Bob's Blog

Alexandra Alper and Matt Spetalnick report in Reuters,

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday accused China of curtailing “rights and liberties” in Hong Kong and blasted U.S. company Nike and the National Basketball Association for falling in line with Beijing in a disagreement over free speech.

Read more here.

Have you seen this body language interpreter on YouTube? Last week's Oval Office meeting with Trump, Pence, Schumer, and Pelosi provides a good opportunity for body language interpreting!

Jim Hoft reports at The Gateway Pundit that Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Missouri to participate in the clean up of a Jewish Cemetery that was vandalized.

Vandals damaged dozens of headstones this week at the historic Jewish Cemetery north of St. Louis.

Read more here.

"The President of the United States expects our allies to keep their commitments!" At the 14:30 mark, notice Merkel does not clap when Pence talks about ensuring Iran will not get a nuclear bomb.

Trump and Pence visited the flood-damaged areas of Louisiana today, while Obama golfed.

Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports in the LA Times,

The Rev. Tony Perkins, whose home flooded, invited Trump to draw attention to the disaster by visiting the area. In June, Perkins helped coordinate a meeting with the candidate and evangelical leaders.

Perkins, president of the conservative Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, took Trump to see flooded homes and introduced him to victims who shared their stories, including an elderly man rescued from the roof of the home where he was born.

As he met with victims, Perkins said Trump asked about recovery efforts. “He thinks in terms of not just what the government can do, but what people can do,” Perkins said, including churches.

Pam West, 63, came to see Trump at the church after her nearby home flooded. Her Grand Marquis is packed with salvaged clothes and jewelry while she and her husband stay with a cousin. The couple had to be rescued by boat. They never had been impacted by flooding before and have no flood insurance.

She called Trump’s visit “awesome. … Our own dear president is too busy at Martha’s Vineyard to visit us,” West said as she picked up a box of donated toiletries from a Samaritan’s Purse truck parked outside. “I’m hoping a lot of people who were going to vote for Hillary will see he came and vote for him. He’s our only hope.”

Read more here.

Mike Pence and Hillary Clinton were both here in Colorado today. How did the media cover their appearances? ColoradoPeakPolitics reports,

Hillary Clinton told Coloradans today that they should support her for president because she likes fire marshals, the internet, education, and campaign donors in Aspen.

She hates guns, Donald Trump, and the media we presume, because she hasn’t held a press conference since December.

She did grant an interview to Channel 9 News, and we were ever so excited that maybe she would be asked one of the questions we posed earlier today. But alas, she was not. She was asked to comment on how mean Trump was being to her.

It wasn’t exactly a barn burner of a speech she delivered today in Commerce City, mostly just the same old tired rhetoric that manages to gloss over everything voters are really interested in, namely, will she ever go to jail?

Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, spoke in Denver, we think. We weren’t there, so we looked to the Denver Post for the rundown, but found only one quote in the entire story on Pence’s speech, from Pence.

Pence told the crowd that Democrats are telling America the current economy is the best the country can do.

“It’s not the best we can do, it’s just the best they can do,” Pence said. “When Donald Trump is president of the United States we’re going to balance our budget, cut our taxes … and we’re going to make the American economy work for everybody.”

The rest of the article criticized Trump, which ironically, is what the story on Hillary’s speech did — trash Trump.

The entire article on Hillary was filled with glowing praise, no Republicans were asked to criticize her, but Democrats were given free rein to criticize Trump in the Pence piece.

The coverage was so unbalanced, we have to wonder why the Post even bothered going to the Pence speech.

Oh, right. To trash Trump.

Lesley Stahl tries repeatedly to get Mike Pence to disagree with Donald Trump. She does not succeed, and Donald Trump loves it. Hot Air has the interview here.

That is the question Charles Johnson is asking at Got News. In fact, Johnson thinks there is a chance Trump my change his mind.

It is believed that Trump may consider using this cloud as an excuse to do a VP swap, claiming that his hands were forced in a backroom deal to satisfy the demands of party elites that he balance his ticket with foreign policy experience.

Altering a ticket at a convention would certainly be a radical development, but hardly one without precedent. By using the convention process to justify the switch Trump (in theory) would turn what might otherwise be reported as the indecisiveness of a chaotic campaign into yet another exciting twist in the story of his campaign.

In other words, the intrigue surrounding Trump’s VP selection may be just beginning!

Read more here.