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.