of massive voter fraud and manipulation in Illinois, West Virginia and Texas, home of the soon to be vice president Lyndon B. Johnson.

Nixon determined that contesting the election would be bad for the country and allowed the results to stand. The results ultimately included the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's assassination, Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War and decades of unrest.

Nixon was elected in 1968 on a promise to end the Vietnam War, which finally occurred not by the military victory that was within his grasp as early as 1969, but after he left office in disgrace in 1974. The fall of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to murderous rampaging communists resulted from two cowardly acts of Congress, the Case-Church Amendment of 1973 and the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 that pulled all support from South Vietnam.

As a result some 3 million people were butchered by the communists, 2 million South Vietnamese fled and were dubbed Boat People by the media, who basically ignored the 300,000 deaths reported by the UN Commission on the Status of Refugees and Displaced Persons. The media also ignored the 160,000 deaths in communist concentration camps that the media called "reeducation camps," and hid the savage genocide in Cambodia's killing fields, where millions died, until it was too widely known to ignore.

It was in the Kennedy/Johnson years that the seeds of the drug epidemic that still afflicts millions of Americans sprouted, along with a near universal breakdown of morals that led to the spread of venereal diseases on an epidemic scale and ultimately brought about incurable sexually transmitted diseases including herpes and AIDS.

Would all of this have happened under Nixon? Not likely. It is entirely possible that other issues would have arisen in those Cold War years, but Lyndon Johnson never would have been president and that in itself would have been far better for the country than the hell that he brought about.

So, should Donald J. Trump willingly discard an opportunity to challenge a fraudulent election vote? No. Never. He is not the first presidential candidate to keep his options open, and he won't be the last.

But he is today's candidate, challenging the establishment, vowing to Drain the Swamp that is today's government, and he is certain to face myriad attempts legal and illegal, fair and foul, to keep him from becoming president and making good on his campaign pledges. He should hold firm until the last legal vote is counted, and every illegal vote is discarded.

In the end it's all about voter suppression. People who do real polls, not the media generated propaganda that exists only to convince candidates to buy ad space, know that Donald Trump has been way ahead from the beginning.

So if you are backing Hillary Clinton and willing to throw the entire Constitution of the United States of America out the window to get her elected, how do you offset the albatross that she has had hanging around her neck for two decades? Not her own incompetence, vile and profane behavior, history of selling herself and her country to the lowest bidder or total disdain for the citizens she aims to rule.

No, none of that. Rather, the albatross that is her husband and his reputation as a serial sexual molester who left the White House in disgrace, impeached, disbarred, taking thousands of dollars worth of government property that he was forced to return, and leaving behind only his DNA on a blue dress proving forever that if he is breathing and his lips are moving he is lying.

Despite the media and the Democrat party perpetually proclaiming Bill Clinton to be a much-loved latter day Pied Piper who in reality takes private plane trips to secret places with known pedophiles, and yet supposedly attracts throngs of  truly ignorant donors, the voters know him to be who and what he really is. And we know that voting him and Hillary back into the White House would be suicide for the American Dream, the Constitution and all that was possible for more than two centuries.

So how do you offset this gaping negativity, this dark cloud that follows her everywhere she goes? How do you combat it, especially in the midst of the total failure of your most effective weapon, the fawning propagandists portraying themselves as journalists who scramble to move their cameras ever closer to the podium so as not to reveal what every one already knows, that where Trump attracts tens of thousands each day, she rarely attracts even tens of hundreds?

Easy. You create a work of fiction out of a decade old secret audio recording of Trump saying the kind of things about women that far too many men say in private to each other. You turn that one mistake into a lifetime of fabricated behavior, get your media tools to repeat it every hour of every day, and make it the lead headline of every news story every hour until the Big Lie becomes the only thing the public remembers and Trump is forced to respond, adding to the piling on.

And there you have it; a totally fabricated diversion to draw attention away from your albatross and in fact, make it his albatross. Not only does the public begin to question his qualifications for office, but your own inabilities across the spectrum of public service - your positions on the real issues facing the country - get lost in the shuffle.

No, he never said he forced his way on women and groped or kissed them against their will.

In fact he said the exact opposite; that women let him kiss them and grope them because he is a star and when you are a star you get to do that kind of thing. Have you ever seen or read interviews with the bouncers from Studio 54, that Manhattan nightclub famous for its patrons snorting enough cocaine to keep the country of Columbia solvent for decades? Have you read the accounts of what women were willing to do just to get in the door?

Have you ever looked into the demands made of rock band groupies whose highest aspiration is being included in the background of a rock video; and have you seen how many people thought nothing of destroying their own self-esteem just for a chance to be "seen?"

So I don't doubt that Donald Trump existed in a world that is foreign to most of us, but I do doubt the stories of his conveniently discovered accusers because frankly, he didn't have to force himself on anyone.

From the initial allegations of Jessica Leeds whose description of a first-class unsavory encounter in her airplane seat next to Trump in the 1980s doesn't match the actual interior of the plane she claimed they were in, to the outrage of flight attendants everywhere who say they never would have allowed such behavior, to the copy cats who sprouted lies like fungi in beds of manure in the days afterward, there has been an appalling absence of basic journalism across the American media spectrum.

From the standpoint of a 30-year veteran of the media, public relations, and media relations fields, with considerable work in crisis management behind me, I can point to one particular aspect of this sordid media generated and perpetrated mess that leads me to believe Trump, not his accusers.

Trump fessed up to his reprehensible commentary, told the country he was truly sorry and embarrassed for his long-ago behavior. He looked us in the eye, admitted what he did was not his best moment, was regrettable and apologized for long-ago trash talk.

But the neither the Times, a showpiece of yellow journalism with a long-time reputation for making errors that it refuses to correct, nor the rest of the American mainstream media, including FOX News, was content to let that rest, considering that he said it during a debate with Clinton in which he mopped the floor with her steel-like coiffure and showed the world the true difference between them. NO, the media went on a tear, bringing forth discredited accuser after discredited accuser, including copy cats, apers and bandwagon jumpers, not one of whom could prove even a smidgen of her claims against him.

But when the NY Times and other media outlets launched their tidal wave of attacks on Trump he stood up to them, looked them in the eye and said No Way Did This Happen. A client in trouble who doesn't obfuscate and avoid the issue, but instead tackles it head-on by flat-out denying it and demanding that his accusers show their proof is a PR man's dream.

Want to run your mouth and make vicious unsubstantiated claims? Then show up, stand up and let's see your proof! Oh, you don't have any? Well, like Louis XV once said, "Apres moi, le deluge." Here comes the rain baby.

Decades ago, while there still were real investigative reporters in this country, as opposed to media faces who report on investigations, there was a requirement that at least two credible sources back up any story of this nature; three was better.

Now it merely takes the word of anyone who is willing to prostitute themselves to the media for a few minutes of infamy, and a lifetime of dishonor and discredit. Not people who tell the accuser "You lie and I'll back you up," but people who witnessed the alleged incident were required for valid investigative pieces to make it to the public.

Unfortunately for Hillary and her media lackeys, there aren’t any. In fact, Trump has witnesses who say these incidents didn't happen, and they were there!

So what does the media do to hide its complicity and duplicity? It leads every story every hour with bogus "polls" showing that their exemplary "reporting" has awakened the public who now are deserting Trump and jumping on the Clinton bandwagon. This of course begs the question "Why?"

People who aren't voting for Clinton know exactly why they aren't and wouldn't vote for her regardless. If they were going to vote for someone other than Trump due to the media created controversies, it certainly wouldn't be her.

But there is one thing that all of these media polls have in common. Look in the print stories about the poll results and there will be a link taking you to the actual poll. And you will find that invariably they over-sample Democrats by as much as 10 percentage points, and grossly under-sample Independent voters.

So why wouldn't these "polls" show Clinton leading? Also, pollsters, who conduct these polls by "randomly" calling people on the phone and asking if they are registered and voting, can skew them simply by targeting certain area codes and local prefixes.

Both major political parties have extensive data on registered voters in every locality and they know where their strengths and weaknesses lie. So if you want an outcome that is favorable to Democrats, just target phone numbers in places where Democrats have the highest registrations, then call away until you have an acceptable number responding the way you want and voila!

You have created a false narrative, spoon fed it to a supposedly gullible public, spread it far and wide and have shown that it has indeed changed the minds of millions of likely voters. Except you haven't; you have made it appear to be so, but it isn't so. But now the candidates are scrambling to either make the most of it,  or fight back against it, and one way they do that is to use the media to spread their own message; and that means dollars.

I actually heard a FOX News contributor say the other day that the best thing Trump can do to offset these results is "buy TV ads!" Seriously.

So how can voters offset this unprecedented surge of yellow journalism? Vote. Get out and vote. Make sure your family members vote, your neighbors vote; in short if we want America back, we have to take it back here and now in massive numbers that will overwhelm the bogus polls and election fraud that is sure to come next. You have your marching orders.

Let's get it over with up front. I'm not watching tonight's debate.

I know who I'm voting for in November, there isn't even a minuscule chance that someone will say something tonight that will change my mind and I am absolutely certain I can find something better to watch if my evening is to be spent in front of a television.

I can also make some predictions that probably will come true. Tonight's moderator is CBS News’ Elaine Quijano, who the media refers to as a Filipino-American and an Asian-American even though she was born and raised in the United States. I didn't know until just now that people born in the Philippines are considered Asian, which I thought meant people of Oriental races. Sorry, I guess I'm not very informed.

The media says that she will clash with GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, because as the media also says, Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee is anti-immigrant. 

That of course is an outright lie and the mantra chanted by the Democrats, including the media, ever since Trump entered the race and promised to get illegal immigration under control.

The media refers to Quijano as a second-generation American, just like me, although no one has ever called me a Scottish-American and my relatives in Scotland don't think of me as Scottish either. Apparently that means we're supposed to hate Donald Trump and vote for Hillary Clinton which has about as much chance of happening in my house as a wax cat surviving a California wildfire.

Nonetheless, that appears to be the cover for Quijano to pull a Lester Holt on Pence and ask him a bunch of 'gotcha' questions and interrupt him while he tries to formulate a response. Of course he'll deserve anything he gets from the media since he doesn't want a bunch of unvetted Syrian refugees, some of whom are highly likely to be terrorists, dumped helter-skelter into Indiana where he is governor.

Regardless of how well Pence does tonight, the media tomorrow will say he lost. If he has no blunders and his Democrat opponent screws up from the opening question to the last, the media will still say Pence lost.

If his opponent can't say two words without tripping over his tongue, the media will say Pence lost. I, however, believe Pence will win because tomorrow I still will not vote for Hillary Clinton and I won't buy any products from the advertisers who back this blather. 

Did I tell you that I discovered an entire unwatched season of The Blacklist on Netflix last week? Go Reddington!

The New York Times and its assorted media sycophants spent most of Sunday slapping themselves on the back over a sloppy and questionable package of attack articles alleging that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took an entirely legal and justifiable loss on his 1995 tax returns partially due to a downturn in the Atlantic City gaming industry.

The Times, admitting that it possesses only three out of potentially scores of documents that would have been involved in such a complicated corporate/personal tax return, even ran a sidebar crowing about how it returned to 'old fashioned journalism' in producing the articles – an incredible overreach when you see how little actual legwork went into the effort. Old- fashioned journalism in this case apparently means a return to the days of Yellow Journalism, when rumor and innuendo were used with abandon to savage political enemies and anyone else the writer didn't like.

The biggest problem with the article is that although the Times and its associated propaganda partners claim that it reveals something, it actually relies heavily on supposition to arrive at meaningless conclusions, and the most active verbiage includes words such as "could have." The primary foundation for the claims fomented by the Times lies in the paper's confession that it all came from three cover pages purporting to be from a tax return apparently filed more than two decades ago, including altered entrees, and backed by conjecture.

The Times claims the three pages were anonymously mailed to its newsroom from Trump Towers, while many analysts say they believe the package came from Trump's long-ago ex-wife Marla Maples who is the only person other than Trump who could have legally released the documents without his approval.

By claiming the documents arrived anonymously the courageous reporters and editors at the Times – including an editor who has so voraciously salivated over Trump's tax returns that he says he will go to jail to get  his hands on them – obviously are hoping to immunize themselves from potential legal consequences should Trump's attorneys file an action against the paper.

The story behind the hit piece centers on the decline in revenues from Trump's Atlantic City casinos in the mid-1990s which the Times, itself on the brink of financial collapse, says was due to Trump's mismanagement. If the Times is going to make that claim against Trump it has to expand it to include gaming giants such as Caesars, Bally's and financial colossus Morgan Stanley which incurred a loss of equal proportions to Trump's, more than a decade after Trump pulled the plug on his Atlantic City businesses to stem to losses.

In reality, the rise of the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun Casinos in Eastern Connecticut was the beginning of the end of expansion and high times for Atlantic City casinos. The Connecticut casinos siphoned off billions of dollars of gaming revenues from throughout the northeast and elsewhere, not just from Trump's businesses but from many others as well.

In the early 1990s Atlantic City had a dozen major casinos as well as several smaller ones, and was being eyed by major league investors for even more expansion. But the rise of the Connecticut casinos abetted by legalization of gambling in Philadelphia, Delaware, Maryland and New York State and online gambling in New Jersey steadily drove a stake into Atlantic City's expansion and hastened its decline.

Analysts say that when things finally even out Atlantic City will be able to support only four casinos at best.

This backdrop was ignored by the Times when it used the three cover pages – one for New York, one for New Jersey and one for Connecticut, purporting to be from Donald Trump and Maples' tax returns in 1995 but only one of which – the New Jersey cover sheet – bore their signatures. The New York document shows – using altered entries – that Trump took a $916 million loss two decades ago.

Maybe that's true, maybe it's not because the line entries that document the loss are done in two different fonts that don't even line up with each other. So the intrepid reporters at the Times called the accounting firm that prepared the document, (their name is printed on the bottom so its hard to miss) and found out that the accountant who prepared the return 21 years ago is now 80 years old and living in retirement in Florida.

Not to be denied, the Times sent a reporter to the Sunshine State where it interviewed the reluctant accountant in a bagel shop. Shades of Deep Throat or what?

He told the Times that his computer software back in 1995 couldn't print out a 9-digit number so he put the original into his typewriter – the article didn't disclose whether it was a manual Royal or an IBM Selectric and it probably doesn't matter, other than being able to verify the fonts, since either way we are talking ancient technology here – and typed in the extra numbers.

Unfortunately he didn't initial the changes, nor did Trump which is a commonly accepted accountability principle when altering official documents. But even if everything the Times says about the documents is true, so what?

Basically, two paragraphs of 1990s gaming commission documents that accompany the article say that Trump could take advantage of what amounts to averaging over a total of 18 years, starting in 1992 and going forward to 2010. Big deal. That is the price of doing business; sometimes the best laid plans go completely awry and you have to scramble to keep from going under, which apparently, Trump did.

So he is a survivor and did nothing illegal. Moreover, there is not one word about the millions of dollars Trump and his businesses pay in state taxes, local taxes, payroll taxes, fees, permits, sales taxes and the millions of dollars in income taxes paid by his employees who have jobs thanks to his businesses.

Yet the Times runs a package that is rife with innuendo and misinformation, one example of which is the claim in the sidebar regarding the three pages from his 1995 return; "They were signed by Mr. Trump’s wife at the time, Marla Maples, and by Mr. Trump, whose recognizable handwriting renders his signature in jagged, oversize letters."

Actually, only one page was signed, so using "they" to imply multiple signatures is flat out inaccurate. "A page was signed …" would have been accurate, but also would have deflated the impact of the information.

Considering that the Times has used the same income averaging in its recent tax returns to improve its financial standing, it is at the very least hypocritical to be bashing Trump for making use of the tax laws, which he legally is required to do or face lawsuits from his investors.

The vast majority of the Times main article smacks of jealousy, seemingly because Trump did survive and didn't go under. Since his wasn't the only business that took a major hit in Atlantic City in the 1990s, it was duplicitous of the Times to focus only on his losses and not the ongoing losses of Atlantic City and those who invested in it four decades ago.

The Old Gray Lady as the Times is known, obviously has declined from her position as paper of record to that of a miserable old crone who can't keep her facts straight or do her job correctly or well.  

Perhaps the Times masthead should be changed to say "All the News That's Fit to Print - and a Lot That Ain't."

 Frankly, she seems to have decomposed to the status of checkout counter tabloid rather than a respected journal, much like an aging call girl trying to claim that somehow she is better than and socially above her street-walking cousins, when in fact the only differences are their outer appearances and the price - which can't be written off ones income taxes.

If I didn't know better I'd think that the only news worth reporting this weekend was tonight's scheduled presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Did you know that there was another terrorist shooting in a shopping mall in the Pacific Northwest over the weekend in which five people were murdered? Oh, and down in Texas yet another mass shooting.

No, instead we get non-stop pre-debate hype, interspersed with claptrap about the "peaceful" protests in Charlotte, NC, where an armed black man was shot by a black cop and bunches of white people were assaulted as a result. And property was burned, cops were attacked, the streets were full of gunfire, windows were smashed, cop cars were damaged, all in the name of "peaceful protest." Oh, and five white men were killed by police last week in the same time span as the shooting in Charlotte, but few Americans have heard of that.

Has it occurred to anyone else that the media is so self-insulated and removed from the rest of society that they don't know that we know they are full of crap and we can see for ourselves that what is really happening doesn’t mesh with what they are saying?

Instead, the media has to hype the debate, even though sometimes it is on only one network, because they hope there will be more debates on the other networks and if they make these debates appear important enough or entertaining enough, then they can sell ads at out-of-control rates and justify the bloated news readers' and "contributors" salaries.

Taken together this mish-mash of real news and media-generated propaganda has an ulterior motive, the end result of which is to get Hillary Clinton elected. The media has long been the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party and nothing has changed this year except that FOX News is so anti-Trump – with a couple of notable exceptions – that it now is lumped in with all the other media in terms of being seen as Clinton supporters.

Also, after NBC news personality Matt Lauer was vilified by his media colleagues for actually asking tough questions of Clinton in a Commander-in-Chief Forum last month it is highly unlikely that tonight's moderator, Lester Holt, will even consider anything remotely resembling fairness in his approach.

As far as the alleged polls that have Clinton ahead nationally, many outlets use the Real Clear Politics average, unless another poll comes along that more convincingly makes a point they favor. But the problem with the RCP average is that most of the polls they use to arrive at the average are done by … The Media!

In the case of the most recent RCP average going into the debate, Trump is a couple of points behind in the average. But that is only because one of the few non-media polls sampled, the McClatchy-Marist poll, had Clinton ahead by 7 points – as did the NBC poll – and which happened to skew the results heavily in Clinton's favor!

As usual, there was no true verification of the poll respondents who simply were contacted by "random" phone calls on their house phone or cell phone, asked who they were and what party they belonged to, which is hardly scientific to say the least. All the media relies on these polls, but a simple search of the methodology used shows that the NBC poll queried 45 percent of respondents who said they ranged from strong to leaning Democrat, and only 35 percent who said they were strong to leaning Republican, while a mere 13 percent identified themselves as independent.

Oddly enough the McClatchy poll methodology claims that 35 percent of voters nationally are Democrats, 30 percent are Republicans and 33 percent are Independents. When they query only "likely voters" they say that 37 percent are Democrats, 32 percent Republicans and 30 percent Independents.

Not only does the McClatchy poll raise serious questions about the NBC News poll, it also contradicts itself in that of its respondents 47 percent ranged from strong to leaning Democrat, while 42 percent said they were strong to leaning Republican and only 9 percent self-identified as independent. Meaning these polls are garbage and irrelevant.

So why are they used? Why do they drive every single news cycle? Well, one theory says that if you are going to tamper with the outcome of an election it is best to keep your tampering within the margin error of expected results. So if on Election Day the polls have Trump ahead by 3 points and the margin of error is 3.6 points and Clinton wins by 2.7 points – which is way outside the margin for an automatic recount – well, the media can say the polls had it wrong but only by the slimmest of margins.

This is important because professional analysts know their numbers and if results are out of skew they will jump on it hard and fast. Remember in 2004 when the media reported in late afternoon on Election Day that exit polls were showing John Kerry ahead of George Bush in some key districts? But analysts looked at the districts where those false exit poll numbers originated and knew right off the bat something was amiss.

So how do voters overcome this attempted manipulation of the public will? Do the same thing the English did in the Brexit vote last summer. Turn out in numbers that overwhelm the margin of error and vote in the person who should be voted in by such a large margin that any attempt at voter fraud will stand out like a neon sign.

Oh, and when all is said and done, the polls likely won't move a single point due to the debates. Check out George Bush in his presidential campaigns. Same amount of hype, all kinds of endless arguing about who won this one or that one and in the end, there was no change in the pre-debate status. Much ado, etc. Food for thought.

Despite the concerted and nearly overwhelming efforts of a mansion full of strange bedfellows who opposed him, Republican Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses Monday night, to the chagrin of Donald Trump and the mainstream media, especially FOX News.

FOX and other outlets, cable and network included, worked frantically, and hand-in-hand with Trump, in the weeks leading up to the vote to drive Cruz out of the race. Cruz is considered the one real maverick in the GOP field and campaigns on his independence from the GOP establishment.

The media and Trump failed abysmally but even though Cruz won hands down, you wouldn’t have known it from the media reports on the night. In fact, if you hadn’t paid attention to the race or the votes until sometime after 10 p.m. Monday night, you would have thought from the coverage that the real winner was Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the establishment favorite if they can’t have Jeb Bush. And they can't.

FOX had cast the race as a sure-win for Trump, and based on flawed – and horribly under-represented – polls, it was to be the death knell for the Cruz campaign. With Jeb Bush barely rating a shrug on the public interest scale, the establishment media fawned over Rubio and anointed him the newest, bestest favorite.

In its attempt to derail Cruz, FOX brought Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad onto hits shows twice to pass on false claims about ethanol and Cruz's opposition to government subsidies for the dirty, costly, alcohol-based fuel additive that doesn’t work. They also went spastic over a last-minute Des Moines Register poll that not only had Trump winning, but said that the bigger the turnout the bigger the win for Trump – based again on polls of a few hundred voters with somewhat vague identities.

But that isn't what happened. The turnout was huge, historic for Republicans, yet the more people who voted, the more who voted for Cruz. I guess the commercials run by Trump and Rubio touting their newfound Christianity – Trump even started carrying a Bible for God's sake, pun intended, in a blatant show of crass pandering – didn't fool very many true Christian Evangelists.

Every show, every major FOX personality – with the exception Andrea Tantaros and a couple of pundits on The Five who still have the courage to speak their minds – had it in for Cruz, far more so than Trump even. Now the media has another problem on its hands, that being what to do about Trump after they spent the summer bashing  him, and then warmed up to him over the holidays when it appeared he was going to prevail.

Warmed up to him may not be the right phrase. Sucked up to him, or circled the wagons around him in a blatant show of New York City liberal elitism may be a better way to describe it. Can we say Hypocrites?

But Trump faltered and Rubio still came in third, which means neither won. (See Trump's pre-Iowa comments on coming in second to see what last night really means.) So what does the media do know that its best laid plans have come unraveled?

Probably just ignore it all, make believe it never happened, make sure it goes away by never mentioning it again and head into New Hampshire with an altered sense of mission.

But before the rest of us sit back and smugly predict what will happen next, we should remind ourselves that there is a long, long road to the GOP nomination. Anything can happen, and anything probably will. Basically the way I see it, if either Cruz or Rubio comes out on top, we all win.

If anyone below them on the returns yardstick comes in first we may well have a problem. The trouble with Trump is that I don’t know which alter ego will show up if he wins it all – and he still might.

But is he a liberal in disguise, or a true convert to conservatism who will really do right for this country?

Either way, there is one thing I know for sure at this point. Ethanol is still a dirty, polluting, stinking expensive and inefficient biofuel that has become a source of Farmer in the Dell welfare for far too many people in the Midwest, and if Cruz gets elected, this is one source of welfare that will no longer be championed by Big Government.

Oh, and Trump should get serious about telling us who he is and what he stands for and stop bashing everyone opposed to him. Even base animals know you don’t poop where you eat and eventually you will need these people to back you, not back away from you.

And FOX News? You folks have to take a close look at your business plan boys and girls. It's crumbling. You have to start reporting the news and stop trying to manipulate the news; or making it.

And that's the truth!

Texas Senator Ted Cruz was heading for front-runner status in the race for the Republican nomination for president back in December, until he referred to Donald Trump's "New York values" in one of the interminable presidential debates, this one hosted by FOX.

Cruz made the point that New Yorkers, which most thinking people understand means residents of New York City, not necessarily the rest of the state, are liberal in their thoughts and actions. Trump parried Cruz's comment not with a defense of his liberal positions on a variety of matters, but by bringing up the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were hit by aircraft that had been hijacked by Muslim extremists and more than 2,000 people died.

Since then it has been rough going for Cruz, not out in the rest of the country, that also lost people and buildings on that day, but with the New York/Washington media cartel, which has spared no effort in painting Cruz as highly disagreeable and inappropriate to be President of the United States. This is remarkable in the sense that until Cruz uttered that phrase – which Cruz has plenty of statements from Trump himself to back him up – the very media that now is savage in its attacks on him, led by the FOX News Channel, had been equally vicious in its attacks on Trump.

Now, however, Trump, who boycotted the last FOX debate for GOP candidates ostensibly because he doesn’t like Megyn Kelly, one of the 'moderators,' (but more likely because he didn't want to lose support that close to caucus voting due to attacks from his rivals,) is solidly a New York/D.C media favorite. Even, or perhaps especially, FOX goes out of its way to paint Cruz in the worst possible light while giving Trump a pass on virtually everything.

We expect this of the Washington Post, New York Times – or any New York newspaper for that matter – and the television networks, not to mention MSNBC and CNN. But FOX claims to be Fair, Balanced and Unafraid. Unfair, definitely Unbalanced, and Job Scared should be its logo. (I should note that the Times endorsed Ohio Governor John Kasich, but frankly, I believe that was just for cover. They can't be serious.)

Take for instance Special Report on Friday night, when anchor Bret Baier did an interview with Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, in which Cruz's objection to government subsidies for ethanol arose. Although Baier briefly hit on the fact that Branstad's son is a highly paid lobbyist for ethanol, he allowed the governor to outright lie when he used the term "refineries" when referring to jobs involving the production of ethanol. Then the governor claimed that ethanol is cheaper than gasoline, and that objections to ethanol come from "Big Oil."

I say lie because Branstad knows that ethanol is not a fuel that is refined. It is moonshine corn liquor that is distilled, the same as any other spirits like bourbon, whiskey, sour mash or vodka, and only becomes ethanol when gasoline is mixed with it. And since the US Congress has mandated that "Big Oil" use no less than 32 billion gallons of ethanol domestically by 2020 – meaning a ready-made before-market outlet just in mixing gas with the moonshine – I don’t see how they can possibly have a problem with a government induced and government mandated and supported market.

In fact, the law requires that the moonshine (corn liquor) have gasoline added to it so the people who distill it won't be able to drink it between the distillery and the pump; not that there is any worry of that happening in a state where the Evangelical Christian vote is all powerful and FOX claims that more than half of the evangelicals are voting for Trump.

Then on FOX News Sunday, host Chris Wallace did an abominable interview with Cruz, repeatedly interrupting him when he was trying to answer Wallace's questions, and baiting him with false employment and job "statistics." Fortunately for journalism, Wallace came out on the short end of that stick.

That was followed by an incredibly fawning interview with Trump in which he was allowed to make several baseless and unchallenged attacks on Cruz. Wallace even let Trump get away with saying he didn't know where his money was going when he donated $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation, even though he has only donated $57,000 to veterans' causes prior to his run for president.

I thought Trump was the ultimate businessman. Yet he gives away a quarter-million dollars without knowing where it is going and for what purpose? Sounds like a classic Washington/Manhattan insider to me. Trump even brought up Cruz's citizenship again without mentioning that he is considering a lawsuit against Cruz! Without a peep from Wallace.

Wallace's one-two interview frankly was one of the most unprofessional I have ever seen despite working four decades in the media and related industries. It reminded me of disgraced CBS News anchor Dan Rather's self-promoting attacks on President Richard Nixon back in the 1970's – before Nixon resigned.

But worse, Wallace's 'panel of experts' which supposedly is comprised of media professionals with superior insight into the issues of the day, included none other than Branstad! And again he was allowed to bash Cruz unchecked – although he has lots of nice things to say about Trump – and again portrayed the ethanol industry as a boon to his state while falsely claiming Cruz is against renewable energy – with no challenge from Wallace or the panel.

Wallace, who also "moderated" the most recent debate in which his lack of professionalism was at its height – "This is a debate sir, and we'll set the rules" – knew that Cruz had answered that criticism by noting that he favors all forms of renewable energy but not government subsidies for any of them. Yet Wallace remained silent on Sunday then and again when Branstad referred to ethanol distilleries as "plants" instead of distilleries.

Which brings me to the question, are Iowa's evangelical Christians, as well as other voters, all that gullible? Are they so uninformed on ethanol that they don't know that half of their state's corn crop goes to making moonshine that then is mixed with gasoline to make a dirty, expensive and ineffective "biofuel" that American drivers are forced to buy to support their "industry?"

Do they not know that Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have been mostly silent on their new-found Christianity until they started running last-minute campaign ads hoping to influence the evangelical vote? Do they not know that many of Trump's positions are diametrically opposite of their professed beliefs?

I guess we'll find out Monday night after the caucus vote comes in.

Oh, and I have been a loyal viewer of FOX News and FOX News Sunday in particular since the late Tony Snow was the host. But after seeing the gross lack of professionalism on view this week in Iowa, building on plenty of previous instances, I will now be getting my news elsewhere. And, while one viewer may not matter, you can bet that if a loyal person like me has had it with FOX, plenty of others have too.

Say goodnight FOX; One America News Network seems like a good place to relocate.