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Tuesday, February 11, 2025
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The skyline of the city of Baltimore at dusk.

The skyline of the city of Baltimore at dusk.

If you’re just now visiting the U.S., or you’ve always wanted to visit the Northeast, Baltimore is a great place to check off your bucket-list. Home of the legendary Babe Ruth and Edgar Allen Poe, Baltimore is both rich in history and thrill-seeking activities. Below are the top six destinations that you have to check out!

  1. Edgar Allen Poe House and Museum

This national landmark is a popular destination for many tourists. The Poe House and Museum is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the Fall and Summer months. This neat little house is located in the downtown area of the city and is a self-guided tour that includes many of Poe’s personal items. This includes but is not limited to his chair, desk, and telescope. There is also a gift shop filled with many of Poe’s books, t-shirts and souvenirs.

  1. Babe Ruth Museum

This historic museum is home to where Babe Ruth was actually born. It is open all-year long and is only $7 for adults and $4 for children. With seven different exhibits you are sure to see a plethora of Babe’s memorabilia and even learn something new about this legendary player.

  1. Maryland Science Center

This is certainly a must-see for families and couples alike. The Maryland Academy of Sciences is the oldest scientific institution in the U.S, having been created in 1797. This amazing establishment features over ten exhibits, a planetarium, and informational IMAX productions.

  1. National Aquarium

Ranked as the third largest aquarium in America this site features over a whopping 16,000 marine life animals. Inside of its walls it also hosts a five-story Tropical Rain Forest. The National Aquarium has a great location as well. Located on historic seaport of the Inner Harbor this is sure to be an enriching experience for all parties.

  1. The Washington Monument

This 228-foot stairway and museum is a photographer’s dream. Chances are a regular smartphone is enough to make your Facebook audience jealous. However, there are other things to do. This museum is part of a park that also sports a golf course, tennis center, paddle boats and an aquatic center. Visiting the monument is certainly an all day affair.

  1. Fell’s Point

A 75 acre waterfront neighborhood built in 1763 has been greatly restored to feature some of the city’s top seafood, cafes and shops. Once the shipbuilding district of Baltimore, this waterfront, with its deeply rooted history is not limited to ghost tours, history tours, and pedal mills to help traverse the town. This one hotspot is sure not disappoint as one epicenter of the city’s foundation.

There’s much than just history when it comes to Baltimore. Since the city is surrounded by water there’s other attractions such as water taxis and sailing tours. Baltimore is a metropolis that has not only been crucial to Maryland, but to the building of America as a whole. So what are you waiting on? Fun and adventure is awaiting you!

Top 6: Whether you’re visiting the U.S.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waits as he is introduced during a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, on July 26 in Charlotte, N.C. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waits as he is introduced during a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, on July 26 in Charlotte, N.C.
(Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

A year ago, in August 2015, this column called “The Donald” the Democrats’ Trump card. It is hard to imagine any other Republican candidate who could rescue a thoroughly discredited Hillary Clinton from a devastating defeat in this year’s election.

Now 50 prominent Republicans with foreign policy and national security experience have taken the unprecedented step of publicly and collectively announcing that they cannot vote for Donald Trump because they believe that he would be “the most reckless president in American history.”

Why? Not only because he has “demonstrated repeatedly that “he has little understanding” of the nation’s “vital national interests” but because “Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself.”

Indeed, Donald Trump has shown little real interest in anything besides Donald Trump.

His response to these criticisms has been completely predictable. Trump has not even tried to answer the charges or to assure the American people on something as important as their survival and the survival of this nation. Instead, there is the standard Trump tactic of launching unsubstantiated charges against his critics.

Even if all his charges against his critics were 100 percent true, that is no assurance to the American people on the vital issues they raised– and for which there are innumerable examples of Trump’s own words and deeds to make people worry about what he would do in the White House.

The strongest argument — indeed, the only argument — for voting for Trump is Hillary Clinton. For both candidates, the danger is not simply that we might have one bad administration to live through. The far greater danger is that either of them can create an irretrievable catastrophe.

With Hillary Clinton in the White House, there is no question whatever that she will nominate candidates for the Supreme Court who will destroy both the First Amendment right to free speech and the Second Amendment right to armed self-protection. And that will undoubtedly be just the beginning of the dismantling of the Constitution.

Hillary has already announced her desire to have an existing Supreme Court decision — “Citizens United versus FEC”– overturned because it said that both corporations and labor unions have a right to free speech.

If the government can make free speech illegal, there is virtually nothing else it cannot do, because people will no longer be free to expose their misdeeds. Mrs. Clinton has a long record of concealing her misdeeds, going back to her husband’s administration in Washington, and in Arkansas before that.

Why not vote for Donald Trump then, since he has no known agenda for undermining Constitutional freedoms?

There are few things worse than being deprived of our basic Constitutional rights, on which our freedom ultimately depends. But one of those few things is being deprived of life itself by the reckless decisions of a volatile, ill-informed, immature and self-absorbed President in a nuclear age.

All too many of Donald Trump’s words and actions thus far make him a candidate for the title of the oldest man who has never grown up. Nothing he says against his critics can change that.

How did we get into the predicament where our choices for President are narrowed to a candidate who inspires distrust versus a candidate who inspires disgust — and where both are dangerous?

The Democrats had few, and less promising, candidates at the outset. The Republicans, however, had a number of candidates with substantial achievements.

Republicans opened this game with the stronger hand. But they played that hand into what looks like a defeat at the polls in November — a defeat not only for Trump but for other Republican candidates tainted by the immature and repellent behavior of the man at the top of the ticket.

One key misstep by the Republican establishment was agreeing, once again, to so-called “debates” in which a stage full of candidates had time for only short and superficial sound bites. Trump was, and is, the king of superficial sound bites.

Will the Republican establishment learn anything from all this? Very unlikely. Smug elites seldom learn.

50 prominent Republicans with foreign policy and

Donald J. Trump, right, addresses the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, while Hillary Clinton, left, addresses the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. (Photos: AP/Reuters)

Donald J. Trump, right, addresses the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, while Hillary Clinton, left, addresses the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. (Photos: AP/Reuters)

I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president. She’s a liar.

But I can’t vote for Donald Trump. He lies almost as often.

Trump denies he ever said things, claiming he never used terms like “fat pig” to describe women, that he never was open to using nuclear weapons against ISIS, that he never mocked Jon Stewart for changing his name. Smears big and small — Trump just denies he said them.

He’s also a bully. He intimidates weaker people by suing them. In business deals, he refuses to pay some of what he owes and then tells creditors: Go ahead and sue me! Creditors often take partial payment because they can’t afford to fight Trump in court.

Trump even filed a $5 million lawsuit against a Miss USA contestant who criticized his pageant. She can’t afford to pay defense lawyers, so she has to shut up.

Trump’s supporters are convinced he’ll shake up the system, but they ignore the evidence that Trump is just one more manipulative member of the rich political class. Plenty of photos show Trump proudly golfing alongside George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and other political insiders whom he now mocks.

But all that matters less than the policies he proposes — it’s the policies that will hurt us.

Trump’s tariffs, sold as protecting the American little guy, actually help big businesses by protecting them from overseas competition. Then they can jack up prices, making life harder for poor American customers.

The Obama administration tried tariffs on tires from China like the 45 percent ones Trump wants to impose, and the results were higher prices — Americans had to spend about $1 billion more to buy tires. Favored (usually unionized) businesses got protection from competition, but other businesses died or never started because imported supplies were suddenly much more expensive.

Of course, we don’t really know what Trump’s positions are. He’s for gun control, then against it. He was against the minimum wage but now wants to raise it.

Hillary Clinton flip-flops, too. She was for trade pacts, but she’s now against them; against gay marriage, now for it; for the Iraq war, now against it.
Clinton lies even more than Trump. She lies about her emails, running from sniper fire, making $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures, etc. This column doesn’t have room for all her lies.

But with Clinton, too, it’s not the lies that will do the most damage, it’s the policies she’ll push — higher taxes, involvement in more foreign wars, endless regulation that will stop innovation.

Most of the time, the danger isn’t politicians’ personal corruption. The real cost to our prosperity and freedom comes from what the politicians do legally.
Though President Barack Obama is a paragon of honesty compared with Trump and Clinton, he has done sleazy things, like secretly sending $400 million in cash to Iran and lying to people about details of Obamacare.

But even when he tells us the truth, Obama does plenty of damage.

His FCC has imposed new rules that will stifle internet innovation. His overtime rules will limit employer flexibility and stunt job growth. Obama’s “stimulus” spending diverted trillions of dollars from better investments the marketplace would have chosen. His limits on internships hurt business and deprive young people of opportunities. His doubling of our debt will burden us forever.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton may be more corrupt than Obama, but it’s not the corruption that hurts us most. It’s the political culture of buying votes by spending taxpayers’ money on special interests. That culture grows when government spends $4 trillion every year and makes so many rules that any almost regulator can crush a disfavored industry or help a favored one.

As the old joke goes, it’s not the corruption that matters. “The real crime is what’s legal.” How do we improve a system like that?

Here’s one solution: Shrink government — limit its power. Then there will be less reason for politicians’ cronies to bribe them, for politicians to lie about it and for all of us to fear the State.

The smaller government is, the less we need to fear the bad things it will do.

I don't want Hillary Clinton to be

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, at a press conference during the Republican Party of Wisconsin 2016 State Convention at the KI Convention Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Saturday, May 14, 2016. (Photo: AP)

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, at a press conference during the Republican Party of Wisconsin 2016 State Convention at the KI Convention Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Saturday, May 14, 2016. (Photo: AP)

House Speaker Paul Ryan will easily defeat challenger Paul Nehlen in the Republican primary for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. With 46.90% of precincts reporting, Speaker Ryan led with 84% of the vote to 16% for Nehlen, who tried to capitalize on the top elected Republican’s feud with the party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump.

However, despite their differences, Mr. Trump endorsed Speaker Ryan last week over the insurgent candidate, who actually began to out-raise the speaker in the final month. At some point, Mr. Ryan clearly saw himself at least somewhat vulnerable, as he began to flood his district with mailers claiming he would support Mr. Trump’s immigration plan.

House Speaker Paul Ryan will easily defeat

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to the Detroit Economic Club on Monday August 8, 2016. (Photo: AP)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to the Detroit Economic Club on Monday August 8, 2016. (Photo: AP)

It’s no secret that I’m very leery of Donald Trump. Simply stated, I don’t sense any genuine commitment to smaller government and free markets.

In addition to fretting about his overall approach on the big issue of liberty vs. government, I’ve specifically criticized his views on protectionism, on bailouts, on entitlements, monetary policy, tax policy, and (just yesterday) distorting tax loopholes.

But skepticism isn’t the same as bias.

I commend Trump when he says something accurate or when he proposes good policies, and I defend him when he’s unfairly attacked.

With this in mind, it’s time to point out something very accurate in his big speech yesterday to the Detroit Economic Club.

He issued a strong and effective indictment of Obamanomics.

…let’s look at what the Obama-Clinton policies have done nationally. Their policies produced 1.2% growth, the weakest so-called recovery since the Great Depression… There are now 94.3 million Americans outside the labor force. …We have the lowest labor force participation rates in four decades. …Meanwhile, American households are earning more than $4,000 less today than they were sixteen years ago.

Trump’s basically right. No matter how you slice and dice the data, Obamanomics (which he refers to as Obama-Clinton policies for obvious reasons) clearly hasn’t worked.

We’ve had the weakest recovery since the Great Depression. Labor-force participation is dismal. And median household income has lagged.

I touched on some of those issues in this discussion on Fox Business News.

[brid video=”58223″ player=”2077″ title=”Dan MItchell Commenting on Job Numbers and Economic Stagnation”]

But you don’t have to believe me.

Former Senator Phil Gramm and former Senate staffer Mike Solon dissect Obamanomics in a column for the Wall Street Journal.

When President Obama took office during the 2007-09 recession no president was ever better positioned to lead a strong recovery. With an impressive electoral mandate, Mr. Obama enjoyed a filibuster-proof Senate supermajority, a 79-vote House majority and a nation ready for change. History too seemed to smile on Mr. Obama’s endeavor. The recession ended just six months into his first term and, with the sole exception of the Great Depression, every severe recession since 1870—when reliable annual data were first collected—had been followed by a vigorous recovery.

They point out that President Obama used the opportunity to push Keynesian fiscal and monetary policy.

No resources were spared. The Obama $836 billion stimulus exceeded all previous U.S. economic stimulus programs combined. The Treasury borrowed over $1 trillion a year for four years in a row, according to Office of Management and Budget data. The Federal Reserve injected $3 trillion of new reserves into the banking system, generating record-low interest rates.

And the institutions with Keynesian models predicted (what a surprise) that we would get good results.

In August 2010, the Congressional Budget Office projected 3.3% average real GDP growth for 2010-15. The Federal Reserve forecast growth as strong as 3.7%. Mr. Obama’s own Office of Management and Budget expected peak growth of 4.5%.

Unfortunately, these models were wrong. Wildly wrong.

…not once in the last seven years has annual economic growth ever reached 3%. Average real per capita income grew five times faster during the Clinton recovery, seven times faster during the Reagan recovery and 10 times faster during the Kennedy/Johnson recovery than during the Obama recovery.

Gramm and Solon point out that there’s only been one other “recovery” remotely similar to the one we’re having now.

…in only two recoveries did government impose economic policies radically different from the policies pursued in all the other recoveries—different than traditional policy but similar to each other— FDR’s Great Depression and Mr. Obama’s Great Recession. …When Mr. Obama replicated some of FDR’s “progressive” policies, history was there to reteach its lessons.

Amen.

The so-called New Deal was a statist disaster than lengthened and deepened the Great Depression.

Indeed, it was only a Great Depression because of awful policies that began under Herbert Hoover and then continued under Franklin Roosevelt.

Obama wanted the second coming of the New Deal.

The good news is that he wasn’t able to impose nearly as much bad policy as Hoover and FDR.

The bad news is that he imposed enough bad policy to produce an abnormally weak recovery.

Which leads to the lesson that everyone should learn.

The dominant lesson of the Great Depression and the Great Recession is that when government overspends, overtaxes and over-regulates, economic freedom is suppressed and economic growth vanishes.

Sadly, I don’t think either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton understand this lesson.

It’s time to point out something very

Donald Trump, holds up his Bible as he speaks during the Values Voter Summit Sept. 25 in Washington (Photo: AP/Jose Luis Magana)

Donald Trump, holds up his Bible as he speaks during the Values Voter Summit Sept. 25 in Washington (Photo: AP/Jose Luis Magana)

When I wrote last year about “Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Increase the Cost of College,” I explained that colleges and universities boost tuition when the government hands out more subsidies to students, so the main effect is to make higher education even more expensive.

Today, let’s look at Donald Trump’s plan to increase the cost of childcare. And this is a very easy column to write because the economic consequences of Trump’s plan to make childcare expenses deductible are the same as Hillary’s misguided plan to subsidize tuition.

Let’s start with a caveat. We don’t know a lot about Trump’s new scheme. All we know is that he said in his big speech to the Economic Club of Detroit that “My plan will also help reduce the cost of childcare by allowing parents to fully deduct the average cost of childcare spending from their taxes.”

From an economic perspective, Trump’s statement doesn’t make sense. At best, creating a big deduction for childcare expenses simply creates the illusion of lower cost because of the tax loophole.

But that’s the best-case scenario. The actual result will be to increase costs and make the tax code even more convoluted.

When income is shielded from taxation, either based on how it is earned or how it is spent, that creates an incentive for taxpayers to make economically irrational decisions solely to benefit from the special tax preference. And just as the healthcare exclusion has led to ever-higher prices and ever-greater levels of bureaucracy and inefficiency in the health sector, a deduction for childcare expenses will have similar effects in that sector of the economy. Providers will boost prices to capture much of the benefit (much as colleges have jacked up tuition to capture the value of government-provided loans and grants).

Creating a new distortion in the tax code also will have a discriminatory impact. The tax loophole will only have value for parents who use outside care for their kids. Parents who care for their own kids get nothing. Moreover, the new loophole also won’t have any value for the millions of people who don’t earn enough to have any tax liability. Yet these people will be hurt when childcare providers increase their prices to capture the value of the deduction for parents with higher levels of income.

And that will probably lead politicians to make the tax loophole “refundable,” which is a wonky way of saying that people with low levels of income will get handouts from the government (in other words, “refundable” tax breaks are actually government spending laundered through the tax code, just like much of the EITC).

So we’d almost certainly be looking at a typical example of Mitchell’s Law, where one bad policy leads to another bad policy.

And when the dust settles, government is bigger, the tax code is more convoluted, and the visible foot of government crowds out another slice of the invisible hand of the market.

Remember, bigger government and more intervention is a mistake when Republicans do it, and it’s a mistake when Democrats do it.

I want fewer favors in the tax code, not more. I want rationality to guide economic decisions, not distorting tax preferences. Most of all, I don’t want politicians to have more power over the economy. I wish Trump listened to Ben Carson when putting together a tax plan.

The economic consequences of Donald Trump’s plan

Democratic President Barack Obama, left, embraces Hillary Clinton, right, after speaking to the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia. (Photo: AP)

Democratic President Barack Obama, left, embraces Hillary Clinton, right, after speaking to the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia. (Photo: AP)

We expect to hear a lot of lies during an election year, and this year is certainly no exception. What is surprising is how old some of these lies are, and how often they have been shown to be lies, years ago or even decades ago.

One of the oldest of these lies is that women are paid less than men for doing the same work. Like many other politically successful lies, it contains just enough of the truth to fool the gullible.

Women as a group do get paid less than men as a group. But not for doing the same work. Women average fewer annual hours of work than men. They work continuously for fewer years than men, since only women get pregnant, and most women are not prepared to instantly dump the baby on somebody else to raise.

Being a mother is not an incidental sideline, and being a single mother can be a major restriction on how much time can be put into a job, either in a year or over the years.

People like Hillary Clinton can simply grab a statistic about male-female income differences and run with it, since her purpose is not truth but votes. The real question however is whether, or to what extent, those income differences are due to employers paying women and men different wages for doing the very same jobs, for the very same amount of time.

We do not need to guess about such things. Many studies have been done over many years — and they repeatedly show that women and men who work the very same hours in the very same jobs at the very same levels of skill and experience do not have the pay gaps that people like Hillary Clinton loudly denounce.

As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married.

People who are looking for grievances are not going to be stopped by facts, especially if they are in politics. But where are our media pundits and our academic scholars? Mostly silent, either out of fear of being denounced as anti-women or because they have chosen to take sides rather than convey facts.

Nevertheless, there are enough scholars, including women economists, who have done enough honest studies over the years that there is no excuse for continuing to repeat a discredited lie, based on comparing apples and oranges. A book written by two women and titled “Women’s Figures” shows the results when you compare women and men with comparable qualifications.

It is much the same story with black-white comparisons. More than 40 years ago, my own research turned up statistics on black and white professors who had Ph.D.s from equally high-ranked institutions in the same fields, and who had published the same number of articles.

When all these things were held constant, the black professors earned somewhat more than white professors. But, since all these things are not the same among black and white professors in general, there is a racial gap in pay that allows some to loudly denounce racial discrimination among academics.

Those who wish to check out my statistics can get a copy of my 1975 monograph, “Affirmative Action Reconsidered.” It has not been updated because not all the same statistics will be released now. This is not unusual. Statistics that might undermine some other popular conclusions — whether on affirmative action, global warming or whatever — have been kept under wraps when other researchers tried to get them.

Too many people in the media and in academia abandon their roles as conduits for facts and take on the role of filterers of facts to promote social and political agendas.

In all too many educational institutions, from kindergartens to postgraduate university programs, students may never hear any facts that contradict the prevailing groupthink.

How many students taught by Keynesian economists will ever learn about the 1921 recession, when the Harding administration did nothing — and unemployment dropped steeply as the economy recovered on its own?

There are many reasons why old lies, refuted long ago, are still heard every election year, and in all too many other years.

We expect to hear a lot of

Paul Kalanithi, M.D., was a neurosurgeon and writer. Paul grew up in Kingman, Arizona, before attending Stanford University.

Paul Kalanithi, M.D., was a neurosurgeon and writer. Paul grew up in Kingman, Arizona, before attending Stanford University.

Stagnant wages, weight gain, in-laws staying too long. A canceled flight, a stolen bicycle, a flooded basement. Bounced checks, a cold sore, refrigerator on the fritz. Getting fired.

All irritating but also microscopic in the grand scheme of things — the grand scheme being our mortality, the fact that we’re going to die. Busy, busy, focusing on to-do lists to propel ourselves toward fitness, social and career excellence. So tightly scheduled that the smallest glitch unravels the day.

Such was the world of Paul Kalanithi as he was finishing his intensive medical training at the age of 35. Kalanithi’s professional rocket booster had just ignited. As he was about to lift off to a splendid future as a celebrated neurosurgeon, a terrifying CT scan shut it down. The scan showed the blots of late-stage lung cancer, his own.

Kalanithi found himself on another kind of countdown, the one marking months or years he had left. He spent much of that time — two years — writing a book about his dual experience as a doctor practiced in delivering terrible news and a patient on the receiving end. The result is a remarkable book, “When Breath Becomes Air.”
Some of you may have read this best-seller. Those who haven’t might consider picking it up. This doesn’t sound like a summer read, but while the topic is not light, Kalanithi’s observations are revelatory. Summer is when many of us have the space to reflect and perhaps reorder priorities. To the young and hearty spared big-stuff crises, “When Breath Becomes Air” shrinks everyday anxieties down to size.

Their default is to assume they have 20, 40, 50 years left — and who’s thinking that far ahead? People who’ve received dire diagnoses, or those close to them, know otherwise.

Kalanithi sweeps away the “you can get what you want” sunglow of self-help guides. But that also brings some relief. Squarely facing the certitude of death helps liberate one from wanting so much of so little consequence.

“Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering,” Kalanithi writes. “It felt less like an epiphany — a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters — and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward.”

Gone were the expected offers from elite medical institutions and a job that would have paid him six times what he was used to. Plans to have children became highly complicated. (With medical intervention, his wife was able to bear him a daughter shortly before he died.)

The expectation for amassing prizes and gratitude for saving sick peoples’ lives had vanished. Instead, he would bounce from his own grief to hope to terror while being ground through the machinery of heroic medicine. There were moments of comfort, though, at the hands of caring doctors and nurses — and he talks lovingly of them.

The point came when Kalanithi recognized that he would not be the special case, a statistic that similarly afflicted patients would look to for hope. He, who had everything to live for, was not going to see much more of life. That’s when he turned to the spiritual through religion.

It doesn’t have to be terminal illness that changes young people’s understanding of mortality. Anyone can die suddenly in a car accident or terrorist attack. Serious illness just gives one time to ponder it.

This may be Kalanithi’s most profound insight:

“I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”

Wisdom that we — anesthetized by our imagined entitlement to long life — might all share.

Such was the world of Paul Kalanithi

[brid video=”58074″ player=”2077″ title=”WSJ’s Daniel Henninger Trump’s Economic Policy Speech Was ‘Excellent'”]

Aug. 08, 2016 – 4:09 – Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, said Donald Trump took a “big step” toward a political comeback with his “excellent” speech to the Detroit Economic Club.

Mr. Henninger, who has been a Trump critic in the past, said he looked at both economic plans from Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton. He concluded Mrs. Clinton is offering no serious economic plan to move the economy beyond what has been subpar growth.

FULL SPEECH & TRANSCRIPT FROM DETROIT

Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall

Pat Smith, left, the mother of Sean Smith, who died during the attack at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in 2012, speaks at the 2016 Republican National Convention. State Department headquarters, right, in D.C., left, and, right, Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to the reporters at United Nations headquarters on Tuesday, March 10, 2015. (Photos: PPD/AP/Seth Wenig)

Pat Smith, left, the mother of Sean Smith, who died during the attack at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in 2012, speaks at the 2016 Republican National Convention. State Department headquarters, right, in D.C., left, and, right, Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to the reporters at United Nations headquarters on Tuesday, March 10, 2015. (Photos: PPD/AP/Seth Wenig)

The parents of two of the four Americans who died in the 2012 Benghazi terror attack filed a lawsuit against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

The case, which was was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch USA on behalf of Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, and Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, alleges Mrs. Clinton wrongfully caused the death of their sons. It also states the former secretary of state engaged in defamation, as well as intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

The lawsuit alleges Mrs. Clinton’s “extremely careless” handling of classified information contributed to their deaths, a reference to the words used by FBI Director James Comey. In his statement, which came after the Bureau’s investigation into her use of a private email server during her tenure at the State Department, Director Comey said Mrs. Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling confidential and classified information and, though he refused to prosecute her for it, “there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.”

In the complaint, the plaintiffs wrote “as  a direct result of Defendant Clinton’s reckless handling of this classified, sensitive information, that terrorists were able to obtain the whereabouts of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and thus the U.S. State Department and covert and other government operations in Benghazi, Libya and subsequently orchestrate, plan, and execute the now infamous September 11, 2012 attack.”

“Having used a secret private email server that we now know was used to communicate with Ambassador Christopher Stevens with confidential and classified government information, and which we also now know was likely hacked by hostile adversaries such as Iran, Russia, China and North Korea aligning with terrorist groups, it is clear that Hillary Clinton allegedly negligently and recklessly gave up the classified location of the plaintiffs’ sons, resulting in a deadly terrorist attack that took their lives,” Mr. Klayman said in a statement announcing the suit.

The parents, now the plaintiffs, also alleged that Mrs. Clinton defamed them in statements to the media.The families of the victims have been publicly criticizing Mrs. Clinton, among other administration officials, for lying to them about the cause of the attack (the YouTube video) and the events that transpired over the 13 hours. She said during an interview with her former employee-turned-journalist George Stephanopolous that the families were lying about her statements in the days after the attack. She later walked back her claims, instead blaming the “fog of war” for her statements, which she now again denies making.

[brid video=”21739″ player=”2077″ title=”WATCH Hillary Blames Lying to Benghazi Victims on “Fog of War””]

Ms. Smith has been an outspoken critic of Mrs. Clinton, most recently at the Republican National Convention in July, after which she was trashed by Clinton surrogates.

“During her campaign for President, Defendant Clinton has negligently, recklessly, and/or maliciously defamed Plaintiffs by either directly calling them liars, or by strongly implying that they are liars, in order to protect and enhance her public image and intimidate and emotionally harm and silence them to not speak up about the Benghazi attack on at least four separate occasions,” Mr. Klayman wrote in his complaint.

The Clinton campaign has not yet responded to mutliple requests for comment regarding the lawsuit.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi released its final report on the Benghazi terrorist attack in June, which faulted with the Obama administration, including Hillary Clinton. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans–foreign service officer Sean Smith and former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty–were killed in the attacks.

The report interviewed more than 80 witnesses not previously called before Congress to testify or the State Department Accountability Review Board, including Ben Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Rhodes, who with political adviser David Plouffe, prepped then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her shameful national TV appearances claiming the YouTube video was responsible for the terrorist attack.

As PPD previously reported, a Sept. 14, 2012 memo from Rhodes included the subject line: “RE: PREP Call with Susan: Saturday at 4:00 pm ET.”

The Rhodes email served as a catalyst for the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It was first obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal court lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, but withheld when requested by Congress outside a federal judge’s power and jurisdiction.

[brid video=”43806″ player=”2077″ title=”Rep. Jim Jordan (ROH) explains what happened in Benghazi”]

“Immediately after the attack, Defendant Clinton, in an effort to save the re-election chances of President Barack Obama, and in turn, her own chances at the 2016 Presidency, lied to Plaintiffs and the public at large that the Benghazi Attacks were caused by Islamic reaction over an anti-Muslim YouTube video that had been posted on the internet,” Mr. Klayman wrote in his complaint. “These lies were perpetrated despite the fact that she knew immediately that this video was actually not the cause of the attack—information that she shared with the Prime Minister of Egypt and her own daughter, Chelsea Clinton, but hid from Plaintiffs and the public at large.”

As PPD also previously reported, the journal entry made by Mr. Woods following his conversation with Mrs. Clinton is in fact admissible in a court of law. That was not lost on the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

“Defendant Clinton even promised Plaintiffs that the person responsible for the video would be arrested,” the complaint reads. “Plaintiff Woods recorded the conversation with Defendant Clinton contemporaneously in his diary, which he has recorded in for many years.”

Parents of two of the four Americans

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