All editorials on this page were written by James E. Dustin and are protected by the copyright laws of the United States. They cannot be copied or reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

Index (scroll down. The most recent title is at the top):

December 26 – Shame on the Democrats

December 18 – It’s my holiday, Doc.

December 11 – Keep the Electoral College

December 4 – The problem with superheroes

November 27 – Put a little sugar on it

November 20 – Help, Congress! Help!

November 13 – GOP, don’t blow it.

November 6 – vacation

October 30 – vacation

October 23 – vacation

Oct. 16 – Czar Hillary

Octobder 9 – The Cost of Electing Hillary

October 2 – Hillary’s (lack of) Accomplishments

September 25 – Hillary is a god

September 18 – Hillary on gun control

September 11 – Taking a knee

September 4 – Trump for President

August 28 – Hillary’s Third Speech to Goldman Sachs

August 21 – Hillary’s Second Speech to Goldman Sachs

August 14 – Hillary’s First Speech to Goldman Sachs

August 7 – Zika!

July 31 – Pinnochios at the White House

July 24 – Yet Another Hillary Email Scandal

July 17 – Golf on the Planet of the Apes

July 10 – Above the Law

June 26 and July 3 – Are We Doomed?

June 19 – Brexiting

June 12 – Hillary’s Biggest Lies

June 5 – The (Republican) Party’s Over

May 29 – It’s safer to shut up

May 22 – Obama the Bathroom Boss (a poem)

May 15 – Evil will find a way

May 8 – Hope you’re not laughing at Puerto Rico

May 1 – Why are voters so dumb?

April 24 – The two most-hated American institutions

April 17 – Why do 90 percent of blacks vote for Democrats?

April 10 – I get 147 channels I don’t want … to pay for.

April 3 – This could happen before the November election. Scary.

March 27 – Can I just get a simple truck?

March 20 – Taking reincarnation seriously

March 13 – Ask what your country can do for you

March 6 – Employment by the numbers

Feb. 28 – Ted Cruz for President

Feb. 21 – The supreme challenge

Feb. 14 – Opened a package lately?

Feb. 7 – How to fix the Democratic party

Jan. 31 – Social insecurity

Jan. 24 – Across the racial divide

Jan. 17 – State of the Union fairy tales

Jan. 10 – a review of Star Wars: The Force Reruns

Jan. 3 – A third term for Obama?

Dec. 26, 2016

A Bad Day to be a Democrat

How embarrassing to be a Democrat these days.

I was watching the news on Dec. 19 when the Electoral College members cast their votes. In one state, the electors announced that they had cast all ten votes for Donald Trump. Then this lady observing the proceedings leaped out her seat, yelled and screamed and carried on shouting “This is my country! This is my country!” until she had to be forcibly removed from the room.

What exactly did she expect? Donald Trump won the state, and therefore – under the process described in Article II of the Constitution – the Republican electors get to cast the state’s electoral votes. Did this lady think that ten devout Republicans were going to somehow switch their votes to Hillary Clinton?

But let’s go back to the day after the election, and what did we see: hundreds of people taking to the streets to protest the election results. The right to protest is protected in the U.S., but these protestors did not have the right to burn cars, break windows, assault police and beat up someone suspected of voting for Trump, as happened in Chicago. And what did they expect? That somebody would decree that Hillary Clinton would be declared President if they would just stop rioting?

Did we see that after Barack Obama won in 2018? No. Did we see that after Barack Obama won in 2012? No. And one can’t help but suspect many of these people taking to the streets because they lost the election did not vote in the election. Only 57.9 percent of Democrats went to the polls to vote for president.

Could that be because the Democrats had one of the most unattractive and despicable candidates ever forced upon them? Could that be because the Democrat elite went to great lengths to torpedo Bernie Sanders’ campaign, even to the extent of trying to use his religion against him? Could it be that the Clinton campaign sent thugs to starts fights at Trump rallies? Could it be that there was enough evidence of Clinton’s incompetence and lack of accomplishments that thoughtful Democrats couldn’t vote for her?

And then we had the Jill Stein recount fiasco. Jill Stein, who barely managed to get 1 percent of the vote anywhere, somehow was given legal standing to demand recounts in three states that Clinton lost. And Hillary Clinton, who lambasted Trump during the campaign for not categorically stating he would accept the results of the election, supported Stein’s efforts.

When that didn’t work, and network of Hillary supporters started going after the Republican electors trying to get them to vote for Hillary. Republican electors reported getting thousands of emails, hundreds of letters and numerous phone calls that included death threats to them and their families if they voted for Trump.

Then to add absurdity to futility, about 40 Clinton electors pledged not to vote for Hillary Clinton in an effort to persuade their Republican counterparts to not vote for Trump. Does that even make any sense? Even if they persuaded enough Republican electors not to vote for Trump, that would simply throw the election to the House of Representatives, now dominated by Republicans. Is anyone but me not following the reasoning of those Democrat electors who didn’t vote for Hillary?

And then we get the Russian thing. The Russians hacked Hillary’s email. The Russians hacked John Podesta’s email. The one thing the Democrats never did was dispute what the hacked emails revealed, and those revelations could not help but undermine Clinton’s candidacy among eligible voters, Republican and Democrats. Even Hillary Clinton said (through a lawyer) that her campaign had found no evidence that the Russians had affected the outcome of the election. Even President Obama said there was no evidence that the Russians had affected the outcome of the election. Yet even on the morning of Dec. 19 when the electors cast their votes, the leader of the “faithless electors” movement was saying that was the reason to sabotage the electoral process.

The Democrats lost a huge election, not only at the presidential level, but in the U.S. Senate elections, in U.S. House elections, in gubernatorial elections and state legislative elections. And instead of behaving like the fans of a losing European soccer team, they maybe should look honestly at why they lost.

If all these rabid Democrats and Liberals had stood up the party’s elites and put up a decent candidate in 2016, they probably would have won. I bet Joe Biden on Nov. 9 set a teeth gnashing record that will stand for a long time in the Dentistry Hall of Fame.

So, would now be a good time for a final Hillary Clinton concession speech?

Dec. 18, 2016

Happy Holidays, and Merry Christmas

This being the holiday season, I’d like to make this observation regarding holidays: If you don’t like the holiday someone else is celebrating, that does not give you a personal mandate to go interfere with the observance of that holiday.

I’m thinking specifically of Columbus Day. There were so many protests against Columbus Day and the annual parade in Denver that sponsors cancelled it for ten years. It returned this year concurrent with a Four Directions All Nations March and Rally (catchy name … not), attended mainly by American Indians and supported by Black Lives Matter.

At that march, participants called for the end of Columbus Day … period. “One day, we’re going to get rid of Columbus Day in all 50 states,” said Kenny Frost of the Southern Ute tribe.

Why?

Good, bad or indifferent, Columbus is a part of American history. And people of Italian ancestry admire the man for what he did, and deservedly so. I lived in St. Charles, Missouri, when an exact replica of La Nina, one of the three ships that Columbus led across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492, sailed up the Missouri River.

That sailing ship was 65 feet long and 18 feet wide. Most double-wide mobile homes have more square footage than that, and I tried to imagine 18 men living and working in a double-wide for three months. You have to concede, these were brave men.

The rap against Columbus by American Indians is that he brought disease and the practice of slavery with him. Let’s dispense with the latter charge. American Indians practiced slavery themselves. They would raid one another’s tribes and steal women and children. It’s a part of their history, and many – not all – practiced slavery before the Europeans ever arrived.

Slavery was common among all peoples in the world of Columbus. Slavery in oared galleys was a common punishment for crime, even by Christian countries. The Vikings took slaves home with them after their raids on Europe. Most armies were composed of conscripted men. Most of the harvest in medieval Russia was brought in by serfs. The elite troops of the Ottoman Empire were Janissaries – forcibly converted Christians. The world has moved on. Nobody condones slavery anymore.

As to bringing disease to the indigenous peoples, no doubt Columbus, his crews and those that followed did exactly that. However, they had no idea they were doing it. Knowledge of medicine in the 15^th Century was laughably scant. There was a medieval countess who bragged to her friends that she had only taken two baths in her entire life (thus paving the way for development of powerful perfumes). “Doctors” advised against sick patients getting exposed to fresh air and routinely bled patients to cure almost any malady. Clothing rarely was washed.

There was no World Health Organization, no Centers for Disease Control, no system for advising world travelers to remove lice from their hair or fleas from their pets before journeying abroad. It’s not like Columbus walked off the ship and started injecting the natives with the smallpox virus.

You could hardly say Columbus targeted the American Indian for destruction. Columbus didn’t know where he was going and didn’t know where he was when he got there. He thought he’d arrived in the Far East, the Indies – therefore the name, Indians. But for that era, sailing vast distances across enormous oceans was a daunting task. Thousands died horribly doing it. If you don’t think that took courage and determination, try taking a 65-foot sailboat across the Atlantic without a radio or a back-up engine.

Jumping ahead to now, why does the celebration of the achievements of Columbus and other European explorers annoy descendants of indigenous people? It’s not like it’s going to happen again. There are no indigenous people on Mars.

For that matter, why does the celebration of Christmas annoy some people. Or the celebration of Ramadan? Or Passover? It’s because some people go out of their way to be offended, and even form organizations to promote being offended. I’m thinking of the Freedom from Religion folks here. If they want to be atheists, fine, but why inflict their lack of belief on the rest of us?

There’s a great deal of wisdom in many old sayings, and one of them is: Live and let live.

And, Merry Christmas.

Dec. 11, 2016

The Electoral College – The Founders’ Best Idea

I have a friend who holds a dual citizenship in the United States and in California. He has legal residences in both places. I asked him where he votes. “I vote in Colorado because my vote doesn’t count in California,” he replied.

His vote doesn’t count there because he’s a Republican. California since the age of Ronald Reagan has become a liberal, socialist enclave within the United States. Democrats hold the governorship and super majorities in both the state House and Senate. Hillary Clinton won the presidential election in that state by 4.3 million votes.

When you read that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the United States by 2.5 million votes, that’s not true. The three states along the Left Coast – California, Oregon and Washington – gave her a 5-million-vote margin. That’s tough to overcome, and also a good indication why the Founders came up with the idea of an Electoral College. They didn’t want 6 percent of the states telling the other 94 percent what to do.

I don’t recall any cries for the Electoral College to be abolished when Barack Obama won an overwhelming victory in 2008, nor when he won again in 2012. But now, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-(what else?)Calif., as her parting shot introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate to abolish the Electoral College. Her empty gesture, reminiscent of Jill Stein’s recount efforts on behalf of Hillary Clinton, struck a chord with all those people rioting in the streets who neglected to vote on Nov. 8. Among those crowds could be seen signs like, “We Need A California Republic.” I tend to agree. Maybe we wouldn’t get any more actors making commercials to persuade electors to act dishonorably,

Presumably someone who has served in the U.S. Congress for 33 years should have some inkling about why the Electoral College system was established, but to make the point perfectly clear, it’s so the rest of us don’t have to live in California.

Let’s just set aside recent legislation in that state that is going to require dairy farmers to recover methane from farting cows. Let’s just travel the financial path down which socialist countries have followed over and over again with absolutely no examples of success.

California is a welfare state. It not only gives huge amounts of money to people who don’t work, it gives huge amounts of money to people who used to work. Example: California covers 100 percent of the medical costs for life of employees who have worked for the state for 20 years. Does your place of employment offer that?

California is over $400 billion in debt due to unfunded liabilities, public pensions, retiree health costs and bonds.

Bonds are IOUs. Although California’s state constitution requires a balanced budget, the state routinely gets around that provision by incurring long-term debt. As long as it can pay the interest due annually on that debt, that is considered a balanced budget. So where does that get them? One dollar out of every $2 spent out of the state’s infrastructure improvement budget goes not to infrastructure improvements, but to interest payments on bonds.

If the popular vote determined who becomes the U.S. president, every president from now until the end of forever would come from California, Illinois, or New York. Then we would have presidents who, like California, would never drill for oil and would put bovine Depends™ on livestock and quite possibly wild animals. You would not be able to buy ammunition for your gun – much less an actual gun – without a background check, and squatters on your rental properties would have legal rights to resist being evicted.

Four states – California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey – have 25 percent of the registered voters in the United States. All four states are overwhelmingly and dependably Democrat. In a popular vote scenario, the Democrat candidate doesn’t even need to campaign in those four states, as was demonstrated by Hillary Clinton. Why go there? We could call the 2020 election for the Democrat in those states today, along with Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Minnesota.

Where does that leave the rest of the states in the U.S. in a popular vote contest? It leaves them with little or no voice at all. That was what the Founders realized, and now fast-forward to today with a much stronger and more vigorous central government. Take away the voices of the states with small populations, and you have a recipe for national disaster.

But with the Electoral College system, California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York have only 107 electoral votes with 270 needed to win. The southern tier of states, which used to be the Democrat “solid south,” can usually deliver 140 electoral votes to a Republican candidate.

This is a way different picture than the popular vote scenario. Now all the other states come into play. In the 2000 election, the electoral vote by the end of the evening boiled down to one state – Florida. In 2016, Wisconsin was the state that put Trump over the top.

If we want to continue to be the “United” States, we’d better not trash the Electoral College. We’d probably end up with several California Republics.

Dec. 4, 2016

Superheroes: Stop Wrecking Our Cities

I broke a rule of mine this fall and went to see a superhero movie. I didn’t mean to. I wanted to see the remake of “The Magnificent Seven,” which is a remake of the Yul Brynner/Steve McQueen classic, which was a remake of the Japanese classic “Seven Samurai.”

This constant replication of old themes – as we are seeing with four death stars (and counting) in the Star Wars series – would be an indication that Hollywood lacks (a) new ideas and (b) new plots.

I had some car problems and got to the theater too late to see The Magnificent Seven, so I had to pick among the remaining movies. I don’t go to move theaters that often, so my rule was to see no movie involving superheroes, vampires or zombies. It increases my chances of seeing a really good film.

But I chose Dr. Strange, another Marvel comic book superhero. Should have stuck to my rule.

Okay. Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before: regular old human being suffers terrible accident, can’t find help in the U.S. and so goes to the Far East where he finds a monastery populated by wise old monks with access to ancient powers. He then defeats a super villain and saves the world.

Wow! Who comes up with this stuff? I almost dozed off during this one. But it did demonstrate the problem associated with having superheroes on the planet, even if they are good superheroes.

I’m the mayor of a small town in Colorado, and frankly I wouldn’t allow any superheroes to live here. Why? Because superheroes attract super villains, and when they get into a fight, they cause extensive devastation to the city where the fight takes place.

I would like to see, maybe during the rolling of the credits, the Avengers meeting with the mayor to discuss how they can help repair what they’ve damaged. I mean, Thor’s pretty good with a hammer. Flash could fetch tools and things. Bruce Wayne could provide financing, the Hulk earthmoving chores and the Black Widow morale boosting. Captain America would be a good foreman.

The Hollywood Reporter calculated that the fight between the Avengers and the Chitauri in 2012 would have caused $160 billion in damages to the city – more than the attack on 9/11 that was carried out by mere mortals.

In Dr. Strange, the fight between the good monks and the bad guys did extensive damage to seven different cities where the good monasteries were located. I would be inclined to prevent the construction of such monasteries through zoning laws.

This is quite an uptick from the old gangster movies where the worst damage done during a car chase was a hydrant got knocked off its base and shot a geyser of water into the air. Any city’s public works budget can take care of that. Who is going to pay for $160 billion in damages to New York? Crowd funding?

We didn’t really need superheroes before the comic books invented them. But when they did invent them, the writers realized that any superhero could handle any normal thug with ease. It wasn’t even fair. In fact, it was boring. So to show how super the superheroes really were, the writers had to upgrade the thugs to also have super powers, and that would be okay if the fights were taking place out in the Mojave Desert or San Francisco, but they are beating one another up in attractive urban areas. Very bad for property values.

So stop supporting these guys at the movie theaters, and they’ll probably go away.

Nov. 27, 2016

Sweet! New Revenue

Among the issues on ballots last Nov. 8 were proposals in four cities to impose a tax on soda and other sugared drinks. We safely can label these cities as liberal enclaves; they include three cities in California and Boulder, Colorado.

Honestly, I think we should require that information be included on city limit signs that warn travelers they are about to enter a nanny state zone. Travelers can then relax and not worry about anything because they can be assured the government is protecting them on all fronts. Or bypass that particular city.

Backers of the sugar tax promote the proposition by saying that it is an effort to fight obesity and to raise money for other purposes. The latter claim demonstrates the actual purpose of the tax. Liberal jurisdictions never have enough money to pay for their numerous social welfare programs.

The former claim, that a tax will discourage people from buying sugary drinks and therefore lead to these people losing weight, is nonsense. Boulder should use the initial money rolling in from the two-cents per ounce tax to weigh everybody in town. Then weigh everybody again two years from now and see if the tax made any difference. My guess is that it wouldn’t.

People who consume a lot of sugar will find a way to do that in much the same way that people who are addicted to drugs will find a way to do that. They probably know it isn’t good for them, but they lack the will power to change their ways. So if a 12-ounce can of soda now costs 24 cents more in Boulder, people will either pay that or go outside of Boulder to buy their soda or sweetened tea or whatever.

What will Boulder’s response be when city officials discover sugar is omnipresent in most foods? Will they impose a surtax on doughnuts? On cinnamon buns? On cakes? On pies? On candy bars? On ice cream? On corn? There are 14 grams of sugar in a can of corn.

I got this information off the label on a can of corn, and therein lies a hint as to what governments actually should do: they should inform consumers about what consumers are about to ingest and leave it at that. Let people make their own choices. Allow natural selection to proceed uninhibited.

If governments persist in making decisions for people, then the people are rightfully going to blame the government when things don’t go well for them. If the good citizens of Boulder get fat despite surtaxes on sugary drinks, might they not want to sue the city for allowing that to happen?

That is not at all far-fetched. Just read about all the frivolous lawsuits that are filed because people are quite ready to blame (and sue) someone else for their misfortunes. One case that comes to mind was the jogger who tripped and injured herself when her shoelaces became untied. She sued the shoe company.

I can imagine someone walking into court and suing Boulder by saying something like, “I paid my tax on soda, but I got fat anyway. Your fault.”

You’re going to see these issues on local ballots elsewhere because the argument appears to be attractive. The government is good. The government cares about your health. If the government actually cared about your health, it would ban sugary drinks from being sold within the city limits. Or it would put every overweight person into a concentration camp from which they would not be released until they have attained ideal body-fat goals. One can do a lot with $3.8 million per year.

But that isn’t what the government actually wants. What the government cares about is the money. Boulder will reap about $3.8 million a year from the surtax on sugary drinks. Boulder is not going to spend all of that on preventing obesity. It is going to spend a portion of that on “other programs.”

But it will tell itself and you that it is doing this for your own good.

Nov. 20, 2016

Take Care of Yourself

This drives me crazy.

Somebody discovers a problem and the initial reaction is, “Congress should do something about this.”

In this latest case, the U.S. Department of Transportation reported that traffic fatalities were up about 10 percent in 2016 over the first six months of 2015.

They don’t know why. They suggested that because more people have jobs, people are driving more; or that people are driving while distracted due to the increase in electronic devices being used in vehicles, or that people are driving faster.

And then this: “Several safety advocates also say that nothing is going to happen as long as Congress remains virtually laissez faire about the problem.”

Driving a car is one of the few remaining evolutionary influences on the human race today. If you get in a car and drive well, you will survive to reproduce and have children that will also drive well. If you do not drive well, you may become one of the 10,000 or so traffic fatalities and quite possibly won’t reproduce.

A great deal of human reproduction, you know, goes on in the back of a car. Not as much as when I was growing up, but still a significant number of back seat conceptions occur.

I am convinced that even though humans have only been driving for slightly over 100 years, there has been some natural selection occurring. For instance, I believe there is a gene in the DNA of some people that makes it impossible for them to drive if it is snowing. They can’t seem to process that road conditions change during different weather conditions.

There is also a gene that won’t allow certain people to comprehend a device as simple as a turn indicator. Many of them think the turn indicator is supposed to tell the driver behind you what you just did, not what you intend to do.

And there is a gene that will immobilize all brain processes when some drivers come to a four-way stop and there are other cars present. If a traffic signal doesn’t tell them what to do, they are helpless. Sometimes the squeegee people have to lead them away from their cars.

And finally, there are people who drive too fast. When I was a senior in college, I had four friends who owned Corvettes and one who owned a Z-28 Camaro. At the end of the year, one Corvette had survived.

Dodge has come out with a car aptly called the Hellcat, which can reach speeds of 209 mph. There is no public highway in America where it is legal to drive that fast, or even half that fast. There are only a small percentage of drivers who are qualified to drive that car, yet anyone can buy it.

And therein lies another evolutionary factor – there are many buyers of Hellcats who do not have the brains to realize that they should not be buying a Hellcat.

But why should Congress care? Congress cannot protect us from everything, although there are those out there who think that can be done. The U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Safety Council have announced a 30-year campaign to end all highway fatalities.

Really? The only way those agencies can achieve that is by making everyone ride in cars that are driven by computers, although we might still have a building fall on a car.

That actually happened on an interstate running west out of St. Louis. On a bright afternoon in light traffic, a fellow was driving along in the right lane when a 90-year-old brick building next to the highway collapsed, killing the driver. Will Congress come up with a law to prevent that?

Mass transit won’t eliminate highway deaths. Buses crash and trains wreck. I would never go to a wedding in a third-world country because all I seem to read about from those countries is how a wedding party bus plunged into a 500-foot deep chasm.

Reducing the speed limit doesn’t do it. We tried that in the 70s, and the highway fatality rate back then was higher than it is now. Thank God for Sammy Hagar, who sang the song that helped eliminate the national 55 mph speed limit:

Go on and write me up for 125

Post my face, wanted dead or alive

Take my license, all that jive

I can’t drive 55

America’s roads and highways are iconic. We don’t like overregulation. Half my life I’ve watched the smokies and the bandits dueling it out on the pavement. We get muscle cars, they get radar. We get radar detectors, they get helicopters. We get CBs, they get CBs. “Smokey’s got his ears on, he’s hot on your trail. He ain’t gonna rest ’til you’re in jail,” sang Jerry Reeves.

It’s all good. Congress doesn’t need to do anything further, except maybe look at the budgets of the Department of Transportation and the National Safety Council and determine if they need to put the brakes on spending by those two agencies.

But people please, if you stub your toe, it doesn’t require congressional action to make sure you never do it again.

Nov. 13, 2016

A Chance for Change

Isn’t it ironic that the Republicans find themselves in the exact same position that the Democrats attained exactly eight years ago – holding the presidency and both houses of Congress.

We know what happened then. The Democrats squandered all their political capital passing ObamaCare, and squandered nearly a trillion dollars on a Stimulus Bill that didn’t seem to help anybody. Two years later in a wave election, the Republicans took the House.

President Obama then proceeded to kill the coal industry and put literally thousands of new regulations on corporate America while raising taxes in a variety of areas. It soon became clear that if you liked your health plan, you might not be able to keep your health plan, and if you liked your doctor, you may not be able to keep your doctor. And under ObamaCare, premiums didn’t fall by $2,500 per year for families, they skyrocketed.

And it didn’t even work. We were told there were anywhere from 30 million to 50 million Americans without health insurance. Since ObamaCare passed, 11 million have gotten insurance under those plans, and 9 million have been added to the Medicaid roles.

Meanwhile, the President abused his power and scandals haunted his administration – Fast and Furious; IRS targeting of conservative organizations; “extremely careless” handling of this country’s most sensitive information; unbelievable incompetence at the VA; lies about why a U.S. ambassador was killed overseas; racial profiling at the Department of Justice; directives about who can use what bathrooms at schools in the U.S.; non-enforcement of immigration laws; release of criminals up to and including those convicted of homicide; a vast expansion of the welfare roles; and absolutely uncontrolled federal spending.

So the Democrat candidate’s platform was to carry on Obama’s legacy? Did they think we don’t read out here? Hillary Clinton encouraged us to go to her website and learn what she planned to do if elected, so I did. She didn’t promise more of the same, she promised a vast expansion of Obama’s policies – increased gun control, expanded entitlement benefits (from programs that are going broke), more welfare programs, more taxes on corporations, more benefits for illegal residents.

Anyone with a brain can see where this is going. Expand the welfare roles to a point where welfare recipients will control the elections. We already have 52.2 million people on means-tested welfare programs. Clinton got about 60 million votes. Seems to me, we’re pretty close to the tipping point.

So here’s a suggestion for the Republicans: don’t blow it.

Address our concerns:

• We don’t want the country to go broke, we don’t want to see the dollar devalued, we don’t want to see you printing more money so you can spend what you don’t have. There is plenty of lard in the federal budget, so start cutting (See “Nancy Pelosi’s Planet elsewhere on this website). And start with yourselves. Make an example. Cut congressional pay and benefits. Eliminate the presidential pension; Bill Clinton has showed us ex-presidents don’t need a pension. Cut office and travel budgets. Start at the top, and the country will cheer.
• Suck it up and start deporting illegal aliens who have been convicted of felonies while in the U.S. Who logically can object to that? Imprison illegals who have been deported and return to the U.S., as the law requires. Build the wall (as required by the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was supported by one Hillary Clinton), and thoroughly vet asylum seekers. Or don’t let them in. The Constitution gives the federal government the power to protect the nation, so do it.
• Repeal the 16^th Amendment. The income tax and the collection apparatus to collect income taxes has been a vehicle for political tricks, corruption, intimidation, favoritism, and social engineering almost since the day it was passed. Get rid of it. Replace it with a value-added tax. Pass a term limits amendment. This can be done. The GOP will control the the entire elective state government in 24 states, and both houses of the legislatures in 33 states. This is a pivotal moment.
• Appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will follow the Constitution and not feel the need to impose any political philosophy on the nation. The Court is there to determine if a law is constitutional or not. It is not there to tell us what kind of marriages we can enter into. I’d suggest U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
• Have the text of the Tenth Amendment tattooed on the arm of anyone elected to federal office. Powers not specifically given to the federal government are reserved for the states. The Department of Education has no legal right dictating curriculum to K-12 schools, even the requirement that the Constitution be taught at least one school day a year. The federal Department of Education probably shouldn’t even exist, along with several other federal agencies.
• Regulate industry to give us clean air, clean water, safe food and drugs, safe working places and the like. But don’t tax and regulate them into submission. The big ones will leave, the little ones will go broke. Corporate America is not a bottomless well of available tax revenue. Corporate America is not GE; it is the local market, the car dealership, the regional bank, the community newspaper, the book store, the local restaurant. Corporate America is the nation’s largest employer and dispenser of health insurance. Don’t punish them for being here.
• Police the welfare system. In testimony to Congress, our current director of the Social Security Disability program didn’t even know much his own department spent on compliance enforcement. Welfare should be there for people who need it, not so Ed can go fishing on Thursday morning in his $18,000 bass boat.
• Approve the Keystone Pipeline, and add a few thousand jobs to the economy. There are already 68,000 miles of fuel pipelines in the U.S.; this is just one more.

I’ve got about 20 more suggestions on my list, but I figure you’ve got about two years to prove to the American people that we haven’t kicked out one set of buffoons and brought in the other. Independents are going to become the largest bloc of voters in the U.S., and we don’t care what party wins. If you don’t do the job, look back at the election in 2010 and see what happens.

Oct. 16, 2016

All Hail Hillary!

This is the fifth and final philippic on why we should not elect Hillary Clinton as President of the United States, or even president of your local Rotary Club.

But first, a little Constitutional refresher:

• The Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
• Article One, Section 9 (Powers of Congress): To make all Laws (my emphasis) which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
• Article Two of the Constitution defines the powers of the president. Nowhere does it give the president the power to make or change laws. And it also says “He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

If you read much, or even pay attention to the news, you should realize that our current president – allegedly a constitutional scholar – has either violated or ignored the above provisions of the Constitution repeatedly.

After the Affordable Care Act was first passed in 2009 (without a single Republican vote), Obama made four immediate changes to the law. He mostly changed deadlines that were going to be politically inconvenient. Subsequently, he made even more changes without taking the law back to Congress, which has the sole power under the Constitution to make and unmake laws.

Additionally, Obama issued an executive order in 2014 in which he officially deferred deportations and granted temporary legal status to more than four million illegal aliens. It was DAPA, or Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, entitling them to work authorizations and other benefits.  President Obama also used executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Whatever your sympathies for illegal immigrants in America, you must realize that allowing a president to make and unmake laws is not only a violation of his oath of office, but an extremely dangerous precedent. For you Hillary supporters, do you want such power in the hands of Donald Trump should he be elected? The precedent, unfortunately, is there.

So how does Hillary feel about Obama’s actions? This directly from her own website: “Hillary will Defend President Obama’s executive actions – known as DACA and DAPA … Hillary believes DAPA is squarely within the president’s authority.”

Okay, is this a theme in Hillary’s philosophy, that the President of the United States has unlimited power? Yes, it is. Let’s go back to the Affordable Care Act. Hillary promises to expand its reach to anyone standing on American soil.

Again, her website: “Hillary will expand access to affordable health care to families regardless of immigration status by allowing families to buy health insurance on the health exchanges regardless of their immigration status.”

How about global warming? From her website: “Hillary’s plan will deliver on the pledge President Obama made at the Paris climate conference – without relying on climate deniers in Congress to pass new legislation.” I don’t know what this says to you, but it says to me that she will carry on Obama’s core pledge – “If Congress won’t do it, I will.” History calls these types of leaders czars, autocrats, dictators, emperors, totalitarians, absolute monarchs.

Hillary will use the federal police to enforce her wishes: “She will … keep assault weapons and other tools of terror out of terrorists’ hands by allowing the FBI to stop gun sales to suspected terrorists.” Supposedly, in the United States, you cannot take away the rights, freedoms and property of American citizens if they are merely “suspects.” Under her plan, the federal government could stop you from buying a legal weapon merely by naming you as a suspect. I’m not putting words in her mouth; these quotes are directly from her website.

Hillary believes she can take actions like this.

Example: “Hillary will reward companies that share profits and invest in their workers, and she will raise the minimum wage to a living wage.” Hillary will raise the minimum wage? Shouldn’t that be, Hillary will send legislation to Congress asking them to raise the minimum wage?

Example: “Hillary will implement a ‘fair share surcharge’ on multi-millionaires and billionaires.” Shouldn’t that be, Hillary will ask Congress to enact changes to the federal tax code to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires?

Example: “As president, Hillary will: “Guarantee up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to care for a new child or a seriously ill family member, and up to 12 weeks of medical leave to recover from a serious illness or injury of their own.” Again, is she just going to decree this will happen?

And regarding the Tenth Amendment: “Hillary will implement the recommendations of the president’s bipartisan commission to improve voting. Hillary will work so that every citizen is automatically registered to vote when they turn 18, unless they opt out, and make sure that voter registration rolls are accurate and secure.” That’s not a responsibility given to the federal government, and therefore it belongs to the states.

Hillary wants the feds to dictate how schools discipline students. She wants to raise K-12 teachers’ pay. She wants to regulate zoos, oversee how farm animals are raised, tell states to provide universal “Head Start” programs, regulate local police departments. She wants to tell state colleges and universities to provide free tuition, etc. and etc. These aren’t powers given to the President, or even to the federal government.

But president after president has encroached on the Tenth Amendment’s dictates until it has almost become moot.

Just before his first inauguration, Obama declared that “We are just five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Little did we realize back in 2009 that he intended to ignore and debase the fundamental document that made America more independent, more free, and more successful than any other nation on Earth – The Constitution.

Having successfully done that, he has laid the foundation for someone like Hillary Clinton – who has no respect for the law whatsoever – to come along and continue down that path. An ineffective and cowardly Congress has allowed this to happen, and the door is now open to totalitarianism.

Hillary Clinton is about to walk through that door. God help us all.

Oct. 9, 2016

Hillary Will Add At Least

$270 Billion to Deficit Annually

Edward Everett Dirksen apparently never said it, but the quote sticks around: “A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” This is 2016. Now we’re talking about a trillion here and a trillion there.

Hillary Clinton plans to do nothing about this. This is the fourth in a series of columns devoted to electing anyone but Hillary Clinton. These columns are based solely on data gleaned from her own website.

And in perusing that website, I failed to find anything, as in not a word, on how she will cut spending … anywhere. However, there is quite a bit on how she will increase spending.

So the nation’s debt now equals $20 trillion. Hillary’s mentor, Barack Obama, doubled the national debt during his term in office. He spent more than all other previous presidents combined. The deficit is expected to be about $600 billion this year.

Here’s what Hillary Clinton plans. And if you doubt it, go to her website. Read it yourself. But I’ve read it for you. The quotes and numbers are hers; my comments are in parentheses:

• “Revitalize the economy in communities that have been left out and left behind through a “Breaking Every Barrier Agenda” that includes $125 billion in targeted investments to create good-paying jobs, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, and connect housing to opportunity.” (I should mention right off that in the Democrat lexicon, “investment” means spending).
• “Hillary Clinton has announced a $275 billion, five-year plan to rebuild our infrastructure—and put Americans to work in the process. She’ll work to pass her infrastructure plan in her first 100 days of office, as part of a comprehensive agenda to create the next generation of good-paying jobs.”
• “Hillary will work to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline by providing $2 billion in support to schools to reform overly punitive disciplinary policies, calling on states to reform school disturbance laws, and encouraging states to use federal education funding to implement social and emotional support interventions.”
• “Double funding for community health centers, and support the healthcare workforce: As part of her comprehensive health care agenda.”
• “Help responsible homeowners save for a down payment. Hillary’s plan will provide funding to match up to $10,000 in savings for working families to put towards a down payment on a first home.” (It’s hard to tell how much this will cost. In 2014, here were 4.9 million home sales. If 2 million of those people had $10,000 to put down, this program would cost taxpayers $20 billion per year).
• “She’ll cap monthly and annual out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs at $250 and empower Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.” (It’s also hard to tell how much this will cost, but Medicare trustees say the program will run out of money in 2024. This will hasten its demise).
• “Invest $5 billion in re-entry job programs for formerly incarcerated individuals.” (No frequency listed here – one time? Annually? Doesn’t say).
• “Award scholarships of up to $1,500 per year to help as many as 1 million student parents afford high-quality child care. (This will cost $1.5 billion per year).”
• “A $25 billion fund will support historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and other minority-serving institutions.”
• “By 2021, families with income up to $125,000 will pay no tuition at in-state four-year public colleges and universities. And from the beginning, every student from a family making $85,000 a year or less will be able to go to an in-state four-year public college or university without paying tuition.” (20 million students attended colleges and universities last year. Let’s say 15 million were in public institutions in their home state. Students attending in-state, public colleges pay an average $9,410 per year. That is going to cost more than $141 billion per year)
• “Strengthen American manufacturing through a $10 billion investment in ‘Make it in America’ partnerships.
• “Launch a $60 billion Clean Energy Challenge to partner with states, cities, and rural communities to cut carbon pollution and expand clean energy, including for low-income families.” (She also plans to have 500 million – you read that right, half a billion – new solar panels installed during her reign. She doesn’t say who will pay for those).
• “Hillary will commit $1 billion in her first budget to find and fund the best training programs, support new research, and make this a national policing priority.” (to eliminate bias in policing).
• “Hillary will create a national Office of Immigrant Affairs. (no cost estimate here), support affordable integration services through $15 million in new grant funding.”
• She will significantly expand AmeriCorps to allow hundreds of thousands of more Americans to serve their communities through organizations such as City Year, YouthBuild, American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, and other community organizations. To achieve this, Hillary will grow AmeriCorps to 250,000 members annually.” (There are 75,000 AmeriCorps “volunteers” now. They get a stipend of $13,500 per year. Adding 175,000 will therefore cost an additional $236 million per year).
• “Expand Social Security.” (There is absolutely no way to know what this will cost, but Hillary is talking about ways to increase payments. The Social Security fund trustees say in 2034, the fund will not have enough money to pay full benefits. This will move that date forward).

So here’s the calculation. I estimate that if elected, Hillary will spend six years in office: a four-year first term, and two years into her second term at which point she gets impeached and removed from office Why? Because the dollar will be worthless.

So, adding all that up and dividing by six, Hillary, if she gets everything she wants – and she usually does – she will add $246.5 billion annually to the current deficit, which means it will increase by 50 percent, more or less.

But that ain’t all, folks. The biggest part of our national expenditures is entitlement spending – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and others. There are 48 million people on Social Security alone. If Hillary’s plans add up to a mere $500 per year per recipient, that adds another $24 billion annually to the deficit.

And these are just the specifics. Hillary has also pledged such things as: “Every campus should offer survivors (of sexual assault) the support they need—no matter their gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or race.” Or, “She will scale up funding for programs through which pediatricians and schools seek to identify and support children facing behavioral problems.” Or, “Hillary will increase funding to support the next generation of farmers and ranchers in local food markets and regional food systems.”

Again, read it yourself. There are promises of increased funding for virtually everybody (except defense).

And if that isn’t enough, there’s more planned borrowing. “That’s why Hillary will build on the highly successful Build America Bonds program to provide cities and towns the capital they need to rebuild their schools. These ‘Modernize Every School Bonds’ will double the Build America Bonds subsidy for efforts to fix and modernize America’s classrooms.” Bonds, if you didn’t know, are government IOUs.

So how is she going to pay for all this? You’ll read it over and over again on her website: “Making sure the wealthy, Wall Street, and corporations pay their fair share in taxes.” That’s it. I did enough calculations for one day. Maybe someone can add up all the money the wealthy, Wall Street and corporations have to see if it’s enough … for the first year.

Oct. 2, 2016

When Hillary Can’t List

Her Own Accomplishments

One of the main pillars of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President of the U.S. is her experience in the federal government – eight years as the wife of a president, seven years as a U.S. senator, and four years as secretary of state.

One would think she could pile up a large number of accomplishments during those years of public service, and according to her, she has.

That is, if you accept that “co-sponsoring” somebody’s else’s bill is an accomplishment. Or “championing” a cause is an accomplishment. Or “supporting” a movement is an accomplishment.

That’s a little like taking credit for Johnny’s merit badge when all you really did was help sew it on.

Let’s look at Hillary’s own list of accomplishments from her own website and pay special attention to the verbs. It’s an interesting exercise in obfuscation.

The quotes are from her own website. I added clarifications in parentheses, just so you know who is speaking here. Here we go:

• “In the U.S. Senate, she consistently pushed for greater funding for Alzheimer’s research, including federally funded stem cell research.”
• “In the Senate, she introduced the bipartisan Expanding the Promise for Individuals with Autism Act (EPIAA) to expand access to interventions and support for Americans with autism. And she co-sponsored legislation in 2006 that authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending on autism-related programs.” (Just a note here – Members of Congress can introduce an infinite number of bills, and co-sponsor some of the infinite number of bills introduced by other Members of Congress. Hillary co-sponsored 703 bills while she was a U.S. senator).
• “As senator, Hillary co-sponsored the 2005 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Additionally, Hillary introduced the CARE Act twice, to ensure that rape and incest victims had access to emergency contraception in hospital emergency rooms.” (The bill didn’t pass while she was there).
• “In response to the spike in reports of sexual assault cases in the military, she introduced legislation to make emergency contraception available to servicewomen.”
• “As senator, she co-sponsored and voted for legislation that would close the gun show loophole, voted against the dangerous immunity protections for gun dealers and manufacturers, and co-sponsored legislation to extend and reinstate the assault weapons ban.”
• “She co-sponsored legislation to extend Medicaid coverage to low-income people with HIV and expand resources for HIV testing and education.”
• “Hillary was an original co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act.” (Didn’t pass).
• “In the U.S. Senate, she co-sponsored the Campus Care and Counseling Act, which established critical mental health support and early suicide prevention for college students across the country.”
• “She pushed for stricter FDA review of animal drugs, co-sponsored legislation to protect animal rights and prohibit animal fighting.”
• “She also supported a $500 million increase in mental health care for veterans, (and) co-sponsored the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act.” (with all this interest in legislation, one might think that at least one piece of significant legislation passed by the Senate in seven years would have Hillary’s name on it, like the Frank-Dobbs bill. But no, there is no such act.)
• “As a U.S. senator, she served on the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee, as a key member shaping the No Child Left Behind Act. (This is widely disputed. This was a bill supported by President George W. Bush and shepherded through the Senate by Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch).”
• “In the U.S. Senate, Hillary championed legislation to address hate crimes, fought for federal non-discrimination legislation to protect LGBT Americans in the workplace, and advocated for an end to restrictions that blocked LGBT Americans from adopting children.” (I think marriage is as marriage has always been; between a man and a woman – Hillary Clinton, 2000)
• “In the U.S. Senate, she co-sponsored the Campus Care and Counseling Act.”
• “She fought to make women’s rights a priority in international relations.” (This while the Clinton Foundation was accepting huge donations from countries with attitudes toward women right out of the  7^th Century).
• “As secretary of state, Hillary saw firsthand the impact that Peace Corps Volunteers have around the world.”
• “As U.S. senator from New York, Hillary spearheaded efforts to prohibit the U.S. Department of Agriculture from buying chickens for the federal school lunch program that have been injected with therapeutic antibiotics.”
• “As a U.S. senator, she worked to improve pre-K programs and provide parenting help for at-risk families.”
• “As senator, Hillary co-sponsored and sponsored bills to reduce the impact of the Medicare prescription drug gap by reducing the price of pharmaceuticals for seniors.”
• “Hillary has been a champion of internet freedom.”

And finally, Hillary can’t keep from lying, even in print:

• “As secretary of state, Hillary worked to build strong support for the United States to join the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But despite a broad, bipartisan coalition, the Republican-controlled Senate blocked its passage.” (The Senate was never controlled by Republicans while Hillary was secretary of state).

One can’t help but wonder what her lackeys were thinking when they put this all together for her website. “Is there nothing we can point to that she actually did?” they might have asked. To draw a paraphrase from “Star Trek, The Next Generation,” the Borg might have said of Hillary: “Competence is futile.”

But what is perhaps more startling about Hillary’s website accolades to herself are the things that aren’t there. For instance, under “Combating Terrorism and Keeping the Homeland Safe,” there is not a word about what Hillary did on that front while she was secretary of state. Was it Hillary who advised President Obama to dismiss ISIS as “the JV squad?” There is not a word about she deftly handled any of the many crises occurring in the Middle East during her tenure. There is not a word about how she dealt with the quagmire of Afghanistan. Why not? She’s not shy about bragging about even the least of accomplishments.

And if you go over to “Military and Defense,” her single claim to fame as secretary of state was she negotiated a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. What about her stupid red “restart” button with Russia. Did that stop Putin from taking over the Crimea and starting a war in Ukraine? What about North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests? What about China’s construction of islands in disputed areas of the South China Sea? Where was she? There’s nothing there, nothing to brag about, nothing to claim.

And under the issue “Wall Street Reform,” not one word about what she did on that issue during her 19 years in the federal government. It would have been interesting to see a paragraph that began with, “As I told the people at Goldman Sachs in my second $250,000 speech…” But, again with Hillary, there’s nothing there.

Finally, I haven’t read virtually every word on her “Issues” page, but I’ve read most of it. I haven’t come across the word “Benghazi” yet.

Sept. 25, 2016

Hillary Promises to Cure Alzheimer’s

Second in a series on why Hillary Clinton should not be President of the United States: she can’t cure diseases even if she says she can. And she did. This comes directly from Hillary Clinton’s “issues” page on her website:

“We can prevent, effectively treat, and make an Alzheimer’s cure possible by 2025.”

Okay, if you have a relative or know someone who has Alzheimer’s, this will get your attention. But listen, look at the time frame. This is a classic rhetorical device used by politicians since Socrates taught it 3,000 years ago, and used exceptionally well by one Barack Obama.

That technique is to promise to deliver something that you won’t be responsible for delivering until you are out of office. Obama did it with ObamaCare. He (in clear violation of the Constitution) made changes to the law to put off its most onerous penalties until he would be out of office.

First of all, when Obama and his minions passed this bill, it was to give 30 million Americans health insurance who did not have health insurance in 2009. Seven years later, 9 million Americans have gotten insurance through ObamaCare, and 9 million were added to the Medicaid roles (your tax dollars at work). Meanwhile, this fall, the rest of us will be facing health insurance premiums going up by anywhere from 9 percent to 48 percent, depending on where you live. The penalty for not having health insurance this year, a penalty administered by everybody’s favorite federal agency – the IRS – will run from $695 to $2,085. Would you have supported this program if you knew that? Have you heard Hillary disavowing support for this program?

But Obama won’t pay the price for this fiasco. He will be out of office. If we assume Hillary wins the upcoming election and re-election in 2020, she won’t pay the price for not curing Alzheimer’s by 2025. See how this works?

When asked about her e-mails, Hillary says the following: “I have admitted I made a mistake, and I take responsibility for it.” Well, what the heck does that mean? What does “taking responsibility” entail? Resigning from office? Dropping out of the campaign?

FBI director James Comey called her “exceedingly careless.” Do we want someone who is extremely careless running our country?

I would call Hillary “extremely calculating.” She will count on you not noticing that curing Alzheimer’s by 2025 takes her off the hook. Here’s a hint. It takes $1 billion and ten years of research, fund raising and clinical trials to come up with a drug to treat, much less cure a disease.

Scientists have been working on Alzheimer’s, breast cancer, the ebola virus, and a hundred other maladies for years. If one of our crack debate moderators asked her why she thinks she could cure Alzheimer’s by 2025, she would be totally stumped.

Yet she can put such an astounding promise on her website, and nobody notices. Nobody, except me.

Sept. 18, 2016

No Fly? No Gun

I’m going to devote the last four columns before the election to the defeat of Hillary Clinton. Nobody who has been investigated so often for so long by so many law enforcement agencies should even have got this far on the march to the highest office in the land, but she did.

So I’ll just skip discussion of all the stuff you already know – she’s a congenital liar, she did nothing worth noting as a U.S. senator or secretary of state, she misled the American public about Benghazi, her handling of official emails was stunningly stupid, and so on.

Let’s instead go to her website and examine her positions on issues that matter to Americans and Coloradans, of which I am one. I’ll start with gun control.

This is a direct quote from Hillary’s “issues” page: “And yes, if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America.”

Think about that. How does one get put on the no-fly list? It’s a secret activity that requires no court approval. You can be put on the no-fly list, and not even know it. The feds did not require themselves to notify people who were added to the list.

You can be put on the list for:

• Being suspected of terrorist activity.
• Having traveled to certain countries.
• Something you said. This happened to a Princeton professor.
• Having a similar name to someone already on the no-fly list. Mohammed Ali, for instance.
• Declining to be an informant for government investigative agencies. This happened in 2015 to four Muslims.
• Clerical error.
• Other alleged criminal behavior, like an open warrant.
• Controversial tweets.

And once you get on the list, it’s hard to get off it. At this writing, there are 81,000 names on the no-fly list, including 1,000 American citizens. Many have had to file lawsuits to get off it while the feds had to go through no court procedure to put you on it.

So Hillary Clinton would take this a step further. She would deny you the right to buy a gun based on a bureaucrat’s decision. This is a punishment without due process. This is what we call suspension of your Constitutional rights.

You don’t lose those rights overnight. You lose those rights through a steady erosion of the bedrock principle – the Second Amendment – until the Second Amendment becomes meaningless. This erosion already is in progress.

I give you California, a state so liberal nobody even campaigns there anymore. The Democrats have it, the Republicans don’t.

California just passed a basket of restrictions on gun ownership, including this interesting statute: If you buy ammunition in California, you have to go through a background check.

Why? People don’t usually by bullets unless they own guns. Now that California requires background checks on people buying ammo, the state will know who you are and what kind of gun you own. There is no other purpose for this piece of legislation. A person planning mayhem in California – i.e. a criminal or terrorist – is likely to have knowledge of this particular law and will go to a different state to buy ammo. The ordinary citizen will not.

Will Hillary extend this California law to the whole nation? She doesn’t say, but after reading what she herself proposes, what do you think?

Sept. 11, 2016

Taking a Knee for Ignorance

When Colin Kaepernick declined to stand and show respect for the flag during the playing of the National Anthem, he started a new trend among athletes and others who have a national stage.

Ostensibly, this action is to protest a “country that oppresses black people and people of color.” Kaepernick, who is half black, is not a good example of this. He has a $119 million contract, a mansion and an estate. Actually, he is a rather good example of the opportunities this country provides for anyone of any skin color.

Barack Obama is another good example of the opportunities this country provides. Obama’s family moved to the United States from Africa to avail themselves of the opportunities here, and look what he achieved.

You don’t have to look very far or very hard to find any number of blacks who managed to survive “oppression” here and achieve great things. In recent American history, we have had a lot of firsts: the first black attorney general, the first black secretary of state, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first black Supreme Court Justice and so on. It might be time to stop counting such milestones.

But, if one has national exposure, others are going to follow along. Some are raising their fists during the playing of the anthem, some are taking a knee. I wonder: do they do this at home when they hear the anthem being played? Or, like the class clown, do they just do it when a lot of people are watching?

I would like to make a couple of observations. One is that it’s a good thing they are living in the United States. A couple of years ago, North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Un had a member of his puppet parliament taken out and shot. One of the man’s crimes was not clapping with enough enthusiasm when Kim Jong-Un entered the parliament chambers.

Journalists in Russia who criticize the government with any kind of effectiveness have been jailed and sometimes killed. Dissidents in Iran are jailed and tortured. Dissidents in China are jailed.

Back when this nation was founded, speaking out against the crown could get you imprisoned or hanged. It’s one of the reasons the Founders wrote into the Constitution the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. It’s the most concise yet most expansive expression of freedoms in the history of government:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

So Colin and his sycophants can go out and disrespect the flag and the Constitution of the United States all they want. But they might want to find out why so many of us find that objectionable.

My dad, for one, fought under that flag during World War II to defeat a world power that was systematically killing off a minority population. Others fought under that flag in the Pacific to defeat an Imperialistic power that had enslaved thousands of Chinese and Korean people.

If Colin Kaepernick wants an example of real oppression, he might want to study what real oppression was under the Nazis and Japanese. 405,000 Americans died in combat to defeat those two totalitarian powers.

Or he might want to go further back in American history and possibly tour Arlington Cemetery where he could pay tribute to some of the 600,000 Union soldiers who were killed, captured, wounded or missing while fighting under the American Flag to end slavery.

Or even further back, Kaepernick might discover the connection between the Flag and the U.S. Constitution, that greatest recitation of the rights of the governed and the restraints on the governors. It was written by people who had experienced real oppression.

And if he honestly studied American history, he might find all the mistakes the nation has made in its 240 years of existence, and then learn how the nation tried to correct those mistakes through such legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He might realize that our system is designed to address our shortcomings.

Or maybe he’d learn some interesting facts about the United States, like the U.S. and its citizens donate more time and money to aid other nations and peoples than all other nations on Earth combined. Maybe he’d learn that the U.S. medical system has created more lifesaving drugs and vaccines than any other nation, or any other ten nations. Or that the U.S. economy has lifted more people out of poverty than any other governmental system in history.

But that would require a little work on his part. Far easier to take a knee for a couple of minutes.

Sept. 4, 2016

Donald Trump for President

Well, I’m tired of thinking about it. I’m going to vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States.

For people like me, and I suspect many of you, the choices are limited. If we vote for Hillary Clinton, we vote for a corrupt liberal. If we vote for Gary Johnson, the best we can hope for is that he wins three or four states and throws the election into the House of Representatives. Then we will get another political hack for President.

Clinton’s Spending Plans

If Hillary Clinton wins, the economy will crash within four years. Go to her website as I have – Hillary Clinton.com – and read through her proposals and position papers. While you’re doing that, add up all the spending she proposes for free college; universal health care; public works projects ($275 billion for just that); half a billion new solar panels ($60 billion for just that); promises to treat, cure or stop Alzheimers, autism, addiction and substance abuse, mental health problems, horse soring (not a typo), suicides by veterans, HIV and AIDS; $10 billion to aid manufacturing businesses; $1.5 billion for child care and additional sums for early childhood education, including doubling the money spent for Head Start; doubling funding for a Justice Department program she likes; $2 billion to reform “overly punitive” disciplinary policies in K-12 schools, plus increasing pay for all teachers; college debt relief for 25 million people; establishing a rural infrastructure bank; a vast expansion of Social Security and Medicare; $15 billion for “historically black colleges and minority institutions;” airport expansion; overhauling the Veterans Administration; and on-campus child care.

That’s just the spending side of the ledger. On the revenue reduction side, Clinton proposes tax credits for families who take care of aging relatives; child care; apprentice programs in business; and new manufacturing in high unemployment areas.

The only new revenue stream proposed by Hillary is the same stream of nonsense that came out of Barack Obama’s mouth: she will force the wealthiest Americans and the largest businesses to pay “their fair share.”

The wealthiest Americans and the largest businesses don’t have that much money. Despite two promises to balance the budget, Obama’s policies added $10 trillion to the national debt, or more than all other presidents, colonial governors and Indian chiefs in American history combined. Even if money grew on trees, there aren’t enough trees to pay off what Hillary Clinton plans to spend.

If you don’t care about that, or you don’t do numbers well, at a 2 percent interest rate, Obama added $200 billion per year to national expenditures in interest payments on the debt, $200 billion that otherwise could have been used to build fighter planes, fund food stamps, give grants to schools and colleges, pave roads, build bridges, hire judges, construct hospitals, and build ten walls along the Mexican border.

If Hillary does everything she’s promising to do, her addition to the national debt will mean that every American man, woman and child’s share of that debt will be $91,000.

The Supreme Court

The court now is split 4-4 along ideological lines. The court wasn’t designed to be that way, but now it is. Hillary Clinton has not disclosed who she might appoint to the court – and who could believe her if she did say – but her allegiance to Barack Obama and concessions to Bernie Sanders would indicate she would appoint liberal ideologues.

Obama appointed Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, neither of whom has deviated from the liberal line since their appointments. At stake:

• Second amendment rights. On a 5-4 vote, the court ruled unconstitutional a District of Columbia ordinance that prohibited private ownership or possession of handguns. A liberal court could reinstate that ordinance.
• On a 4-4 vote, the court failed to overturn a law that forces people to join public employee unions and pay dues that can be used to support candidates, almost exclusively Democrat candidates. With a liberal court, that ruling will stand.
• Religious freedom: On a 5-4 vote, the court allowed a town to have a Christian cleric deliver a prayer at town council meetings. A liberal court would overturn that ruling.
• In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, the court held that corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to get candidates for public office elected or defeated, the same right that unions have. This probably would be the first ruling a liberal court would seek to overturn.

The next president might appoint two, three or even five justices to the Supreme Court. If he court has a 7-2 majority for liberal policies, you could look for more affirmative action, strengthened abortion rights, and worst of all, expansion of the powers of the central government and the lessening of the powers of the states. Forget the Tenth Amendment.

We don’t know what Donald Trump will do, but he said during the week of Sept. 4 that his appointments comparator would the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a strict constitutionalist and one of the greatest minds to ever reach the Supreme Court. That’s good enough for me.

The Final Straw Vote

Hillary Clinton throughout her career has been dogged by ethical and criminal investigations. She recently said, “There might be smoke, but there’s no fire,” which is a convenient twisting of the more obvious adage, “Where there’s smoke, there is fire.”

There is a line in the Jaycee Creed that reflects one of the foundations of the United States: “Government should be of laws, not of men.” In other words, no one should be above the law. Hillary and Bill Clinton clearly believe otherwise. Do we really believe there is no prid pro quo involved when Bill Clinton gets $750,000 plus expenses for a single speech? Did Goldman Sachs so badly want to hear three speeches from Hillary Clinton that they gave her $675,000? And why will Hillary not make public those speeches or her 30,000 emails? Who destroys personal data devices with a hammer if they don’t have something to hide? Did foreign governments not feel they would get something in return for donating to the Clinton Family Foundation when Hillary was secretary of state?

Who, or perhaps the correct question would be how many people will own Hillary Clinton if she is elected?

I hate to have to vote for a candidate because the other candidate is worse, but in this year, at this place, at this juncture in history, it’s what I’m going to do.

August 28, 2016

Hillary’s Chip in Your Head

Yep, my anonymous source delivered again. He (or she) dropped off a transcript of the final speech of three given by Hillary Clinton to employees and managers of Goldman Sachs, which paid a mere $250,000 per speech. I took the liberty of printing almost all of it this time because it was actually amusing. Starts here:

• Substance use disorders are chronic diseases, and recovery is only possible through effective and ongoing care. I plan to put these people in camps where we can be assured they will receive such care, and more importantly, don’t bother the rest of us. I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• I will make the U.S. the clean energy superpower of the world – with half a billion solar panels installed by the end of my first term. These will be installed in coal mines so those sites that once produced dirty energy will now produce clean energy while putting those out-of-work miners back on the job. I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• I will commit to stopping Alzheimer’s. We will start with Mr. Alzheimer himself and work our way down through the family, paying them all off if need be. I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• There is increasing scientific evidence that brain development in the earliest years of childhood is crucial. We need programs that provide home visits by a social worker or nurse during and directly after pregnancy to assist those children we won’t be aborting. I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• Connect all Americans to the internet through a small, undetectable microchip so that we will always now where you are and what you are doing. This will be part of my $275 billion infrastructure program. I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• Too many families in America have suffered – and continue to suffer – from gun violence. It’s the leading cause of death among young African American men. We will therefore confiscate all guns owned by young African American men. And yes, if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun. Look for a huge expansion of the no-fly list. I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• American families are being squeezed by rising out-of-pocket health care costs. As an expansion of Obamacare, I will provide squeeze insurance to all Americans. I don’t know how much this will cost either. A lot, I bet HAHAHA. But I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• We can’t wait any longer for a path to full and equal citizenship. I will ensure refugees who seek asylum in the U.S. have a fair chance to tell their stories. Therefore, I am announcing a new reality TV show to be called, “I’m here, Bronx Cheer.” These programs will be paid for by not enforcing any immigration laws at all, thereby realizing a huge savings in the Department of Homeland Security.
• I am proposing middle-class tax breaks to help families cope with the rising cost of everyday expenses, like child care and education, and I’ve announced new tax credits to help families caring for an ill or aging family member. I’ll pay for them by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and closing loopholes in our tax code, like the mortgage interest deduction, the charitable donation deduction, travel expense deduction, child care deduction and health insurance cost deduction.
• Let’s make debt-free college available to everyone. Anyone who is physically in the United States should have access to a free college education. I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• As a U.S. senator, I co-founded the bipartisan Senate Manufacturing Caucus, which, however, never ended up manufacturing anything. I supported the “New Manhattan Project” to rebuild American manufacturing before I found out the Manhattan Project was a project to build bombs. But I tried.
• I will invest (spend money) in innovation and capabilities that will allow us to prepare for and fight 21st-century threats. That includes leveraging our information advantage through what’s called “net-centric warfare” capabilities – because I am so computer savvy HAHAHA – and preparing for Asymmetric threats. I will travel personally to Asymmetrica if I must to warn them I can threaten them with net-centric warfare stuff. I will pay for this by requiring the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share.
• Education should be the great door opener, and yet we know it often doesn’t turn out that way. I think every child in this country deserves a good teacher in a good school, and clearly, the NEA is not providing these teachers now. Um, please don’t tell the NEA I said that.
• I have been a vocal advocate for LGBT rights throughout my career. Except in 1996, when I said nothing when President Bill signed the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that defined federal marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Or in 2000 when I said, “I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman.” But I’ve evolved.
• I will fight to expand Social Security for those who need it most and who are treated unfairly today. For instance: I will prohibit the Trust Fund trustees from saying things like: “Expenditures are projected to exceed non-interest income throughout the projection period, as it has in every year since 2008. The fund again fails the test of short-range financial adequacy, as its trust fund ratio is already below 100 percent of annual costs and is expected to decline in a continuous fashion until reserve depletion in 2028.” These words are disturbing to our elderly people, and these words will stop.
• I am a proud lifelong fighter for women’s issues, because I firmly believe what’s good for women is good for America. Except in the Clinton Family Foundation, which paid men 38 percent more than women, but the Clinton Family Foundation, as you know, is above the law. 

Thank you all for coming today, and thank you for keeping my silly meanderings secret. I truly believe in all the things I’ve said to you today, or at least as much as I believe in anything HAHAHA, so many of my points will require some small modifications in the future. Thank you again. 

Editor’s note: If you’d like to see how some of these positions have evolved, go to HillaryClinton.com. But don’t add up all the expenditures she’s promised to make. It will scare the bejeebers out of you.

 

August 21, 2016

Hillary’s Goodbye to the FBI

Well, well.

My anonymous source dropped off a transcript of Hillary Clinton’s second speech to Goldman Sachs employees and executives. As before, most of the speech is chronically boring – stories about her imaginary achievements, fantasies about exciting events in her life, how she attained a black belt in yoga.

But as we learned from reading the transcript of her first speech, there are some passages that could cause some thoughtful reflection among those belonging to the sane class of American voters.

• On Education: Now that we have injected Common Core into so many classrooms, we have the basis for re-educating the masses so that not only will they not be a threat to the established power structure – us, HAHAHA (some chuckles from the audience) – they will be convinced that they can’t live without us. Or they won’t live at all HAHAHA.

Seriously though, I am going to propose a massive expansion of the Department of Education… And if I may digress, the very existence of that federal agency is clearly unconstitutional, and so you get an idea how we can continue to degrade that document until it has no meaning … Expand the Department of Education so K-12 curricula comes from Washington, D.C., not from states or local school boards.

Then we will teach American history only back to 1964 when a Democrat president passed the Civil Rights Act. We know Lyndon Johnson couldn’t have done that without the help of Republicans, but that won’t be taught any more. If we want a firm basis of power, we need total support from captive minority groups. Think I can’t do this? Despite the fact that Republicans were almost solely responsible for the freedoms enjoyed by blacks today, they vote 95 percent for Democrats.

We can build on that, but you’re asking, “How will this help me? How will it help the 1 percenter?” Here’s how. Who’s going to take your job? Who is going to run Goldman Sachs 20 years from now? An ill-educated, mathematically-challenged, functionally illiterate product of the public school system? Or a privileged, well-funded scion of currently rich families who went to good schools and universities? (some appreciative murmuring in the audience)

And if you think we can’t mess with American history to that extent, look what we’ve done already. The Advancement Placement American history courses, which are directly connected with Common Core, don’t even mention Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr! (gasps from some audience members).

• On Immigration: My opponent is making a great deal of hay over the immigration issue. If he gets elected he might even do what he says he’s going to do. You know I won’t do that! HAHAHA. Just kidding. Showing my human side, or sector, or … anyway, I mentioned captive minority groups. We’ve got the blacks, we’re getting the Latinos, but there are still more white educated people than any other bloc. And somehow they got the Asians. That’s why I’ve become opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, even though before I was for it, I think. I lost a laptop, you know, but … But we need another large minority bloc of Democrats. The answer? Middle Eastern refugees! These fit the profile we want – undereducated, unskilled, prone to being manipulated. I’ve already proposed bringing 65,000 Syrians to the U.S. Again, these people are no threat to our class, yet they can all vote to retain us. We’ve already got a blueprint for Arab Lives Matter. We just tell them Republicans caused all the wars in the Middle East. Sure, I voted to invade Iraq, but a Republican was president. This kind of misdirection has worked in the largest American cities for decades. Democrats have failed to serve their constituents in the inner cities, or even to protect their constituents in the inner cities, yet those very constituencies keep them in power. (a great deal of nodding in the audience. Hillary waits, then) With proper funding – wink, wink – I can pull this off on a national scale.

• The FBI: I think it’s time to abolish the FBI and replace it with a national police force. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the FBI recommending that I not be indicted for the crimes I committed, but they criticized me! They. Criticized. Me. ME! Sorry. I lost control there for a moment, but think about it. Did you know that it is a felony to lie to the FBI? How can I operate in that environment? How can you operate in that environment? You are stockbrokers! Financial manipulators! Did you like paying that $550 million fine a few years ago? (a few audience member try to look offended, but most are nodding).

In any case, government police forces should be used for their historical purpose: suppressing the people and keeping the ruling class in power. I can tell you that I and my Republican counterparts agree on this point – that the real purpose of the two major political parties is to retain power. You know this. You donate liberally to Republicans and Democrats. Please continue to do so HAHAHA

The remainder of this particular speech was a running commentary on how much weddings cost, and when she gets elected, it will be the men paying for the weddings, not the daughters, unless Chelsea has a son who chooses to remain a “son” and not go the way of Caitlyn Jenner, but her position on gay marriage is still evolving until the laptop is found … but you get the picture. This part of the speech actually might have filled 30,000 e-mails, but we’ll never know.

 

August 14, 2016

Hillary’s Secret Proposals

I certainly didn’t expect this. It brings me back to my days as an investigative reporter. Someone shoved an unmarked manila envelope through the mail slot in my door. I opened it with great anticipation, hoping maybe it was a bribe of some sort. But guess what it contained: a transcript of one of Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs employees. You know, the speeches that Hillary is too embarrassed to make public.

Well, I can see why. I’m not going to publish the whole transcript because I value my readers’ time. Much of the speech is too boring to be endured, and I can just imagine her droning on for 45 minutes in that snarky, grating voice. But I did find some excerpts interesting.

• On the national debt: I know, and you know, that most Americans don’t even know what the national debt is (some chuckles in the audience) much less what it means to them in their daily lives. But it could become an issue if foreign nations stop taking our money. Obama, my spiritual father, has done an excellent job in taking us in that direction HAHAHA.

I’m going to propose, and you’re going to like this, issuance of a 100-year treasury note. Given that the turmoil in the world is feeding sharp currency fluctuations, many foreign investors will buy these instruments because they will be backed by the full force and credit of the United States HAHAHA (general laughter in the audience).

Americans will buy them too because they’ll have to. Under the precedent created by the Affordable Care Act, we can tell Americans to buy whatever we tell them to buy, be it health insurance or savings bonds. It will be a payroll deduction, just like F.I.C.A. The beauty of this is that we don’t have to pay off the face value of the bonds until 100 years hence, which is for us, never! HAHAHA. (there is some doubtful mumbling in the audience, and then Hillary adds) Bill and I were thinking that the sale of these bonds should be handled by only one private brokerage, one with the experience and worldwide presence to market these securities. (Hillary leaves it at that, but one white-haired, bespectacled executive is seen to be writing a notepad – ‘More donations to Democrat Party – and writes down a number.)

• On her $1 trillion tax increase proposal: I know you’ve heard that I plan to increase taxes on income, capital gains, birthday presents, Christmas presents, death, life, carbon usage, pets, eating out, dining in, playground use, leaving America, coming to America, guns, ammunition, photos of guns, but also of most interest to you, business.

I have proposed $275 billion in new taxes for business, and you have read correctly in my carefully-arranged press reports that the details of the business tax increases are “undefined.”

They are not defined because, as in the past, our tools in Congress will add certain loopholes in the coming legislation that will allow certain enterprises to evade the tax increases. Business tax increases, as you all know, are for little businesses. And you know this has been done before. It’s how GE can avoid paying any taxes at all in some years. It’s how we all came up with “too big to fail.”

We are simply following in the footsteps of our predecessors, but you are probably wondering how these loopholes will be meted out. I will leave that to your imagination, but as you leave today, you will find a list of Democrat senators and one presidential candidate HAHAHA who are in tight races. Just for your information HAHAHA (audience laughs, old white-haired executive crosses out previous number and writes a new one).

• On downsizing government: We are all hearing how we need to downsize government. It’s an annoying and repetitive refrain we hear mainly from people who have never been in government, or have never run big businesses. They apparently believe they have some role in running this country HAHAHA. Unfortunately, they can vote.

So I propose to steal the opposition’s thunder in one, big, headline announcement at a point in the campaign when I will need to drown out everything the other side is saying or has said. I will propose to privatize the State Department (there is absolute silence in the room. Hillary smiles). You know, there have been some problems in the operation of the State Department HAHAHA, and I have a solution.

We can eliminate a $50 billion Cabinet department by simply doing this: turning over all operations to the Clinton Global Initiative (the audience gasps). Our global activities have taken us to almost every nation on Earth to ask for bri…, uh, donations, so we know who to see and who to talk to.

Moreover, the funds for operation of the department will come not from the American taxpayer, but from the foreign nations themselves, less 94 percent for Bill’s salary and expenses. Imagine, a self-funded Department of State! When you get right down to it, we are all rational people, from Obama to Putin, from the Emir of Bahrain to the King of Saudi Arabia, from the Mullahs of Iran to the Caliph of the Islamic State. We are all CEOs at heart. Of course, we all have some hobbies the common folk might find repugnant, but we have one thing in common – self-interest.

It might seem shocking at first, but there is one thing the Clinton Global Initiative has done successfully from Day One – fool everyone! As a private organization, CGI will not have to put up with the pesky Freedom of Information Act requests, won’t have to abide by transparency rules that apply to governmental agencies, won’t even have to run the risk of its CEO being fired by a Republican president, if there ever is one again HAHAHA.

And that concludes my remarks for today. One cautionary note: you’ve just been made privy to some plans we would not like released at this time, which is why all recording devices and phones were confiscated before you came it. Don’t worry, those devices will be sold to raise money for the Clinton Global Initiative HAHAHA, just kidding, No I’m not, just trying to cover both my ends. Anyway, transcripts of this speech will never be released until the second Clinton Presidential Library is built.

Thank you for your time. 

That was from the first of three speeches that Hillary delivered to Goldman Sachs executives for the low, low price of $250,000 per speech. Interesting, eh? Maybe my anonymous source will drop off more in the near future.

 

August 7, 2016

Zika Puts the Bite on Taxpayers

Hillary Clinton has decided to make a campaign issue out of Congress not “dealing” with the issue of the Zika virus before adjourning for the summer recess.

Congress doesn’t deal with a lot of issues. It’s what it does best. And really, I feel like the less Congress does, the safer we Americans are.

But let’s look at this issue. Congress is being asked for additional funds to combat the Zika virus after mosquitoes were found carrying the virus in Florida. It is not against the law to do that in Florida, an oversight that contributed to the current emergency.

Aside from that, you should know this. The various federal health agencies that were involved in the efforts against the spread of the Zika virus have asked for more funds because they have nearly exhausted the $589 million they already had allocated for this purpose.

I’m just some guy who lives up in the mountains and reads a lot, but were I in Congress (God forbid), the first question I would ask is: “What did you do with the $589 million we already gave you?”

My second question would be, “What are you going to do with the $1.1 billion you’re asking for now?”

Quite possibly the Democrats, who filibustered against the $1.1 billion allocation, believe that the money could be spent to buy off the Zika mosquito elders and have them call their brethren home to Brazil.

But otherwise, what are they going to do? To develop a new medicine that treats anything costs $2 billion and takes an average ten years before it can be cleared to be used on humans.

If you’re some bright, 22-year-old college graduate student and have an idea for a drug that could erase liver spots, you’re going to be 32 years old, have gone through at least four long, drawn-out clinical trials, been on the road trying to sell stock to raise money, begged for grants, sold your soul and become an alcoholic before you are likely to see that drug approved and on the market. There is a company – Cel-Sci Corporation (CVM) – that has been trying to develop of a specific drug for 33 years without success.

If the U.S. government were in charge of that process, it would take twice as long and cost three times as much. That is why the U.S. government has never developed a wonder drug.

So for what would all that money be used? Here’s a recent news release from the Centers for Disease Control:

U.S. states and territories can now apply to CDC for funds to fight Zika locally. More than $85 million in redirected funds identified by the Department of Health and Human Services is being made available to support efforts to protect Americans from Zika infection and associated adverse health outcomes, including the serious birth defect microcephaly.

“These funds will allow states and territories to continue implementation of their Zika preparedness plans, but are not enough to support a comprehensive Zika response and can only temporarily address what is needed,” said Stephen C. Redd, M.D. (RADM, USPHS), director of CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response. Without the full amount of requested emergency supplemental funding, many activities that need to start now are being delayed or may have to be stopped within months.

Under the latest announcement, $25 million in FY 2016 preparedness and response funding will go to 53 states, cities, and territories at risk for outbreaks of Zika virus infection.‎ Recipients will receive funds based on the geographic locations of the two mosquitoes known to transmit Zika virus, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus; history of mosquito borne disease outbreaks; and size of population. Jurisdictions will use the funds to strengthen incident management and emergency operations coordination; information management and sharing; and community recovery and resilience.

State, local and territorial health officials can use the funds to rapidly identify and investigate a possible outbreak of Zika virus disease in their communities; coordinate a comprehensive response across all levels of government and non-governmental partners (including the healthcare sector); and identify and connect to community services families affected by Zika virus disease.

Okay, I still don’t know what they’re going to do.  The Zika virus is borne by certain species of mosquitoes. I would think that if a community had $25 million or so, they would spend it catching mosquitoes and seeing if that particular species was (a) here, and (b) was carrying the virus.

I can trap mosquitoes in my back yard by just spreading some glue on my arm. The testing protocols already exist, so (a) and (b) could be quickly done. Then you might want to spend some money informing and warning the public. Beyond that, what can you do?

You can’t “protect Americans from the Zika infection.” All you can do is tell them not to go where the Zika virus has been found, or if they do, imitate soccer player Hope Solo and protect yourself.

You can’t improve “community resilience” without breeding a new form of mosquito-proof human, which takes eons.

We can’t “coordinate an effective Zika response.” There is no Zika government with which to negotiate. It’s carried by mosquitoes. What are they talking about – aerial spraying? Trust me, that doesn’t work for 100 percent of the mosquitoes.

This is my favorite: “Jurisdictions will use the funds to strengthen incident management and emergency operations coordination; information management and sharing.”

This is typical government gobbledygook. “Incident management” is what they do at forest fires. “Information management and sharing” is public relations. They’ll send in a bunch of PR people who couldn’t make it in real journalism to tell you what you already know: “mosquitoes bite humans.”

So if you get bitten and test positive for the Zika virus, will this $1.1 billion help you, as in will it pay for all your treatment? Is that covered by ObamaCare? Would it be fair to the rest of us if it were? All the news release says is, “identify and connect to community services.”

I really, really wish reporters would either ask, or be allowed to ask follow-up questions. It’s hard with a candidate like Hillary Clinton who doesn’t subject herself to questions more than once or twice a year and surrounds herself with ropes to ensure it doesn’t happen.

But wouldn’t a good question be, “Could you detail how that $1.1 billion would be spent?”

July 31, 2016

You Just Gotta Laugh

Now I’ve got another reason not to travel abroad. The Obama administration just told every terrorist and kidnapper in the world that the ransom the U.S. will pay for a kidnap victim is $100 million per person.

If you’re not up on this, The Wall Street Journal reported that in January the U.S. put $400 million in cash (wrapped foreign paper currencies stacked on pallets) on an unmarked cargo plane that flew from the Netherlands to Switzerland and then to Iran in the middle of the night.

It was just revealed on Aug. 4 that the hostages being held in Iran were taken to an airport and told they would be flying home, but not until “the other plane arrived.” When “the other plane arrived,” the hostages were released and flew home.

The United States since the presidency of Thomas Jefferson has had a policy of not paying ransom for hostages. Remember: “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute.” Why? Because paying ransoms encourages the taking of more hostages.

Pshaw, you say. Well, Iran is now holding three more Iranian-Americans as well as dual nationals from the U.K. and Canada. There are people in high places who think the U.S. set a new precedent by saying that now it is willing to pay ransoms. And one group saying that is Iranian officials in Iran. In fact, the Iranian officials who pulled this off were bragging about it.

If there is a humorous side to this flap, it is the White House and its minions trying to say that the payment was not ransom. It was merely paying off a lingering debt to Iran from 1979 that somehow was intertwined with the nuclear deal of 2016 and the payment coincidently occurred the same day the hostages were released.

Not only is that a little hard to swallow, but one wonders why we would even entertain paying a debt to a regime that kept 52 American diplomats and staff prisoners for 444 days. It would seem Iran would owe us for that, not we owe them.

But that is one way to obfuscate. It’s hard, but they tried.

We start with Josh Earnest, press secretary for Obama. Seeing him deny that the $400 million in assorted foreign currencies was not a ransom payment reminds one of watching Leslie Nielsen’s nose grow in that scene from “Airplane.”

Earnest: “Let me be clear. The United States does not pay ransom.” (nose grows)

Earnest: “We have not, and will not, pay ransom to secure the release of U.S. citizens.” (nose grows longer)

A reporter, backing away from the approaching nostrils, asks, so why not make a simple wire transfer of funds through cooperating banks? Why a planeload of cash in the middle of the night?

Earnest: ““Why is that relevant? Why is that relevant? Particularly when we all know there is no banking relationship between the United States and Iran.” (Nose grows longer, smacking the offending reporter between the eyes)

The press, for once, isn’t buying it. Maybe it takes a two-foot long olfactory canal to jolt the mainstream press from its uninterrupted acceptance of White House explanations, but apparently Obama was disturbed at the media’s non-complaince.

He takes over, hoping that different voice/same message might work.

Obama: “We do not pay ransom for hostages” (nose grows)

Obama: “The only bit of news that is relevant on this is the fact that we paid cash.” (nose grows longer)

Obama: “This wasn’t some nefarious deal. It wasn’t a secret. We were completely open with everybody about it.” (nose grows really long)

Obama: The timing of the payment so close to the prisoners’ release was purely coincidental. (nose grows so long it gets caught in the teleprompter when Obama swivels his head)

One expects at any moment to see Obama and Earnest act like children and duel with their extended noses in imitation of the fight between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader in the first Star Wars movie, thus relieving the frustration of being unable to convince even the friendly press.

Secretary of State John Kerry was not afflicted with long-nose syndrome, but he did develop a long face as he said, “The United States does not pay ransom and does not negotiate ransoms.”

Funny stuff. But you know, the bad guys overseas don’t care what Obama and his talking puppets say. They can look at the deal and astutely conclude that the U.S. will pay for hostages. In the Middle East, in Somalia, in parts of Africa, in the Philippines and elsewhere they are preparing. Believe it.

July 24, 2016

Yes, Bobby, the Russians Did It

Here’s an excellent example of how Hillary “Home of the Whopper” Clinton works. She is at the heart of yet another scandal, this one being the disclosure by WikiLeaks that the Democrat Party hierarchy conspired from the very beginning to the presidential campaign to sandbag one of its own: Bernie Sanders.

The kicker to this story is that the Democrats are not denying doing what they did; they just tried to find a way to blame it on Donald Trump.

The story must of have been true because as soon as the evidence was disseminated in such a way that the mainstream media could not cover it up, the Democrats canned longtime national chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and one other high party official.

Which is not to say these people are ever out of work. Wasserman-Schultz immediately was hired as Hillary’s campaign co-chairman. “You will see me every day between now and Nov. 8 on the campaign trail, and we will lock arms and we will not stand down,” she said.

That should give her constituents in Florida pause. Wasserman Schultz is an elected U.S. representative from Florida’s 23^rd District. She should be in Washington representing those people, a job for which she is paid $170,000 per year. So she just said she would not be doing that job for at least the next three months. Can you do that in your job?

Back to the point: the emails WikiLeaks uncovered (and can’t you just savor the irony of Hillary being undone – again – by emails) showed that the DNC worked from the very start to support Hillary and torpedo Bernie Sanders even to the point of labeling Sanders as an atheist. This all came out just before the Democrat National Convention, and one of the results was Wasserman Schultz got booed off the convention stage.

Another result was riots in the streets of Philadelphia, but you didn’t get to see that because the national media didn’t cover it. No big deal, riots at a national party convention. When was that ever news?

“Protesters were overwhelmingly pro-Sanders and vehemently against the presumptive Democrat nominee. Chants of ‘Lock her up’ – a favorite anti-Hillary Clinton slogan at last week’s Republican National Convention – echoed periodically outside the Wells Fargo Center. Protesters contended that Clinton was corrupt, the leaked emails showed it, and that their candidate had been robbed,” reported The Phildelphia Inquirer. There were arrests, and there were injuries.

So you’re inside the Clinton campaign and trying to decide how to “change the narrative.” The “narrative” is the inside-the-Beltway term for how to tell you, the American citizen, what to believe. The narrative rises above all else, including truth, the nation’s welfare and security, the welfare of its citizens, principles, tradition, and God.

The unassailable truth is that the Democrat National Committee and nearly all the party’s elites conspired from years ago to give Hillary Clinton the nomination. When it appeared that Bernie Sanders actually might pose a real challenge, the DNC went into action. We should have gotten a clue when Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary with nearly 70 percent of the vote, but got only two of the eight super delegates from that state.

(As an aside, the Democrats were embarrassed by the super delegate situation. Hillary locked up almost all of them before voting in primaries even began. There are 716 super delegates to the nominating convention. They can vote any way they want regardless of how their constituents vote. It takes 2,382 votes to get the Cemocrat nomination. Therefore Hillary had about a quarter of the delegates needed before anyone even voted. At the convention, the Democrat leaders announced that they would look into this. They said they would create a committee to report back in two years.)

Now that all this conniving against Bernie Sanders has been laid bare, how to the Democrats get back control of the narrative? Answer: blame the Russians. Without any evidence whatsoever, the Hillary campaign accuses the Russians of hacking the DNC computers to help the campaign of Donald Trump, who is a buddy of Vladimir Putin.

(Another aside. One of Hillary’s supposed “achievements” was a reset with the Russians, announced with Hillary carrying a big red button at a news conference and giving it to Vladimir, one of the most cold and ruthless men on Earth. Following the reset, the Russians annexed the Crimea, started a civil war in the Ukraine, went to the aid of Syrian dictator Basher Assad, and generally continued a campaign against American interests all over the world. Nice job, Hillary).

So that was the story from the Hillary campaign. One thing missing from that narrative, interesting as it was, is any denial of the truth disclosed in those hacked emails. It’s kind of like telling your mom, when the evidence was obvious, that you did in fact shave the cat but the cat asked to be shaved. Certain news media outlets can be counted upon to run with the story of the talking cat rather than the real story of cruelty to animals. It’s the way we roll today.

July 17, 2016

Sunset of the Planet of the Apes

I just watched the movie “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.” If you’re unfamiliar with this flick, it starts out with 95 percent of all humans dying from a plague that apparently doesn’t affect chimpanzees.

Then the chimps, who live just outside of San Francisco, get offended at something the humans are doing, and there’s a bad guy chimp and a bad guy human that thwart the peacemakers.

So there’s a big battle in which the chimps charge a wall defended by humans. Chimps wouldn’t do this, of course. Cattle might. But chimps easily can climb trees and buildings and various structures, so if I was as smart as the chimps seem to be, I wouldn’t charge straight at a machine gun. But I didn’t write the script.

The chief good-guy chimp is Caesar, played by Andy Serkis. He also starred as a chimp in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “War of the Planet of the Apes,” and “King Kong.” He played these parts so well that I believe Andy Serkis actually is an ape.

Another thing I took away from the film is that it sets itself up well for a sequel, as did the prior two films based on films made 40 years ago. We can’t seem to get enough of this.

So what would happen if the apes win in the next movie and take over the world? I hope they preserve the game of golf. It occurred to me while watching the film that apes would make dandy golfers.

They’re way stronger than us, have a short stature and long arms. They could probably hit the ball 500 yards. They could also probably chip the ball 500 yards, so they might want to make longer courses, or work really hard on their short games.

The movie after the next one in which the apes win the war could be titled “The Masters of the Planet of the Apes.”

The film ended with the two good guys – human and ape – thinking it was too bad they couldn’t reconcile their differences, but I was thinking, “Hey, this is San Francisco!” The good human could have offered Ceasar’s people the right to vote, the right to live on the street, fling turds at tourists, use any restroom and serve on the school board.

I don’t know why they want to make ape/human relations so difficult.

 

July 10, 2016

Respect for the Law … Not

I was a member of the Jaycees for about 15 years. We started every meeting not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with a recitation of the Jaycee Creed.

It goes like this:

We believe,

That faith in God gives meaning and purpose to human life;

That the brotherhood of man transcends the sovereignty of nations;

That economic justice can best be won by free men through free enterprise;

That government should be of laws rather than of men;

That Earth’s great treasure lies in the human personality;

And that service to humanity is the best work of life.

It was the fourth line – government should be of laws rather than of men – that particularly struck me the first few times I heard it and recited it. It struck me because that is what makes America work. We have to have faith that no one is above the law, or we will have no respect for the law. Without law, we descend into anarchy.

I get reminded now and then about how great a principle that is. There was a TV reporter not too long ago who was interviewing an illegal immigrant.

“Why do you risk so much and spend so much to come to the U.S.? What do you think we have that you don’t?” the reporter asked.

“Judges,” the man answered. “All our judges are corrupt. Yours aren’t.”

Of course that isn’t entirely true, but by and large, our judges abide by the rule of law. And when those judges render a verdict, most of the time we accept that verdict and go on with our lives. It’s like elections. We may not like the result of the elections, but we don’t run out into the bush and start an armed rebellion if the vote didn’t go our way.

The law says that’s the way we pick our leaders and representatives. It’s engraved in the Constitution, perhaps the most inspired and effective governing document in all recorded history.

Now, however, we see among our leaders disdain for the rule of law, and I’ll start right at the top – President Barack Obama. He has ignored the War Powers Act; decided he didn’t need to notify Congress when he made the Bergdahl exchange although the law required it; changed the Affordable Care Act several times without going back to Congress; issued an executive order on immigration despite having said 22 times previously that he didn’t have the power under the Constitution to do that; and so on.

Congress – mainly the Democrats – were too gutless to do anything about it, so the precedents may stand. Do you think it’s a good thing that a president can unilaterally change a law he doesn’t like?

Then we have the director of the FBI reciting a litany of laws broken by one Hillary Clinton in her handling of e-mails containing information important to the security of our nation, but then recommending no prosecution. That must have come as a shock to many individuals who did the same thing Hillary did and were prosecuted, including:

• Author and former State Department employee Peter Van Buren was fired and harassed by the government for disclosing just three pieces of sensitive information in his book.
• James Hitselberger, a translator for the U.S., was prosecuted for unlawful removal and retention of classified documents. In full view of security personnel, he copied the documents and took them home because other personnel needed to use the computer.
• Gen David Petraeus took a plea when prosecuted for sharing classified e-mails with his biographer. (His lawyer, who helped him avoid a jail term, was hired by Hillary Clinton during the FBI investigation).
• A BP executive was charged with a felony – later reduced to a misdemeanor- for mishandling of e-mails in connection with the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
• Brian Nishamura, a Navy sailor, pleaded guilty to charges connected with him downloading information to a personal computer.
• CIA director James A. Deutch (a Bill Clinton appointee) was forced to resign in 1996 because of mishandled e-mails.

The list goes on. Jesselyn Radack is an attorney who has found a new specialty: defending people charged by the government with mishandling e-mails.

So now we see that not only can powerful people just ignore the law, we also see that some people are simply above the law.

Reporters covering the Clinton campaign opined that no one a week before was apprehensive about what James Comey would say. It appeared as if the campaign knew in advance that nothing bad would come out, and why wouldn’t they? Bill Clinton had a private conversation with Attorney General Loretta Lynch – Comey’s boss – a mere week before. Obama – Lynch’s boss – had declared months ago that Hillary “had done nothing wrong” before the FBI investigation was even half done. It would be hard to conclude that the fix was not in.

We’re at a pivotal time in the progress of America. Among the looming forks in the road is the next president will be able to appoint up to five new Supreme Court justices.

What happens to respect for law in the United States if a person who believes herself above the law controls the panel that ultimately decides under what laws the rest of us have to live?

 

June 26 and July 3, 2016

Learning from History

Those of us who have learned history are doomed to witness a repeat of it. For those of us who have studied the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, the parallels between 2016 A.D. and 50 B.C. are eerie.

For the years prior to 50 B.C., Romans had witnessed the steady erosion of their long-standing legal protections against dictatorship. They had seen the growing influence of the mob in Rome. They had seen official corruption on a grand scale. They had experienced periodic civil war, and in just a couple of decades, and empire would supplant the Republic.

So what’s going on in 2016?

• We are seeing the steady erosion of our constitutional protections against dictatorship. For the first time, a U.S. president has told us we have to buy something – health insurance – or face penalties imposed by the IRS. We have presidents circumventing Congress and writing their own laws, or changing laws passed by Congress.

It’s not just Obama who has done this repeatedly. President George W. Bush signed into a law a bill prohibiting torture of prisoners, but added a signing statement that indicated, more or less, that the law would be carried out only at his discretion. That was one of more than 100 “signing statements.”

Presidents have issued such signing statements since Andrew Jackson. Presidents have a tendency to get away with what they can get away with. At some point, one will ignore the soft nomenclature of the “executive order” and call them what they really are: decrees.

• Mob rule. What someone in a distant province thought of the Roman government didn’t mean much. But Rome itself had a huge population of indolent residents who could be called upon from time to time to riot, block the streets, bring business to a halt and even assassinate a political opponent. One of the reasons the Coliseum was built was to provide entertainment to the masses. If a Roman leader couldn’t provide bread and circuses for the mob, he was in trouble.

The Roman mob hardly represented the average Roman citizen, but they wielded influence far beyond what their numbers deserved. We have that equivalent: the bloated welfare system.

If you make a whole class of people dependent on the government, they will support the government as long as the government supports them. The Democrat party knows this. The number of food stamp recipients increased 45 percent under President Obama. There are over 50 million people in the U.S. receiving direct government assistance. There is so much fraud in the in the Social Security Disability program that its director could not tell Congress how much fraud there is. Virtually every president since Lyndon B. Johnson has added one welfare program or more. There are now 182 means-tested welfare programs in the U.S.

And if Hillary Clinton is elected, we producers are going to be feeding more takers. One plank of the Democratic Party Platform would provide free college education. Another calls for the expansion of the Social Security program. Another calls for an expansion of Medicare for those 55 and older.

Whoever promises to maintain and even expand these welfare programs can count on the continued support of the recipients. And such programs almost never disappear. It’s easy to give people things; it’s very hard to take them away. So what happens when the money runs out? The top guys will do anything to hold on to power. Ask Cleander, chief bodyguard of the Roman emperor Commodus. When Cleander failed to put down a mob revolt, Commodus threw his head to the crowds.

• We have seen our Congress, which is comparable to the Roman Senate, become increasingly corrupt and ineffective. They have become considerably more adept at raising money for themselves than managing the federal budget. The Roman Senate was powerless to stop Julius Caeser from crossing the Rubicon in 49 B.C. The Romans had a firm law against any general bringing an army that close to Rome, but Caeser just … did it.

The United States has what we call a War Powers Act to prevent any president from sending U.S troops into battle without prior notice and consent of Congress. In 2011, Obama sent troops in intervene in Lybia without consultation with Congress as required by law. But he just … did it.

Obama also exchanged high-profile prisoners of war for an American deserter without notifying Congress in advance as required by law, but he just … did it. Seeing no consequences to such actions, Obama has gone on to order all schools in the U.S. to allow bathroom access to any and all genders or supposed genders. So just what are the limits nowadays on presidential power if Congress continues to do nothing to restrain such actions?

When Romans actually voted for their senators and consuls (and consuls were term limited, by the way) the Roman Republic grew and thrived for over 400 years to become the richest and most powerful state in the Western Hemisphere. When the people lost the ability to choose leaders, leaders chose themselves, and the republic became an empire.

• Civil war. Incessant civil war helped bring down the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire. Octavian, who became known as Augustus Caesar, became Rome’s first emperor. Despite what you may have gleaned from the movie Gladiator, the Republic never returned.

“Civil war in the U.S.? Can’t happen,” you scoff. I imagine there were many intelligent people in the U.S.S.R. who said the same thing right up until the point that East Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and other countries left the Soviet Union. I can imagine member states of the U.S. leaving, possibly within my own lifetime.

What could trigger such a thing? The collapse of the U.S. dollar and efforts by the federal government to save it. Read about Yugoslavia’s final years. The collapse of the two-party system and the dictatorship of the Democrats. Read about how the Electoral College stacks up nowadays. It’s become a near impossibility for a Republican to win the presidency, even facing such a flawed human being as Hillary Clinton. Actual civil strife. Minorities in the U.S. have gotten used to getting what they want, and I’m not talking just about blacks. We’ve seen militant American Indians, militant gays, militant LGBTs, militant Latinos, militant anti-Trump marchers, militant property owners. In the last year, the FBI shot down a rancher, a black man in Dallas shot down five police officers and wounded seven others, three police officers were assassinated in Baton Rouge, white supremacists preached hate and violence on social media just before the Iowa caucuses, U.S. border guards have been killed in the southwest, and what can only be called open war occurs weekly on the hot streets of Chicago.

It seems as if some group doesn’t get what it wants within three weeks of asking for it, they believe it’s okay to go to war.

What could provide a solution to this would be a leader or leaders who could put the nation back on its constitutional foundations. But American voters have demonstrated an embarrassing inability to elect competent leaders. One has only to look at the two major party candidates for president now to reach that conclusion. Clearly, our best and brightest no longer go into politics. It’s too expensive, too messy, too demeaning, too frustrating. It’s not the just the last few presidents. Look at the last few leaders of Congress: Harry Reid, who besides getting away with the real estate deal of the century in Nevada, deliberately and maliciously told an absolute lie on the floor of the Senate and later bragged about it; John Boehner, who besides trading away his future health for a deep tan, lied to fellow House members about horse trading and the American public about allowing time to read all pending legislation; Nancy Pelosi, who besides using the U.S. Air Force as her personal chauffeur has famously emitted a whole string of stupid remarks that left the Democrats who elected her to the speakership cringing in their offices; or Mitch McConnell, who besides making it possible for Kentucky colleague Rand Paul to run for both president and senator at the same time has done absolutely nothing to stem the string of executive orders pouring from the White House. The jury’s still out on Paul Ryan, but if his last budget deal is an indicator, he’s already been taken over by the pod people.

We’re headed towards four separate cliffs, and we don’t have anyone trying to apply the brakes.

June 19, 2016

The Elite Meet the Common Folks

I guess the news of the world this week was Britain voting to leave the European Union, or the EU. Every time I hear “EU,” I think about those girls in the film Animal House walking home after their dates with the frat boys, saying eeeeeeyouuuuuuuuuuuu!

I never quite understood why Britain got in bed with the EU in the first place. Doing that was kind of like when you and a bunch of friends bought property together, probably for hunting or fishing.

You quickly found out that some worked hard on the property – kept the gates and roads up, stocked firewood, made payments on time, picked up trash. The others didn’t do much except show up for the good times. And the slackers would do stuff like buy an old pickup without telling the other guys but want to share the cost, or invite friends for deer season without the approval of the other members, or just ignore the bylaws.

The EU is like that. They’ve got the producer nations like Germany and Sweden and France, and they’ve got the slackers, like Greece and Portugal and Spain. The EU found itself having to put together a multi-billion euro bailout for Greece, and will probably have to do the same for other countries. Some plan: nations with sound financial policies bail out those that deliberately lack such policies.

It’s like showing up at the hunting lodge and finding out the slackers hadn’t cleaned up after their last party, and you had to spend part of your weekend doing that instead of doing something productive, like fishing.

So Britain didn’t like cleaning up after the others, and it left. But after it left, all the slackers got together and said how stupid Britain was to leave. Slackers are always pretty good at telling other people how to do stuff without having to do it themselves.

Thus we have all the intelligentsia, the scholarly elite, the brains in the room labeling all those who voted for Brexit as stupid rabble.

A columnist for The Washington Post had the temerity to ask, “What if we didn’t leave these incredibly complex decisions to the people?” And: “It turns out there is some evidence people might not have known exactly what they were doing.”

Konstantin Kosacheve, a member of Russia’s parliament (yes, Russia has a parliament), said, “The vote in Britain hasn’t solved its main problem: to become better understood by and convenient for the broader masses of the population.”

Even our President Barack Obama traveled to England to campaign against Brexit, as if that were part of his duties. However, few paid any attention to him. “It had absolutely zero impact on the polls,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, which advises the elite on political risk in that part of the world.

Well, the elites got it wrong. From top to bottom, they predicted the Brits would vote to stay, and the Brits didn’t vote they way they wanted them to, so the Brits who voted that way must be stupid.

Do these comments remind anyone of the rhetoric from the party, media and academic elites regarding the candidacy of one Donald Trump?

The Brits are closer to us culturally than almost any other nation on Earth. We think alike. What I’m hearing is that Americans are fed up with the bunch of elites that are running our country while at the same time not solving any of its major problems.

I’m not one to tout the perspicacity of the American voter. I’m not one of those columnists who write the stock column every election year about how everyone should get out and exercise their right to vote. I don’t think a lot of people should vote because they’re ignorant about the issues and the candidates. I don’t like my vote for a member of Congress being canceled out by someone who doesn’t even know the name of that candidate.

However, they can vote. If the elites want to weep and wail and gnash their teeth when the people don’t vote the way the elites think they should vote, then the elites maybe should look at why the populace got so ornery about the way things are.

Like, why isn’t anyone dealing with the American debt? Why are felons who are here illegally being released onto the streets? If it is a felony to be deported and then come back, why are those persons not being prosecuted when they come back? Why is Medicare on the brink of going broke? Why are we having to deal with nonsensical federal regulations almost on a daily basis? Why do our kids know nothing about American history but everything about Jersey Shore? Why do our kids know next to nothing about the Constitution? Why is the K-12 system not educating our kids? How does the President of the United States assume he has the power to tell us which bathroom we can or can’t use? Why is my savings account losing money when I’m not even using it? What the heck are negative interest rates and why are they even legal?

And so on.

The elites need to venture out into the real world to find out why so many of us aren’t swallowing what they’re feeding us.

 

June 12, 2016

Hillary: Home of the Whopper

I’m a conservative, and most of my readers know it. Therefore when I write about politics, I like to use as my sources liberal institutions, like The New York Times. It gives more credence to my arguments. It’s kind of like getting Atilla to support a campaign for non-violence in the workplace.

So I when was working on a list of the biggest whoppers Hillary Clinton has told to the American public, I went first to PoliticFact. A lot of writers describe PoliticFact as left-leaning, but it did win the Pulitzer Prize for its work. And the site does have a rather exhaustive method of supporting its conclusions.

So I googled “Hillary’s Biggest Lies,” and the browser takes me to PolitiFact. Right off the bat, there are 24 lies Hillary has told just during the presidential campaign. What amazes me about many of these lies is they are so easily disproved.

No. 2 on my list is: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” She was describing her visit to Bosnia in 1996.

Really, it’s as if she was unaware that the world has invented and uses recording devices. Videotape of the event shows her standing on the tarmac talking to a little girl and shaking hands with dignitaries.

The lie won PolitiFact’s “pants on fire” rating, or in Hillary’s case, pantsuit on fire. The odd thing about this lie is that there was no reason for it. She was First Lady at the time and not running for anything.

No. 3 on the list is: “When I was born, (my mother) called me Hillary, and she always told me it’s because of Sir Edmund Hillary.” As The New York Times pointed out, the fib was repeated in biographies about her and Bill Clinton.

And again, the myth was laughably easy to disprove. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first known people to summit Mt. Everest 1953. Hillary Clinton was born in 1947. I guess one explanation would be that Hillary’s mother waited until six years her birth to name her.

No. 4 was perhaps the cruelest lie Hillary ever told, and that was telling families of the four Americans killed in Benghazi. Four family members have said Clinton blamed the attack on the American compound was because of an obscure, anti-Muslim video. The family members were at ceremonies to receive the remains of their loved ones brought home from Lybia.

PolitiFact didn’t call the story a lie. The site said they couldn’t confirm what Clinton said to the family members, but the site also talked to the four family members who remember Clinton telling them that story.

And maybe all the confirmation we need is President Obama sent Hillary’s aide, Susan Rice, out to report the same false story on five Sunday morning talk shows immediately after the attack. So maybe the lie was of administration manufacture, but Hillary still told it.

No. 5: “All my grandparents, you know, came over here.” Not all her grandparents were immigrants to America; one was. Again, this is so easily disproved it’s a wonder she said it. Her ancestry is a lot easier to trace than, say, Obama’s, and her statement was disproved within 24 hours.

No. 6: “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.” The Clintons were about $2.3 million in debt when they left the White House, according to federal disclosure forms. However, they had purchased a house in New York in 1999 for $1.7 million, and a house in Washington, D.C., in 2000 for $2.85 million. Those assets were not required to be listed on federal disclosure forms. I don’t know what neighborhood you come from, but if I’m $2.3 million in debt, I don’t get to buy a $2.85 million home.

Hillary Clinton in 2004 as a member of the Senate listed her wealth at between $10 million and $50 million. Quite a comeback.

You get the gist of it. Hillary Clinton will lie make herself appear to be something she isn’t. She will lie about her position on same-sex marriage, for example, depending on how the political winds are blowing. She can gain sympathy with those in financial difficulties by saying she can know through her own experience how they feel. She can tout her accomplishments as secretary of state but can’t seem to come up with a list of those accomplishments. She can even lie about the origin of her own first name.

It’s not just conservatives of Republicans who point this out. David Geffen, Hollywood big shot and founder of DreamWorks, said of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease it’s troubling.”

William Safire, the late New York Times columnist, called Hillary a “congenital liar. He wrote, “She is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”

I know politicians lie. Donald Trump lies frequently in his unscripted speeches, but I think that’s more of a case where he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so he wings it.

What mystifies me about Hillary Clinton is that she must know that her lies are going to be exposed, yet she leaves herself no way out. Regarding the “dodging sniper fire” tale, she explained that “I misspoke.” That’s like Captain Ahab saying, “We were just on a fishing trip.”

Many of you astute readers noticed that I started Hillary’s list of lies with No. 2. In my opinion, the biggest, boldest, No. 1 falsehood was delivered in a CBS news interview: “Have I ever lied? I don’t believe I ever have.”

There is something wrong with this woman.

June 5, 2016

When It’s Time to Leave the Party

I’d like to inform the Republican Party that I’ve left. I haven’t left it for the Democrat Party, but I’m hoping to join the party that comes along next. I’m not the first or the only one to do this, and it’s not because Donald Trump is the Republican candidate for president. I’m just disillusioned with the way the party’s being run, and I’m sure there are Democrats saying the same thing.

The United States is not stuck with the two-party system. This system is not mandated by the Constitution. The Democrat/Republican structure can go away anytime enough people get sick of it, and if having Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton leading the two tickets isn’t enough to make voters sick, we’re doomed anyway.

A third of the voting population identify themselves as Independent, and I suspect at some point that will become a major party.

Or maybe we should have something called the Pragmatic Party. I was never much for party politics, but I like to vote. In Missouri way back when, the only primary election contests were on the Democrat side, so I was a Democrat. Where I am now, there are hardly any Democrats, so I am a Republican.

But after the primary election, I will re-register and become unaffiliated again because I don’t want to be counted among the Democrats or Republicans. I believe they’re equally corrupt and equally useless. And I don’t believe any thinking individual would agree with every party plank adopted by either party. I don’t even think the hacks that run the parties care or in some instances even know what their party planks are.

For a while, I leaned mostly to the Republican side. I could see what happened when Democrats ran things, like cities, or states, or Puerto Rico. Most large American cities are run by Democrats, and most large American cities are mismanaged and headed the way of Detroit.

Or when Democrats run things like countries. Who could have imagined that a U.S. President would or could order schools to allow male and female students to use whatever bathroom or locker room they want to use?

The Republicans had a chance to stop this sort of thing. In the wake of the Democrats ramrodding ObamaCare through Congress without the support of a single Republican, U.S. voters in 2010 gave Republicans a significant majority in the House. When that didn’t stem the tide of Presidential overreach, voters gave Republicans in the Senate the majority.

Let me tell you how well that worked. When President Obama on Nov. 20, 2014 (conveniently after the election) announced that he would not enforce certain immigration laws – an action that he had said 22 times before he had not the power to do – Congress could have stopped that by not funding those particular agencies charged with carrying out the executive order.

The House passed such a measure. The Senate, with 54 Republicans, declined. I asked my senator, Cory Gardner, why. Gardner is a Republican who unseated an incumbent Democrat in the 2014 general election.

Gardner explained that a federal judge in Texas had issued a restraining order against the new policy being enforced, so the Congress didn’t need to act; the judiciary already had.

I’m thinking, “How well did that work with ObamaCare?” Or, “Why would Congress abrogate its responsibilities and depend on the whims of federal judges?”

It would have been easy for the Senate to pass the House legislation as part of a larger budget bill. The Republicans could have used the same tactics Democrats used in 2009 to pass ObamaCare, which was not a budget reconciliation bill but was called one by then Majority Leader and confessed liar Harry Reid.

The defunding bill actually was a budget bill and under Senate rules could be called a reconciliation bill that does not require 60 votes to pass.

Obama could have vetoed it, but he would have also through that veto delayed or denied funding for a large part of the Department of Homeland Security’s budget. But rather than throw down the gauntlet and challenge the president, the new majority of Republican Senators took the Wussy Highway, which bypasses the Courageous City.

And what about everything else Republicans are supposed to support? Reducing the deficit? Congressional Republicans again ducked that courageous thing by passing a budget with huge deficits for the next two years.

Tax reform? Nothing. Revising the corporate tax structure to encourage companies to stay in America instead of shipping jobs overseas? Nothing. Curbing the excesses of the IRS, EPA and DOE? Nope. Fixing the VA? Nada.

I have no idea how many readers I have here, but do you readers that come here know about the Secure Fence Act of 2006? It requires and funds the construction of 700 miles of fence along the Mexican border and includes other provisions for increased security.

Donald Trump couldn’t have made this his signature issue if the Department of Homeland Security had followed the dictates of that law and built the damn fence. Why is it so hard to get things done in this country? I’ll tell you why. The current office holders of either party are so fearful of losing their seats in the next election that they are afraid to act decisively on anything. So they don’t.

 

May 29, 2016

The Offended Generation

I guess it’s time to start cataloguing what offends us. We will be led in this endeavor by the OGs, otherwise known as members of the Offended Generation.

I’m doing this as a public service because it’s difficult nowadays to communicate at all without offending someone, and that someone won’t be mollified until the sinner has prostrated himself, herself or itself and made abject apology.

So this will be a living guideline for those who are going to attempt some sort of public utterance. We can do this on a blog. Back when I was a newspaper columnist, I was stuck with whatever I wrote that week – no going back and correcting stuff, or adding pertinent information or correcting errors. A lapse in newspaper print will sit there forever, unchanged.

I don’t know quite where to start, so I’ll start with recent events. These acts are offensive:

• A black person raising a clenched fist. According to the OGs, this represents either support of Black Lives Matter or, 40 years ago, the Black Panther Party. As with all other offensive acts, it shouldn’t be done by certain people, like U.S. Military Academy graduates.

A group of 16 black female cadets this year took traditional graduation photos, and one of those photos had all 16 women raising clenched fists. Because West Point discourages partisan political behavior, a bunch of people immediately took offense, and one was actually injured running into a glass door because he was in such a hurry to make a Twitter statement.

You know, it wasn’t that long ago we didn’t have black female cadets at West Point. The first time women were accepted was 1977. And West Point is hard. It’s not like your local high school; you have to earn grades there. Misbehavior can result in what they call separation. It’s what we used to call expulsion.

Therefore, a certain amount of fist pumping at graduation would seem understandable. Do we yell and scream when a black golfer repeatedly fist pumps after a great putt? We do not. Do we swoon away when a black basketball player hits a seemingly impossible three-pointer and fist pumps? We do not. Was there not a lot of fist pumping at the Super Bowl halftime show this year? There was.

So why the hullabaloo regarding the West Point photo? Don’t know. It would be safer to just not do it.

• Use of historical figures on state property. Some American Indian students in New Mexico want the University of New Mexico’s seal changed. The seal (not the animal) depicts a frontiersman with a rifle and a conquistador with a sword.

This apparently is offensive because it reflects a violent era, or so say the Indians. Apparently there are no history courses as the University of New Mexico because, as it happens, that was in fact a violent era. American Indians were intimately involved in that violence, having slaughtered both frontiersmen and conquistadors.

It’s the way it was back then. Many of us humans would like to believe we’ve progressed out of that era into a time when we work out our differences with class action lawsuits and rigged elections. But we can’t tell how good we’ve become unless we know how bad we were.

This is kind of like the students at Princeton University who wanted Woodrow Wilson’s name removed from campus buildings because he was a racist. There were lots of racists around the turn of the Century. There is considerable evidence that Teddy Roosevelt was one. That’s not a reason to erase history because we don’t like what history teaches us. Consider the man who thought his life was entirely useless until he was told he had served as a splendid bad example for others.

The protestors at the University of New Mexico should be happy the seal does not depict a conquistador running his sword through the frontiersman as the frontiersman beings down his clubbed rifle on the head of the conquistador.

But if you’re designing a university seal, make it something unintelligible like Prince’s icon that he used in place of his name. It’s safer that way.

• A sorority in Alabama apologized on May 13, 2016, for a T-shirt that it made depicting a racially offensive image of an African-American person eating a piece of watermelon. Okay, why is this racially offensive? Is it only black people who eat watermelon? Is it only black people who eat fried chicken? Would the T-shirt have been racially offensive if it had depicted a white person eating watermelon? Or a white person eating … I don’t know, what’s the diet stereotype for white people? Why is there a diet stereotype for anyone?

Really folks, these are questions we should be asking ourselves any time one of these “offensive incidents” is reported because they just reinforce and perpetuate these ridiculous stereotypes. I like watermelon. I like fried chicken. Lots of us like fried chicken or it wouldn’t be available at almost every restaurant and fast food joint in the U.S.

If you want something offensive under the eating topic, we could go to the video of John Kasich eating big chunks of waffle while trying to carry on a conversation. See the difference?

 

May 22, 2016

What Could be Verse?

Come gather ‘round fellas and sip on your beer,

I’ll tell ya story that will bring on a tear,

‘Bout of land of success

That they called the U.S.

That was dragged down and is no longer here.

To the world it meant a terrible loss

That its values and presence simply were tossed

Out the window of pride

On the Liberal side

By he named Obama, The Bathroom Boss.

Now I know that’s a most unusual name,

So you’ll need to know how by that name he came.

For two years he had power,

But that would soon sour

‘Cause things were going badly, and he was to blame.

Now banned in this land of the free were decrees,

Laws had to be made by studied degrees.

In the Senate and House

Bills crept like a mouse

So that in the end most people were pleased.

But if some small portion of people were pissed,

There was a third branch on that tree that we missed,

The Supremes were a court,

(Not the singing group sort)

And they could give laws an unusual twist.

The Obama wanted control of that court,

But of nine on the bench, he had only four.

When the time came

Another to name

Those bastards in Congress would give him no more.

So what was an aspiring despot to do?

He’d give laws to Congress that didn’t go through,

He’d wheedle and whine,

Orate and opine

Only to hear them loudly retort, “Screw You!”

Now it must be said he deserved that retort,

Being a president of the combative sort,

“If Congress won’t act,

And this is a fact,

I will deliver my decrees by the quart!”

So Obama’s orders began to come down,

He said, “No more coal will come out of the ground!”

“Turn off that fossil fuel burner!”

“I will always protect Lois Lerner!”

“And hooray for all those sanctuary towns!”

He put murderers out on American streets,

Sold guns to drug lords, misled on Benghazi,

Changed the laws for GM,

Dropped vote charges and then

Made war without asking our reps to agree.

See, he was down by the count: 2-1,

There was only one way to do what he done,

Courts didn’t always agree,

The Senate and House: GOP,

And then it came down to the LBGTs.

There was only so much that the people could stand,

When it came to observing the laws of the land,

And lifelong traditions

That’s learned in home kitchens

About the difference between woman and man.

It’s passed down from parents in bundles and bits,

Perceived even by those who have the least wit,

Human anatomy’s clear,

We tell it plain here,

That menfolk have yankers and women have tits.

Yet Obama had ordered all schools to admit

Their girls and boys to those rooms opposite

Of the way they were born

If they previous had sworn

Their denial of how their loins were equipped.

So boys who desired to examine some knockers

Could now freely enter the females’ lockers,

And a girl could enjoy

Her favorite school boy

Bereft of his baggies, blue jeans or Dockers.

It was all too much for the folks to accept.

To another dimension their nation had leapt.

The Constitution was gone.

What was right was now wrong.

The Founders rolled in their graves and they wept.

So that was the start of the end, so ya see.

And then they got stuck with this gal Hillary.

States then went away

From the old U.S.A.

‘Cause the land they once knew was no longer free.

Historians still lie ‘bout this tragical loss.

They paint over the truth with glitter and gloss.

But I lived then and there,

And I tell you quite square,

The true cause was Obama, the Bathroom Boss.

 

 

May 15, 2016

Evil people don’t need guns

So I have this simple theory: The larger your nation’s population, the more likely your population will suffer from acts of insanity.

You say, “Well, that’s obvious.”

Of course it’s obvious. If you have 100 people in your village, it’s not likely that even one of the villagers will massacre four or five people. If you have 1,000 people, it could happen. If you have 1 million, it will happen.

What isn’t so obvious is that the absence of guns in your village won’t make any difference. Evil will find a way. As proof, I’ll just share a few news reports from four weeks of reading newspapers:

• A woman has been charged with murder in the beating death of a 13-month girl under her care in Montana. Police allege that the woman then put the child’s body in a dumpster and reported her missing.
• An appeals court has upheld the conviction of a Colorado man who killed his father with a hatchet. The man is serving life without parole. The 36-year-old struck his father in the head nine times, then stole his wallet, credit cards and truck.
• The former emergency manager of a hospital in Connecticut has been accused of forcibly administering enemas to at least four men while photographing them. Police seized nearly 2,000 photos of the manager taking pictures of nude men during the procedures.
• A two-year-old boy died of heat prostration after he was left in a car in Kentucky for more than four hours.
• Police arrested a man for assault on his 14-year-old son. Apparently, the dad was upset because the boy didn’t pitch well in a baseball game.
• Authorities in Texas rescued eight children from a home near San Antonio. A two-year-old was chained to the ground in the backyard, and a three-year-old was tied to a door with a dog leash, police said. “To call this horrific would be an understatement,” a police spokesman said.
• A woman in Wichita, Kansas, was stabbed to death during an argument over a parking spot.

• A man called in a bomb threat to a hospital in Salt Lake City. He was upset because his schedule didn’t allow him to attend the birth of his baby. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
• A Colorado woman accused of cutting an unborn baby from its mother’s womb was convicted on all counts, including attempted murder. A jury found the former nurse’s aide guilty in the attack. The mother, who was seven months pregnant, survived the attack but her unborn baby did not.

These are just reports from the U.S. The list doesn’t include other countries where gays are thrown off buildings, machetes are used to hack people to death, prisoners of war are burned in cages, bombs are used to indiscriminately kill hundreds, and other instances of deviant and insane attacks by human beings on other human beings.

As I said, evil will find a way, and we need to find a way to combat evil. The conundrum for the U.S. is we can’t throw someone in jail because we are convinced he or she is going to commit some heinous crime. We have to find other ways.

We can find those ways through religion; most of the great religions are founded on teaching the difference between right and wrong. We can find ways through loving and complete families who raise their children with love and firm guidance. We can find ways through honest and unbiased education that teaches the good and bad examples of human history. We can find ways by fashioning our society to what we know worked or didn’t work in the past.

But these ways have to be ingrained in society. We can’t pass a law that prohibits a heinous act and expect that no one will commit that heinous act. Laws are written for 5 percent of the population; the rest of us are law-abiding citizens.

So 95 percent of us ought to start realizing what’s happening out there. If our side has 95 soldiers and evil has 5, we ought to be winning.

 

May 8, 2016

Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis

There is a certain dark humor stemming from Puerto Rico’s request to the U.S. government for help in solving its debt problem because it’s kind of like going to Jeffery Dahmer to ask for help with your eating disorder.

Puerto Rico is about to default on its sovereign debt. The island territory has $72 billion in actual debt and $30 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. The U.S. government has over $19 trillion in actual debt, and somewhere north of $63 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

Does this even make sense, that a territory with $102 billion in debt would go to an entity with $82 trillion in debt for help? In this world, it does. The federal government has one advantage over all other subsidiary governments, and that advantage is the authority to print money. Therefore, it can act like the patriarch of a vast, extended family of irresponsible spendthrifts.

I can tell you what will happen. This patriarch will help its wayward territory pay off its obligations, but only if the territory adheres to certain rules like those that a benevolent parent would impose on an irresponsible child. Like for instance, closing the ice skating rink in the Puerto Rican city of Aguadilla, the power for which comes for free from a state utility that provides free electricity for every Puerto Rican municipality and government enterprise. Or maybe cutting the number of state employees. Government employees make up 25 percent of the island’s entire work force.

Puerto Ricans will follow the rules for a while, the situation will disappear from the news, and the territory will then relapse like a recidivist child and fall into its next fiscal crisis.

Why will this happen? Because the territory’s debt is held by a large number of rich investors who bought the island’s bonds because they were tax exempt, and because they believe any government bonds are far safer than other debt instruments. The names of these rich investors can often be found on the lists of those major political donors in the U.S.

Boy, are they in for a surprise.

When Congress and the president bail out Puerto Rico, conservative columnist George Will astutely has pointed out that there will be quite a few similar claimants waiting in line for the same treatment, like every state in the U.S. Puerto Rico is a mere territory. Many recent high school graduates think it’s a foreign country. States have much more leverage with the federal government.

Here are the top five debtor states in the U.S. – California, New York, New Jersey, Texas and Illinois. Here are the top five states with the most electoral votes in the U.S. – California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois. And of course, each of them has two senators and a passel of U.S. representatives.

This is an issue that knows no politics. The states listed above have been run by both Republicans and Democrats. In terms of sovereign debt, all states in the U.S. are red states, as in deeply in the red. It’s as if all the managers of all the states went to the same School of Governance because they are all in the same fix and they all got there pretty much the same way. Simply put, they all borrowed to cover spending that exceeded revenue.

According to the website “State Budget Solutions,” the total combined debt of all the states in the U.S. is $5.1 trillion. Go to that website and look up your own state; there isn’t one that isn’t mired in debt.

You possibly have read somewhere that the federal debt is over $19 trillion. That translates to around $45,000 for every American. What you possibly haven’t read is that each American’s share of the total debt incurred by the states is more than $16,000. That amounts to $61,000 each American owes, and where is the government going to go to get that money? They are going to come to you.

As did Puerto Rico in an attempt to stave off fiscal judgment day. They raised the sales tax to 11.5 percent. That, along with other governmental nonsense has led to a large exodus of Puerto Ricans from their island to the states – 440,000 in the last ten years.

At this point, we have discussed federal and state debt. We haven’t even covered local debt, as in school district bond issues, infrastructure loans to cities and towns, tax anticipation notes, municipal bonds. There are very few local governments in the U.S. that are not carrying some sort of debt. We have cities that are declaring bankruptcy.

The next step might well be a state – quite possibly Illinois – declaring bankruptcy.

May 1, 2016

Too Lazy To Be Smart

Radio commentator Glenn Beck had an insightful observation the other day. He said that in the age of the Internet there is really no excuse for being ignorant.

I still cringe when I see man-on-the-street interviews with adults who know so little about the world around them. I’m embarrassed for them. My No. 1 memory of one such interview was when a young lady, a sophomore in college majoring in education, was asked, “What foreign country shares a border with California?”

Her answer: “Oregon.”

And they were in California.

The Internet is full of similar interviews, You Tube is full of them, Facebook is full of them, TV is full of them. Jesse Watters of the “O’Reilly Factor” can fill an entire hour with people who are passionately in favor of some candidate or issue but have no idea why.

Or if you really want to be astounded, ask a millennial an American history question.

“When was the Civil War fought?”

“1960.”

“What country did America fight to gain its Independence?”

“China.”

Yet these same people can yell and scream in your face that Bernie Sanders is the ideal presidential candidate even though he can’t explain how he will pay for all the things he promises. Or Hillary Clinton is the ideal presidential candidate because of all her accomplishments even though nobody seems to know what those accomplishments are. Or Donald Trump is the ideal presidential candidate because he will save the Republican party even though his Republican credentials are a little sketchy. Or Ted Cruz is the worst presidential candidate because he’s so right wing even though they can’t explain why they think that.

And what do we get as our leaders when voters know so little? We get U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who was serving on the House Science Committee and on the Subcommittee that oversees U.S. space policy, ask a guide whether the Mars Pathfinder would be able to show an image of “the flag the astronauts planted there before.” She was gently informed that the flag in question was planted on the moon, not Mars.

We get U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, who during a House committee meeting said he feared that stationing 8,000 Marines on Guam would cause the island to “become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

We get U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, who on “Meet the Press” said the three branches of government in the U.S. are the House, the Senate and the President.

The thing is, we can’t blame the schools for this anymore. I know, I know, K-12 history and civics and geography education stinks. But if you want to get involved in the political process, if you want to support a cause, if you want to save the whales, if you want to know about fracking, there’s almost unlimited data on those subjects at your fingertips.

You millennials are lucky. When I had to write a paper in college, I had to slog on down to the library and dig up information out of these things we called “books.” Then I had to slog back to my dorm room and use a machine we called a “typewriter” to write the paper. I had to check my own spelling and grammar. If I needed copies, I had to go to the Student Union and pay a machine to do it. Or use “carbon paper.”

My dad, when he really couldn’t afford it, bought a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. These were beautiful books, and Dad built a bookcase in the living room to display all those handsome volumes.

And he didn’t say “Read this,” or “learn that,” or “look it up.” The books just sort of sat there in stately silence, waiting patiently for me to come and learn something. And I did. Reading an encyclopedia is a major step up from reading a dictionary. One can just grab Volume XII, open it up at random and learn really cool stuff. I remember a family dinner at a restaurant where I bored the whole family to snooze level telling them about what I’d learned about the sun.

That’s all on the Internet now. The amount of information in the Encyclopedia Britannica is hardly measurable when held up against all the data available on the Internet.

So why are so many voters so dumb?

A research group recently made public the results of a huge survey of Muslims in Muslim countries. There were 10,000 respondents in the survey, which is one order of magnitude larger than the normal sample of any poll taken in the U.S. just before any given primary election.

One of the conclusions of the survey was that educated Muslims were far less likely to blindly accept the imposition of Sharia Law than uneducated Muslims.

Real representative democracy doesn’t work unless the electorate is educated, and so we see why democracy doesn’t work in most Muslim nations. Madrassas generally don’t teach anything except theology, and access to the Internet is limited.

The problem in the U.S. is different. The opportunity to learn is there. But still we, the United States, have a bunch of uninformed slugs out there who can and do vote.

While I don’t see us moving to Sharia law, a core problem with our type of democracy is that eventually useless citizens will realize that they can use their plurality to make productive citizens pay for their sloth. They don’t know that is a dead-end road. And they don’t know that because they don’t study history. Or logic. Logic would tell them that eventually the producers – even if they wanted to – cannot produce enough to pay to support an ever-growing bunch of bums.

Haul out your digital encyclopedia. Read about Argentina, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Great Britain and Venezuela in the 20^th Century, or this year. As of now, the cost of printing Venezuelan currency is more than the currency is worth. It’s as if it cost $1.25 to print a dollar bill. It’s a sterling example of socialism run amok.

But the problem here is that I am writing for readers, people who go to the Internet to learn. If all those people protesting in the streets would sit home one night and do some homework, there would be fewer people protesting in the streets.

But they don’t. They could, but they don’t.

April 24, 2016

He Should Be Cruzing to a Win

One of the reasons I support Ted Cruz for President is that he has an actual plan for dealing with two of the most hated American institutions: the income tax and the IRS. You don’t see much coverage of this because if the Press gave it the ink it deserves, Cruz would be winning handily.

According to most polls, about 80 percent of Americans hate the federal tax code and hate the IRS, and rightfully so. The tax code is rife with loopholes, favoritism, unfairness, special breaks, complexities, irregularities and absurdities.

If Bernie Sanders really wanted to talk about the unfairness of financial life in the U.S., he would focus on how open to abuse the tax code is. But one of the abuses is that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay any income tax at all, so he isn’t going to go there. Hillary Clinton’s tax proposal is to raise taxes by $1 trillion. Do we want that?

I don’t think Cruz goes far enough toward driving a stake through the monster, and that would be repeal of the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment enabled the federal government to impose the income tax. From a more Libertarian point of view, it was the first amendment that did not define and protect individual rights, but rather expanded the power of the federal government over the individual. It was a fundamental change, and boy did the central government run with it.

The first tax code in 1913 ran 400 pages. The individual income tax rate was capped at 7 percent, and promoters of the 16^th Amendment promised that rate would never go higher. But it only took four years before top rates soared to over 70 percent.

Now, the tax code requires 74,608 pages. ObamaCare alone added 3,000 pages to the code and required the hiring of thousands of more employees at the IRS to enforce it.

And who hasn’t had problems with the IRS? This giant bureaucracy has all the appearances of being designed to invite abuse. The chief of the IRS is a political appointee, so the IRS can and has been used for political purposes.

The IRS can find you guilty until you prove your innocence, the exact reverse of established law. The IRS can seize your property without due process. And if you want to fight, you have to hire your own legal and accounting help to fight against an opponent funded by your own tax dollars. It’s a wonder U.S. citizens have put up with this for 100 years.

Ted Cruz has proposed a rather simple and elegant replacement to the current tax code, a system that would enable Congress and the President to reduce the IRS to a mere shadow of its current self. So, a reminder, the current tax code is 74,608 pages and growing every year. Here’s Sen. Cruz’s proposal:

“Under the Simple Flat Tax, the current seven rates of personal income tax will collapse into a single low rate of 10 percent. For a family of four, the first $36,000 will be tax-free. The Child Tax Credit will remain in place, and the Simple Flat Tax Plan expands and modernizes the Earned Income Tax Credit with greater anti-fraud and pro-marriage reforms.

“As a result, the Simple Flat Tax will ensure that low- and middle-income Americans have greater opportunities – not only through minimal taxes, but also through better, high-paying jobs that the Simple Flat Tax will generate. Under the plan, deductions for charitable contributions and mortgage interest payments are preserved.

“The IRS will cease to exist as we know it, there will be zero targeting of individuals based on their faith or political beliefs, and there will be no way for thousands of agents to manipulate the system.

“For businesses, the corporate income tax will be eliminated. It will be replaced by a simple Business Flat Tax at a single 16 percent rate. The current payroll tax system will be abolished, while maintaining full funding for Social Security and Medicare.

“The convoluted tax code will be replaced with new rules of the game – so simple, in fact, that individuals and families could file their taxes on a postcard or phone app. The Death Tax will be eliminated. The Alternative Minimum Tax will be eliminated. The tax on profits earned abroad will be eliminated. And of course, the ObamaCare taxes will be eliminated. Also gone will be the unending loopholes in the current code, the stacks of depreciation schedules for businesses, and the multi-tiered rates on income and investments. Under the Simple Flat Tax, the Internet remains free from taxes.”

That’s it. It’s so simple a solution that the Russians adopted this system after the Communists were thrown out, and the flat tax actually generated more revenue for that country than the previous system.

It’s not just the money. The tax code and the IRS have been used for more nefarious purposes than just collecting taxes. They can be used to make you behave the way the government wants you to behave. The IRS is a great tool for social engineering.

One example is the mortgage interest rate deduction. That is just a tool to encourage home ownership, which some governmental official way back decided was a good thing. Ditto for charitable contributions.

But is a tax deduction for donating to the NRA Foundation good for society? Or an exemption for the ACLU Foundation? Or to your friendly teachers union that turns around and uses that money to make donations to school board candidates?

Lawmakers of both political stripes stick these provisions into the tax code every year to protect their own vision of societal values, or to exempt their district’s favorite industry, or to ease the tax burden for a local developer (see Harry Reid).

It’s not fair to the rest of us, the real 99 percent, and there’s only one candidate attacking the system head-on. It’s Ted Cruz.

April 17, 2016

Blacklisted

The latest polls show the same thing the earliest polls showed: black voters will cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates. Why?

The Republican party has done far more for blacks in the United States than the Democrat party. Indeed, the Democrat Party for well over 100 years tried mightily to deny blacks basic Constitutional rights. And they succeeded for many decades.

Let’s look at history, starting with Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. He freed the slaves, 100 percent of whom were black. He also ensured that slavery would never return by championoning this amendment to the Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

The 13^th Amendment was passed in 1865 by a solid Republican majority in Congress. Every Republican voted for it, but only 16 Democrats voted in favor. If you’d like to see how Lincoln twisted arms to get the votes of those Democrats, watch the excellent movie “Lincoln.”

Not too many people know this, but Lincoln’s vice-president, Andrew Johnson, was a Democrat. During his term of office after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson blocked ratification of the 14^th Amendment, which made freed slaves full citizens of the United States. The amendment was finally ratified in 1868. Not one Democrat in Congress voted to ratify this amendment, not one.

Congress ratified the 15^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870. This amendment gives “every citizen” the right to vote. Blacks, having been made citizens by the 14^th Amendment, therefore got the right to vote. This last of the Reconstruction amendments was passed with the support of exactly no Democrats.

What followed was the steady and persistent efforts by southern Democrats to prevent blacks from voting. These efforts included the Ku Klux Klan, originally an arm of the southern Democrat party, poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation and the invention of the “separate but equal” delivery of government services, including education.

In 1954, the “separate but equal” standard for public education was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, thus beginning the efforts to end segregation in public schools. This was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, pushed through by Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican. Eisenhower also sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to maintain order as desegregation moved forward.

Then seven years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat who had once opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, more than 80 percent of Republicans in Congress voted for that law. Without the support of 80 percent of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate, a Democrat filibuster against the bill would have succeeded.

Republican presidents appointed the first black secretary of state and the first black female secretary of state, the second black justice to sit on the Supreme Court and first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

All this Republican support for the civil rights of blacks tended to help the transition from what had been known as the “Solid South” for Democrats to largely Republican states.

But not now. Outside of the first black this and the first black that, what has the first black President done for his constituency? By one measure – jobs – nothing. The black unemployment rate in 2008 was 9.1 percent. In 2015, it was 9.5 percent.

Yet over 90 percent of blacks will go to the polls this November and vote for a Democrat. Can someone out there please tell me why?

April 10, 2016

Swimming Across the Channels

Canada has now done what a huge majority of U.S. television viewers want done. Our northern neighbors have ordered television providers to give subscribers “a la carte” programming.

That means customers can pick and pay for individual channels they want over and above what’s provided in a basic package. More importantly, they won’t have to pay for channels they don’t want to watch.

‘Bout time. The only problem I have with the Canadian solution is that it was ordered by the government. I’d rather the cable and satellite TV industry come to this point on their own. We don’t want the FCC making this decision. That body probably will also tell us what to watch.

I just subscribed again with satellite TV because they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – $26 a month for two years. But here’s what I get:

• 167 channels in my basic package. Of those, I watch 20 channels regularly. Occasionally, I click on to a channel showing “Wrinkle Filler” just to find out what the heck that is. I didn’t stay long.
• Five of the channels are in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish.
• Eight of the channels show Major League Soccer. I’m not a soccer fan. There shouldn’t be a sport where you’re not allowed to use your hands. It doesn’t make sense.
• 36 channels are selling stuff, including but not limited to music, art, awnings, clothes, blenders, jewelry, cookware, vacuum cleaners, coins, puppy training, Joey and Rony’s all-time favorite hymns, and gold “at cost.” If you think you can buy gold at cost from a TV pitchman, you might also believe Clinton and Trump are the best candidates America could find to run for president. And really, if the Shark Vacuum manufacturers are spending this much on advertising, their product is over-priced.
• There appear to be at least eight shows about life styles in Alaska. Is the state that interesting?
• Three or four channels that seem to air only the “Big Bang Theory” or “Law and Order” original shows and knockoffs. I like “Law and Order,” but I don’t like sit-coms that laugh for me, which is all of them nowadays. Look at “The Simpsons.” Funniest show ever. No laugh track.
  • 30 pay-per-view channels. I don’t have a phone in my home, so I can’t use ‘em.
  • Several of the shopping channels and infomercial channels repeat. I can get BUZZ at channels 243 and 288. If it cost the providers money to ship these shows in, like, a truck, they wouldn’t do this.
  • Eight channels offering self help, including but not limited to gardening, dance workouts, Pilates (whatever that is; something to eat, I think) and Yoga, home decorating, weight loss, golf secrets, almond milking, and, of course, cooking. I like cooking channels. The rest, not. Dancing in my living room scares the dog.
  • Nine channels offering Christian programming. Not knocking organized religion, but I can find God in the mountains, forests and waters of this Earth.
  • Five channels about which I have no clue. One carried a show called “Atlanta Plastic.” Apparently, it’s dedicated to women, but I don’t know why. Another channel carries a show called “Snapped: Killer Couples.” That’s in case you’re way too happy and need to be depressed a little.
  • Nine channels directed at kids. I’m in my 60s. Don’t need that.
  • One channel that isn’t there anymore – Al Jazeera. HAHAHAHAHAWhy should I have to pay for all that crapola? I know everybody has different tastes. You may like religious programming, but could do without the sports channels. Families might want the programming for kids. Some people don’t like shopping channels. Clearly, much of America doesn’t watch news channels.So, why can’t we pay for what we want and not have to pay for what we don’t want?Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate having hundreds of TV channels available. I grew up with three. It was huge when that expanded to five. But it was free. When they talked about pay TV back then, we understood free TV would mean no commercials.Kudos to TCM and Nickelodeon for having commercial-free programming available, but for the rest, you providers definitely are not ingratiating yourselves to the consumer with these endless, repetitive commercial breaks. I just don’t watch channels like AMC because of that.So here it is programmers: either start offering programming based on what the consumer wants, or wait for the government to tell you to do it. The current government would be more than happy to do that, by the way.
    

    April 3, 2016

    Here’s a Scary Thought

    Could the races for the presidential nominations become even more interesting?

    Well, this could happen.

    First, we know about the Republican imbroglio, but let’s update. It now appears that Donald Trump won’t quite get the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination on the first ballot. And it appears also that Ted Cruz and/or the Republican establishment have enough strength to hand the nomination to someone else.

    Trump has retreated from an earlier pledge not to run as a third-party candidate. He now says he might run as a third-party candidate if he’s “treated unfairly.” In Donald Trumpland, that means if he doesn’t get what he wants. So we could have a Republican nominee and Donald Trump running as the nominee from the Buffoon Party.

    John Kasich keeps hanging around like the weird kid who ran errands for the really cool guys in high school. The kid was voted least likely to succeed. So the Republican elite, who don’t like Trump or Cruz, and probably wouldn’t be able to get away with nominating a candidate who only won a single state primary, might nominate someone out of the blue, like Paul Ryan.

    Because Trump’s support is amazingly solid, that would hand the election to Hillary Clinton.

    But wait a minute. Suppose Clinton is indicted. Or if she isn’t indicted, scores of FBI agents and possibly even Director James Comey resign in protest that she wasn’t indicted. That’s a widely reported possibility.

    Obama’s Justice Department won’t indict Hillary Clinton. Obama’s Justice Department hasn’t charged anyone with anything despite scandals in the IRS, the EPA, ATF, VA, HHS, Secret Service, State Department, the Department of Defense and its $43 million gas station in Afghanistan, Homeland Security, etc., etc. and etc. This administration has had more people taking the fifth than an alcoholic thief in a liquor store.

    But either indicted or the target of a massive protest within American’s premier law enforcement agency, Hillary’s campaign would be sunk.

    And then let’s imagine Bernie Sanders dies. Not that I would wish that on the man, but Sanders is 74 years old, well past the allotted threescore and ten.

    If that happens, who are the Democrats going to pick to run? They have spent the last eight years paving the way for Hillary so thoroughly that hardly any other candidate dared to even raise a hand. It’s almost like spending eight years restoring a classic car and then seeing it get run over by an 18 wheeler.

    So the Democrats also could be in a position where they would have to nominate whatever their equivalent of Paul Ryan is (Jerry Brown?). And that, my friends, would mean the American people would have gone through the long, arduous and contentious primary election process and end up with two candidates who had not run in any of the primaries.

    This could become even more chaotic if these events happened after the conventions. Already we have one of the odder presidential contests in American history. It could well become the oddest.

    The presidential selection process that brought us to this point is not the one defined by the Constitution; it is the ones defined by the two major political parties. And what is the main plank of the platforms of both political parties? Retain power. That’s it. We’ve got to this point because Republicans and Democrats alike spend so much time and treasure on getting reelected that they forgot to represent their constituents.

    That’s why we have a Tea Party revolt among Republicans, that’s why Donald Trump is a leading contender, that’s why Bernie Sanders has struck such a nerve among Democrats, that’s why there’s a ton of crossover voting on both sides.

    The Democrats chose their 2016 presidential candidate eight years ago, blithely believing that no one better could possibly come along. The Republicans took control of the House and Senate without producing one hero, so they got 17 candidates and found out the electorate didn’t like the same old tired faces.

    Anyway, absent my scenario described above, we might be stuck with Hillary and The Donald. Ask yourself, does this series of descriptions apply to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?

    Unprincipled. Slippery. Bombastic. Entitled. Hair challenged. Disdainful. Condescending. Quick to anger. Loud. Dislikes the Press. Rich. Aloof. Changes positions often. Sly.  Obfuscates. Lies. Hungry for power. Doesn’t play well with others.

    Is this really the best we could do?

    March 27, 2016

    To Keep On Truckin’

    I’m going to need a new pickup. I’m afraid that Surefoot, the legendary pickup of the West, has congenital engine disease. I’m not sure I want to put a new $4,000 engine in a 1993 GMC with 390,000 miles on it.

    That might make sense if I thought nothing else would go wrong with the truck, but in the last few months Surefoot’s had a fluid leak, a bad four-wheel-drive actuator, a dead central processing unit and a cracked thingamajig. At about $200 per month in repairs, I could be making payments on a new truck.

    I checked the sticker prices on new pickups and realized I probably never would be able to afford a new pickup ever again in my lifetime. It wasn’t a case of sticker shock; it was more a case of sticker electrocution.

    Why is this? It’s because they made the common work truck into a car. My brother, who can afford any new pickup, bemoaned the fact that he couldn’t get a standard, or manual transmission on his new Ford. Standard transmissions used to be cheaper than automatics, but now you can hardly find one. Too many people don’t know how to drive one. It’s too hard. You have to use both feet.

    Automatic transmissions are much more complex and therefore cost more. They also cost more to repair. A major clutch overhaul on a manual runs about $800-$1,500. A similar repair on an automatic costs $3,000 to $5,000.

    So let’s start building a work truck. We’ll start with a manual transmission. A manual has the unique advantage of allowing you to start the truck when your battery is dead, something you can’t do with an automatic.

    And we’ll put a decent modern engine in it. I’ll say two things about fuel-injected, computer fabricated engines – they last a lot longer, and you don’t have to fiddle with the carburetor every 10,000 miles. Because this is a work truck, we’re not going to be driving to Miami in it. We don’t need high speed; we don’t need high mileage. We need to go to the forest for a load of wood, we need to be able to haul a trailer with two tons of cargo. We need four-wheel drive.

    We might need a crew cab, or we might not, depending on whether we have a family or not. We don’t even need air conditioning up here in the mountains, but you might need it down in the flatlands. We definitely need a heater up here. And I like satellite radio.

    Okay, that’s everything I need.

    I’ll tell you what I don’t need. I don’t need power locks and keys that cost $70 each to replace. I don’t need to be able to unlock my truck from 30 feet away; I can walk up to it, insert key, unlock truck.

    My SUV has electronic keys. You push the unlock button once, and the driver’s side door unlocks. If you push it twice, all the doors unlock. If you push it three times, all the windows roll down. I don’t need that. I don’t even know why somebody invented that.

    I don’t even need power windows. That’s one more thing that can go wrong on a car, and that particular part costs $50 to $100 plus labor to replace. I can roll a window up or down.

    I don’t need a backup camera. The rearview mirror works just fine. I don’t need a GPS system; I can use a map, and besides, I think I have a GPS system on my smart phone. I just don’t know how to use it.

    I don’t need electronic security systems. More people have been locked out of their own vehicles by electronic security systems than all other causes combined. And speaking of that, I don’t need electric locks at all. That’s another good way to get locked out of your own vehicle. Or – and this is an actual case – get locked inside your friend’s vehicle.

    I don’t need a computer to tell me what my mileage is at any given moment, or how far I have to go with the gas remaining in the tank. When I grew up, we learned how to calculate mileage through a simple mathematical formula. I may not need half the computer they put in pickups these days. Do you know that your vehicle may have from 30 to 100 computers in it?

    We also learned how far we could go on a tank of gas, and if we didn’t learn that, we walked down the highway with an empty gas can and our thumb out.

    I don’t need an automatic braking system, and I don’t need independent all-wheel drive. These things are nice for traveling on the highways, but are not needed for driving up a Forest Service road to your favorite fishing lake.

    And speaking of that, if you’re going to sell me a pickup, I don’t care if it’s got dings and scratches on it. When I drive up to that fishing lake, it’s inevitably going to get dings and scratches, so I’ll take the ding/scratch discount up front.

    (I noticed one day that Surefoot had a big dent on the right rear quarter panel. It looked like someone backed into it, maybe in a parking lot. I never even noticed. As long as something doesn’t interfere with the driveability of the vehicle, the heck with it).

    I don’t need a lever on the tailgate that opens it when my hands are full. I am capable of setting the packages down, opening the tailgate, and picking the packages back up.

    I don’t need power doors, even if I’m buying a van. I don’t need locks that automatically lock when I drive over 10 mph. I don’t need that little blue light on the dash of my SUV because after four years of ownership, I still don’t what that is. I don’t need lighted mirrors on the sun visors. I don’t need powered outside mirrors.

    I don’t need leather upholstery. Either my dog is going to stain it, or I’m going to drop ketchup on it. Give me a good grade of vinyl. I don’t need heated seats. I don’t need 10 little motors to adjust my seat with the touch of a button. All these cute but unnecessary amenities add to the price of he vehicle. How about those of us who don’t want or need them?

    I don’t need my car to call the police. More confusion and mayhem has been caused by people accidently hitting the panic button on their electronic keys than all actual criminal causes combined. I don’t need my horn to honk when I get a phone call. That is so annoying. I don’t need my pickup to tell me what the temperature is outside the car. I went through that temperature to get to the pickup.

    Well, you get the idea. I just want a simple pickup truck. Does anyone make one of these?

    March 20, 2016

    When I Die

    I’m getting up in years, and I want to cover all my bases should the end come soon. Right now, I don’t know what sort of priest to call when I’m on my deathbed. So what comes after one dies? Religions give us several choices.

    I’ve pretty much dismissed the idea of an Islamic paradise. Even if I qualified for the 72 virgins thing, I have questions. First of all, I don’t find anything in the Koran that says they are good-looking virgins. There’s bound to be a few uglies thrown in your portion. If a certain god is stocking paradise to handle all the male martyrs that Islam has been producing lately, you’re not going to be able to pick and choose.

    Second, I’m there for eternity. What happens to my stable of virgins after the first 100 years or so? They’re not virgins any more, and if they’re anything like the harems of old, they might well have become a bunch of argumentative old wives. Can you imagine picking out wallpaper?

    My Viking ancestors had an interesting view of the afterlife. They believed that if you died in battle, you were whisked off to Valhalla where you could fight all day and drink and party all night. If you got killed in the day’s fighting, you woke up the next day ready to take up the sword once more.

    That sounds like a lot of fun, especially the drinking all night, unless you’ve ever been stabbed. It hurts. I wouldn’t want to go to a place where I could be stabbed or bludgeoned to death several days each week. And again, this goes for eternity, same thing, day after day. If you’re getting stabbed or hacked to death several times a week, you might really want to opt for those ugly virgins.

    The Christian faiths all have a heaven, but they sound pretty boring. If you get everything you want, every hour of every day, is that heaven? That sounds more like socialism. And I don’t play the harp, and, I’m afraid of heights. Anyway, I’ve never felt comfortable living in a gated community.

    So I’m looking at the Hindus. According to them, you have to go through a series of reincarnations before you attain ultimate grace. Looking at the first 40 years of my life, I’m not in line for ultimate grace this time around.

    I’m pretty sure I’m going to be an animal, and I’m thinking a cow wouldn’t be so bad. It’s pretty hard to screw up as a cow. They don’t get arrested for DUI or breaking and entering or theft. What’s one cow going to steal from another cow? Flies? They just don’t have the opportunity to be evil.

    They’re even more polite than we are. They aren’t rude to one another. You never hear a cow saying, “Hey, that’s the same coat you wore yesterday!” They don’t pass on rumors. They don’t talk behind one another’s backs (I guess that would have to be above one another’s backs).

    If you’re a productive cow, you could conceivably live for 20 or so years before they grind you up into hamburger. Looking at the cattle around here, such a life would be pretty stress free. Just chew that old cud, wander around a little bit, gaze stupidly at the scenery.

    And here’s the thing. You wouldn’t have to be a cow forever. If you were a good cow, you go on to the next step, maybe a dog with a good owner. You’d be working your way up. Something different all through the eons until you attain that celestial perfection thing.

    In the meantime, you just might spot an annoying acquaintance you knew back when you were a human. You know, that guy at the office that never does his share, cheats on his wife, is a loud and obnoxious know-it-all. You notice that he’s been reincarnated as a dung beetle. Now that absolutely would be heavenly.

    March 13, 2016

    Here Come the Socialists

    Well, let the handouts begin.

    With the Republican party fractured and facing possibly a brokered convention that could create all kinds of animosity, it looks like a Democrat will be the next President of the United States.

    And unindicted co-conspirator Hillary Clinton and avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders are the only candidates. And they seem to be competing on how much they can give away, if elected.

    This week, let’s look at free higher education. Both candidates don’t want students to pay any tuition at any college that receives public funds, which is almost all of them.

    My initial reaction to that was, if colleges and universities don’t have to offer scholarships any more, how are they going to recruit football and basketball players?

    Athletes – particularly football and basketball players – go to college for two reasons: a free education and the hope of turning pro and earning millions. Well, only 1.3 percent of all college basketball players will make it to the pros. About 2 percent of football players make it to the NFL. And of those who get drafted, not all make it on to the field.

    So the scholarship can loom very large in the future plans of a college athlete. Well, what if he or she doesn’t need that scholarship? Why put in the five or six hours a day of training and practice on the off chance it will pay off in a pro sports career?

    Many will make the decision not to risk their bodies (and in some cases their lives) to play sports. So what does that do? For one, it removes the farm teams for the NFL and NBA. Those two organizations use colleges as their farm teams. The well of talent for those two organizations could run dry.

    The pro leagues would have to organize their own minor league systems, which would mean the taxpayers would be building more stadiums in second-tier cities.

    And what about scholastic scholarships? Why try too hard in high school to get good grades when you won’t need good grades to get you into college? One of the consequences of getting good grades in high school and therefore becoming attractive to college recruiters is the student is better prepared and does better in college, which is good for the country. If colleges have to spend a lot of time and effort on remedial courses, students will spend more time and more of your tax dollars in class.

    In fact, they may well spend years in class if someone else is paying bill. Look at that goofball hunger striker at the University of Missouri. He was in his eighth year of college. How many of those “students” are we going to have if college is free?

    And let’s not forget what public funding has done for K-12 education. Besides giving students the shallowest of educations, it also has created perhaps the most powerful and richest public employee union in the nation.

    This occurs because school districts are run by elected boards. The NEA uses its money and power to elect friendly board members, who in turn give hefty salaries and benefits to the union members, who in turn pay dues to the union that are used to support friendly candidates.

    And if you don’t think K-12 education is failing, ask a high school graduate some basic geography questions, or an American history question, or an economic question like what is the source of tax money. Socialism has infiltrated K-12 education; we give away good grades.

    In Colorado, a 40 percent proficiency rate in math is considered really good. I can only shudder when I think of the higher education turning into an arm of the government. And it will. When the government provides the money, it will eventually provide direction and control.

    Free tuition will also destroy most of those college savings plans that parents have maintained for a century or more. Those savings plans are big business. Lots of people make lots of money on managing those funds, and now, there will be no need.

    And parents won’t have to urge little Johnny to start a savings account, or get a job to earn money for college, or do anything that families used to do together in the hopes that little Johnny would have more opportunities for a better life than his parents.

    When they are running for office, politicians don’t think these things through. When they propose things like free education, they don’t think about the unintended consequences.

    One obvious consequence is the nation can’t afford what these two presidential candidates are proposing. If nothing changes, by the year 2031, entitlement programs and interest on the national debt will consume all the revenue the government receives.

    There will be no money for defense, no money for highways, no money for the space program, no money for research, no money for grants, no money for any discretionary spending whatsoever. Certainly no money for free tuition.

    High school graduates, of whom only 30 or so percent know basic math, cannot comprehend how big a problem a $20 trillion national debt is, and Bernie Sanders wants to add $18 trillion to that! How’s he going to do that? Tax the rich.

    Here’s a math observation for a high school graduate. If you took all the money from all the rich people in the country, all of it, 100 percent of their wealth, it would run the United States for one year. So what would you do the year after that?

    But that’s not the worst consequence of these giveaway programs. And as with all things socialistic, the biggest consequence of all is robbing the population of the need to achieve.

    Why bother getting rich? Bernie and Hillary will take it. That’s their plan. Why start a business? Bernie and Hillary (unless you donate to the Clinton Foundation) will tax it into oblivion. Why work hard at your job? Bernie will guarantee you $15 per hour no matter what kind of employee you are.

    I recently saw a Facebook post that really set me off. The writer gushed how all the “industrialized nations of the world” had free health care, and the United States ought to do it too. She went on to brag about the social well being of Finland, France, Norway, Canada, New Zealand, etc. What wonderful places, she said.

    I said: Finland, France, Norway, Canada and New Zealand didn’t put a man on the moon, didn’t save Western Europe not once but twice from German conquest, lead the world to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, give more in donations to countries hit by natural disasters than the entire rest of the world combined; protect Europe from domination by the USSR and eventually bring it down, freeing Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Uzbekistan, Kazakistan, East Germany and Poland from the communist yoke (while all those socialist countries didn’t have to spend hardly anything on their own defense), put in place the Global Positioning System of satellites that everyone in the world can use FOR FREE, invented and developed the internet that everyone in the world can use FOR FREE, developed the vaccines against polio, measles and smallpox, developed an agricultural system that feeds half the world, give more money to the United Nations than ANY other nation, and etc.

    That’s just a short list. Why on Earth would we want to emulate Europe when 200 years of American history have shown us that capitalism works and socialism doesn’t? Capitalism has raised more people from poverty than any socialist, communist or any other system of economics or government ever tried. Throw in a democratic system, and anybody can succeed. Jeez, we elected a President who was community organizer who never ran anything before in his life. For any baby born in America, the future is bright.

    But there have to be some incentives to achieve. The world clearly was not conceived to be a nursery for helpless children. If we make it into one, we will fade into the darkness of history and never be remembered.

    As the song says, “The road is long, with many a winding turn.” If we provide a straight and level highway, lots of people will use it, but they will be woefully unprepared when they come upon a sharp curve.

    I suggested to the Facebook lady that if she likes wallowing in a socialist state where the government coddles her and her family, fine, but don’t tell us to adopt her system. From a financial standpoint, and more importantly, an evolutionary standpoint, we can’t afford it.

    March 6, 2016

    Employing the Worst Numbers

    The latest government report puts the unemployment rate at 4.9 percent, which is not true. We get fed this number every month, and a compliant press picks it up and spreads it everywhere. The President then brags about it.

    “After reaching 10 percent in 2009, the unemployment rate has now fallen to 4.9 percent even as more Americans joined the job market last month. Americans are working,” Obama told reporters at a White House briefing in Washington. It’s a nice bit of pablum.

    Actually, over 94 million Americans aren’t working, and aren’t looking for work. There is an interesting website called “Jobenomics.” One of its contributors – Chuck Vollmer – wrote a lengthy article on Jan. 11 entitled 2016 State of the U.S. Labor Force. It’s worth reading if you really want to know the details of the employment situation, if for no other reason than he echoes what I’ve been saying for some time, but with a lot more data to support what he says:

    “From a policy-making perspective, the 94.1 million Americas who are no longer looking for work needs significantly more attention than the 15.6 million Americans who are still looking or are underemployed.  The current BLS Employment Situation Summary Report states that 95 percent of the Americans in today’s Not-in-Labor-Force ‘do not want a job now.’ Why should they? America provides generous welfare and means-adjusted programs that are not tied to workfare like the most generous European nations require.”

    Vollmer also has an interesting observation on how the “official” unemployment rate is calculated. “Sooner or later, the American public will figure out that it is theoretically possible for the United States to have a zero rate of unemployment while simultaneously having zero people employed in the labor force,” he writes. But that’s for the math geeks.

    The unemployment rate touted by Obama and former presidents is what is called the U3 rate, and I don’t understand why we even use it. It doesn’t measure total unemployment. It only measures those who are out of work but still seeking a job. That doesn’t tell you that 33.7 percent of the labor force isn’t working.

    You’d find that in the U6 number, a statistic that measures all unemployed and those who are part-time workers purely for economic reasons. That number for January was 9.9 percent.

    Another statistic that Obama didn’t mention during his briefing was the unemployment rates by race. In the 2012 election, nearly 95 percent of blacks voted for Obama. Their unemployment rate in January was 8.8 percent (U3). Nearly 70 percent of Hispanics voted for Obama. Their unemployment rate in January was 5.9 percent (U3).

    The U6 rates for these two racial groups are worse – 16.7 percent for blacks, 17.1 percent for Hispanics. Around 50 percent of young blacks are unemployed.

    Regardless, the Democratic candidate for President this fall will still get huge support from these two groups. Why? I have no idea.

    I know, I know, every U.S. president has used these same U3 statistics. It’s just that Obama assumes this posture of condensation and arrogance to say, “Had we adopted some of the policies that were advocated by Republicans over the last four, five, six years, we know that we probably would have done worse.”

    It’s one of his favorite rhetorical tricks. He can’t know that because the U.S. didn’t adopt those Republican policies; we only adopted what Obama and Harry Reid allowed us to adopt.

    Obama has used this technique over and over. When he was bragging about all the good that the $800 billion stimulus bill did, he used a brand new statistic – jobs created or saved. “Saved” is another unprovable.

    I think a lot more Americans would demonstrate more trust for the federal government if the federal government would just given us the facts and let us make our own judgment.

    But no, we get handed statistics like the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which is based on urban wage earners and clerical workers instead of the C-CPI-U which is based on 87 percent of the population. Why would anyone use the former statistic?

    The latest poll says 51 percent of Americans do not think the economy is working well. And the leading Democratic candidate for the presidency agrees. “The economy has not been working for most Americans,” Hillary Clinton said recently.

    This would be the same Hillary Clinton who was a part of the Obama administration for four years. This would be the party that controlled Congress absolutely for two years of Obama’s presidency, and the Senate for six years. So why are 94 million Americans not working?

    Maybe we should have a debate on the economy between Hillary and Obama.

    Oh, and one more statistic for those of you who are thinking about dropping out of high school. The unemployment rate for high school dropouts is over 30 percent.

    February 28, 2016

    Ted Cruz for President

    After a lot of reading and thought on the matter, I have decided to support U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz for president and hope I have a chance to vote for him. I am supporting him because he is smart, probably the smartest candidate in the whole field. I am a little weary of dumb presidents who have no vision of the future they helped create.

    Cruz is a man who memorized the entire Constitution when he was 13, was valedictorian of his high school class, graduated from Princeton and Harvard. “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant,” Harvard Prof. Alan Dershowitz told the National Review.

    Cruz clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and later argued nine cases before the Supreme Court as solicitor general for Texas. He won all of those cases. Cruz served as assistant attorney general in the Justice Department and director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission in George W. Bush’s administration.

    He won his seat in the Senate by beating a top establishment Republican in Texas.

    That’s a better resume than any other Republican left in the field. Dr. Ben Carson might be as smart, and I could have supported him. But at this point, I think the GOP choices are Cruz, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio.

    I could support Rubio, except I think he sold his soul to the Republican establishment when it became clear the people had rejected the anointed one – Jeb Bush. Rubio would be better than Hillary Clinton, but then anyone would be better than Hillary Clinton.

    Here’s how Salon Magazine, a liberal publication, put it: “Please name the last person to win the presidency alongside an ongoing FBI investigation, negative favorability ratings, questions about character linked to continual flip-flops, a dubious money trail of donors, and the genuine contempt of the rival political party. In reality, Clinton is a liability to Democrats.”

    My own theory is that Clinton won’t make it to the nominating convention. If there is any honesty and integrity left in Washington, D.C., Clinton will either be indicted, or scores of FBI agents will walk off the job in protest because she wasn’t indicted. If she does become president, she will be in the unique position of being able to pardon herself, so let’s hope it doesn’t go that far.

    But I have a more startling theory about Donald Trump. I think a lot of Democrats, where state law allows, are voting for Trump because he is the one Republican candidate Clinton or Bernie Sanders can beat.

    I believe the Press is holding back on revealing much about Trump’s past for the same reason. They are waiting until Trump becomes the Republican nominee, and then they will unload on him. Cruz and Rubio don’t have that vulnerability.

    But Trump? Read sometime about Trump’s treatment of 90-year-old Michael Forbes, a Scottish farmer who had the temerity to not sell his land to Trump as a part of golf course development.

    Or google how a white supremacist PAC supported Trump in robo-calls in Iowa. Or just do a little research on how Trump repeatedly lies on a scale that reminds one of Barack Obama (that golf course, for instance, was going to create 6,000 jobs. It created 200). Or look up evidence of Trump’s ties to the Russian Mafia.

    These stories have been reported sporadically, but you haven’t seen the big boys move in yet. I already have a mental picture of Trump writhing under the 60 Minutes interview cameras when they ask, “What led you to characterize 90-year-old Michael Forbes as ‘living like a pig’?”

    Having witnessed how the mainstream press managed to scrape up whatever dirt they could on Mitt Romney – which wasn’t a lot – imagine what a fertile field they will plow with Donald Trump.

    Put my two pet theories together and we will have a Donald Trump vs. Bernie Sanders presidential election.

    The way to avoid this is for the remaining Republican contenders to do the work the Press should be doing and go after Trump. A continuing problem in the U.S. is half the voting populace is uninformed and downright ignorant. The only way to get to them is with political ads and old-fashioned in-you-face campaigning. They like 140-character messages and 15-second sound bites.

    Ted Cruz might be too honorable to go that route himself, but the PACs aren’t. In my opinion, after what Obama’s PACs did to Romney, anything goes, and no apologies are necessary.

    Future historians might well look back on this election as a pivotal moment in the American story.

    The next president will probably be able to appoint two or three justices to the Supreme Court. The next president will be faced with the chaos of a religious war in the Middle East, with the added wild card of the mullahs in Iran having an atomic weapon at their disposal. The next president will have to deal with a debt so enormous that it might destroy the value of the dollar. The next president is going to have to deal with entitlement reform. The next president might well have to deal with the first state bankruptcy in American history (I’m betting on Illinois). The next president is going to have to deal with the racial divide reintroduced to the U.S. by the current president.

    The U.S. has faced major challenges before. But we have not faced so many that are so large. We’re going to need a really good man to lead us, and I emphasize “good” as in moral and upright, and that man clearly is not Donald Trump. It’s Ted Cruz.

    February 21, 2016

    Dancing with the Supremes

    Hopefully, the U.S. Senate will stick to the stated purpose of its majority leader and not decide on a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia until after the presidential election in November.

    Whenever the chance presents itself, the American people should have a say on who sits on the court. Delaying this particular appointment will make the appointment itself an election issue, and that brings the people into play.

    The Supreme Court has become too political to do otherwise.

    It wasn’t designed to be this way, but it has become this way. I don’t believe the founders envisioned the courts assuming such wide authority in the governance of the land to the point where a federal judge can order order precisely how many snow machines may enter Yellowstone Park through the West Yellowstone portal.

    The Supreme Court was formed to judge law, not pass laws. “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish,” says the Constitution. Not “legislative Power,” not “executive power,” judicial Power, the responsibility to judge the constitutionality of laws.

    Thus, it would seem, when a federal judge in Kansas City ordered the city to double its property tax to pay for K-12 school improvements, the judge exceeded his authority. The power to tax rests with the Legislature, not the courts.

    Yet the order was obeyed and millions of dollars were spent over 11 years to prove once again that throwing tax dollars at a problem doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

    So here we are. People use the courts to advance their agendas when the legislative and executive branches – and even the voters – won’t. Minority causes have found a fertile field in the federal courts. It was a court that overturned the decision of the voters of California against same-sex marriage.

    I think the Supreme Court was created to prevent the central government assuming extra-constitutional powers. “[A] limited Constitution … can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void,” said Alexander Hamilton.

    Which makes me believe that the Supreme Court is there to curtail the central government’s power, not expand it. Yet what did the Supreme Court do when it approved the Affordable Care Act? It approved a law under which the federal government can order you to buy something you may not want to buy.

    The only defense constitutionalists have now against this trend is to appoint constitutionalists to the Supreme Court … and all inferior courts. Unless you’re a news wonk like me, you may have missed the fact that 12 of Obama’s 13 federal court nominees are on hold in the Senate. The reason for that is he appoints liberal ideologues to the bench, and that’s fine if you favor certain liberal causes like gun control, but not if you don’t.

    It would be nice if presidents appointed only learned, respected, experienced legal minds to the courts. However, the test in this modern era seems to be the nominee’s politics. Ronald Reagan did it when he appointed proven conservatives to the court, and Obama’s done it when he appointed liberal ideologues to the court.

    And as a footnote, I really liked Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor to the court. She was born in New York City to Puerto Rican parents. She was raised by her mother after her father died when she was nine years old. The family lived in a tenement, and English was a second language. Sotomayor, on top of all that, was afflicted with diabetes.

    However she did well in high school, attended Princeton on a full academic scholarship, went on to Yale on a full scholarship, was an assistant district attorney, a private attorney, served on New York Mayor Ed Koch’s staff and at one time was a registered independent. She did well, a true American success story.

    Yet as a Supreme Court justice, she has moved in lockstep with the other three reliable liberals – just what the doctrinaire ordered.

    It’s difficult to believe that a court that should be deciding the merits of cases based on the Constitution and precedent divides itself so evenly on major questions. Or that a legal decision falls so conveniently within the political ideology of the justices making the decisions.

    But as I said, here we are. The only way a voter can defend against the tyranny of the courts is to vote for the person who will be filling the seats on those courts.

    Concerning the Supreme Court, the voters only have the chance to make that decision every four years. Making this next appointment to the high court a major issue in the upcoming presidential campaign will go far to educate the voters on the importance of their votes.

    Addendum: Some political whiz on the radio said that most Americans want the U.S. Senate to hold hearings on President Obama’s selection to the Supreme Court. Is that true? I don’t think most millennials know what the Supreme Court is much less how many justices sit on the court. Quick, while you’re reading this, who did Obama pick as his nominee? And just for the record, the Democrats did the same thing the Republicans are doing when they had control in 1992 and 1998. Why is it wrong now?

    February 14, 2016

    The Whole Package

    It’s a good thing I don’t fly because I usually am carrying a blade of some sort. Both my car key rings actually are clasp knives. My backpacks have knives in little pockets. I have Exacto knives and box cutters scattered around the office and home.

    I’m not intent on committing mayhem somewhere, it’s just that I often open packages – you know, food and stuff. I suspect this has happened to almost all if not all my readers out there. You devote a certain amount of time trying to open a package until in frustration you go looking for a blade – a box cutter, a scissors, a knife.

    I went looking for a machete one day. I’d just bought a new blade for my table saw. I couldn’t get at it. The plastic package was so strong scissors couldn’t cut it. I was thinking I was going to have to use my old table saw blade to get at the new one.

    What irony: I needed a cutting tool to get a cutting tool out of its package.

    I eventually got it open be using a very large knife, and then I cut myself on the edges of the savaged plastic edges that remained. I threw the packaging away, so it ended up in some landfill. When an archeologist 10,000 years digs up that landfill to study our civilization, he’s going to think that was a piece of armor.

    Big and small. I opened a little bottle of spices the other day and encountered the seal under the cap. The seal has little tabs on it so you can pull it right off. When I say little, I mean there are molecules larger than those little tabs. Get the knife, slit the seal, gain access to the product.

    Then I got some plumbing fittings. You know what those are, the white PVC pipes. They come mounted on a piece of cardboard and held in place by shrink-wrap. Don’t make the mistake of tearing the cardboard apart to get to the plastic parts; the cardboard is where the directions are. If you’re like me and you tear it up, you’re going to find yourself taping it back together to figure out which direction the gaskets should face. You have to come in from the top, and to do that, you need a box cutter. Trust me.

    Then there were the Ensure bottles. They have plastic shrink-wrapped over the cap. There’s a little triangle demarcated with a dotted line. You simply pull the top of the triangle down, and the rest of the shrinkwrap falls away. If you have fingernails. Many people who play stringed instruments don’t. In any case, it’s a pretty tight fit even if you do have fingernails. A knife works perfectly, though.

    And to pile on insult after insult, a bottle of 12-year-old Glenfidditch has a cap with a tiny little ribbon. You are supposed to pull on the ribbon, which goes all around the cap. When the ribbon is pulled all way around, the plastic falls off and the easy twist-off cap/cork is revealed.

    Except invariably, the ribbon tears because it is only ten angstroms wide. Now there is nothing to hold on to, and your attempt at a suave display of single-malt lore in front of your impatient girlfriend has turned into a boorish attempt to stick a knife blade under what remains of the ribbon. Although sometimes it is cool to whip out a gravity knife, sling the blade open and swiftly cut away the offending material. Better you should start right out with the knife and skip trying to grab that little, fragile wisp of a ribbon.

    And then there are the plastic sacks with the self-sealing strip. Right away, you need a scissors to cut the top off. Now you are presented with the need to pull the two perfectly aligned flaps of plastic apart. You can’t get a fingernail between the flaps, and they’re too slick to rub apart. If you’re me, you go get those scissors again, cut below the self-sealing strip, get what you need, and clothespin the bag back together again.

    I’ve got some suggestions for packaging designers out there:

    • Every member of your company’s board of directors should be required to open the package at a board meeting. If they need a Dremel tool to get at the product, you’ve got a problem.
    • Much of your customer base is getting old, like me. If the directions to open the package or use the product is printed in 1 point type, you’ve lost us. It’s irritating enough have to go get a knife to open the package; now we have go get our 250 power reading glasses too.
    • Look at a Folgers Coffee container. Getting at the product is simplicity itself. Try it, and then use the coffee inside to wake up.
      

      February 7, 2016

      The Elite Meet

      Let’s talk about intellectual integrity, or the lack thereof.

      On Oct. 2, 2015, the National Education Association endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. That anointment date was before the NEA could know who other than Hillary actually would be running for president in 2016.

      On Jan. 30, 2016, The New York Times endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democrat nominee for president, managing to avoid mention of Clinton’s cavalier treatment of highly sensitive and even highly secret government e-mails until the second to the last paragraph.

      On Nov. 13, 2015 – before a single primary election was held – Hillary Clinton had more than 359 of her party’s so-called “super delegates” committed to vote for her at the Democrat nominating convention. By Jan. 30 of this year – after only one popular primary election was held – she had 481 delegates in her pocket.

      A Democrat candidate needs 2,382 delegate votes to win the nomination. New Hampshire has eight superdelegates. Although Bernie Sanders won the state’s primary overwhelmingly over Clinton, Sanders got two superdelegates from New Hampshire, Clinton got six.

      Superdelegates are not chosen by the voters to be delegates to the conventions. They are the party’s elite, Members of Congress, members of the Democrat National Committee, party officials. Altogether, they represent about one-third of the delegates needed to nominate a candidate.

      Maybe The New York Times can be excused for endorsing Clinton. It’s kind of a default position for the newspaper; they’ve endorsed her every time she’s run for federal office.

      Or even the NEA. This union’s power is being challenged by a revolt of members who are tired of seeing their dues used for purposes with which they disagree. That issue is one case before the current Supreme Court, and the NEA desperately needs a liberal Democrat to make the next appointment to that bench.

      So what is all this to you and me? We’re not members of these clubs. We’re not on the editorial boards of major news organizations; we’re not superdelegates; we’re not on the boards of directors of major unions, or for that matter, large companies.

      Republicans do this too. They don’t have nearly as many superdelegates as the Democrats, but they’ve got ‘em. They don’t like party upstarts either, like Ron Paul. At the Republican nominating convention in 2012, the Republican leadership eviscerated Paul’s delegation by changing the rules. Result: 3 million Republican voters stayed home on election day.

      Why all this support for Hillary Clinton, who is under investigation by 100 agents of the FBI and might well be indicted before the election? Because it’s her turn. She’s paid her dues, tried her best to explain Obama’s unintelligible foreign policy, did an unremarkable stint as a U.S. senator, supported the right candidates with the Clintons’ vast resources.

      The Republicans do it too. They ran the unremarkable and elderly Bob Dole in 1996 because it was his turn. Mitt Romney graciously dropped out of the primaries a tad early to hand the nomination to John McCain in 2008, for which he was awarded the nomination in 2012, and then Romney himself graciously dropped out in 2015 to give Jeb Bush a clear shot at all Romney’s donors.

      Is it any wonder that the voters are fed up enough to make Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump front runners? The real wonder is that out of all the talent in this great nation, it is quite likely that we will be asked to choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to lead the USA.

      Sad.

    January 31, 2016

    The Final Countdown

    Many of you recently received your annual Social Security letter entitled “Important Information,” but the letter didn’t include any really important information. The Social Security bureaucracy keeps that information elsewhere.

    The “important information” in this letter was that your Social Security payment would remain the same in 2016 as it was in 2015.

    (While you aren’t getting a raise, federal employees are. They got a 1.3 per cent pay raise. All 2.15 million federal employees will get it. Clearly, this was not a merit raise.)

    The rest of the letter explains how your taxes are connected to Social Security, how your payment breaks down vis a vis Medicare and Medicare supplementary insurance, the tidbit on same-sex couples, and blah, blah, blah. Pretty dry stuff.

    If you want to read something really meaty, go to “The 2015 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds.” If you’re on Social Security disability, you might want to rework your budget for 2016.

    The reports says, “Social Security’s Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Fund now faces an urgent threat of reserve depletion, requiring prompt corrective action by lawmakers if sudden reductions or interruptions in benefit payments are to be avoided.”

    Don’t you just love bureaucratic language? What exactly is “reserve depletion?” It means the fund will be broke. What are “interruptions in benefit payments?” It means you won’t be paid.

    And, “Lawmakers need to act soon to avoid automatic reductions in payments to DI beneficiaries in late 2016.” That’s this year.

    And as for Medicare: “The Trustees project that the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund will be depleted in 2030, the same year projected in last year’s report. At that time dedicated revenues will be sufficient to pay 86 percent of HI costs.” That’s 14 years from now, or quite probably within the lifetime of many of us in our late 60s and early 70s.

    Social Security itself may last longer, especially if the government only increases benefits by 0 per cent per year. Again, the report: “After 2019, Treasury will redeem trust fund asset reserves to the extent that program cost exceeds tax revenue and interest earnings until depletion of total trust fund reserves in 2034, one year later than projected in last year’s Trustees Report. Thereafter, tax income is projected to be sufficient to pay about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through the end of the projection period in 2089.” If you’re a millennial, this should concern you, but then, most millennials are mostly and blissfully unconcerned about anything.

    Boil that down and it means if Congress does nothing, which Congress does well, you will not only not get a raise in 2034, you will get a 25 percent haircut in your benefits.

    Even that conclusion is by no means certain. This isn’t in the report, but those “trust fund asset reserves” are IOUs not saleable or transferable to anyone. When Congress started raiding the Social Security Trust Fund under President Lyndon Johnson and every president since, it put IOUs in a drawer at the Department of the Treasury.

    If Congress doesn’t budget enough money, or doesn’t have the credit anymore to borrow enough money, those IOUs become worthless.

    Our federal debt is now over $19 trillion. What’s it going to be in 2034? If Hillary Clinton does what Obama did, the debt will be $30 trillion in 2024. If Chelsea Clinton does what her mother is going to do, it will be $42 trillion in 2034.

    Debt service at that point will cost the U.S. government about $840 billion per year (at 2 percent). So how do y’all feel about $8 trillion over ten years on interest payments? Hmmmm, where could that money have been spent to better serve the taxpayers?

    So how to save Social Security. Well, we could increase the payroll taxes and further discourage business creation and expansion in the U.S. We could raise the eligibility age to beyond the life expectancy of most Americans. Or, we could kill everyone over the age of 75.

    And with that thought, I’d like to wish all us old people a Happy New Year.

    January 24, 2016

    You Are Not What You Are

    Alright! It’s done! It’s over! Affirmative action, quotas, preferential programs, hate crime laws, gerrymandered voting districts and all other race-based policies, because now, you are not what you are, you are what you want to be.

    And this is all thanks to people like Caitlyn Jenner, one of the first people in America who can check both gender boxes on her job application; and Rachel Delozal, who born white but transitioned to black; and Elizabeth Warren, who discovered an American Indian of the Invisible Tribe in her ancestry, and the high school boy in Illinois who just wanted to use the girls locker room.

    All these folks are leading us into the new age when bigotry will be impossible because we’re not going to be able to tell by looking at you what you are. Ergo, programs like affirmative action won’t work anymore. Racial profiling won’t work anymore.

    If the college you want to attend requires a certain amount of black students be admitted, well then simply declare on your college application form that you are black. You may not actually be black, but you can claim that you “identify” with being black.

    People like Sen. Warren have led the way on this. Did she suffer for the false claim that one of her ancestors was a Cherokee to get a teaching position at Harvard? Hell, no. In fact, she later got elected to the U.S. Senate.

    Was your congressional district redrawn to include more minority representation? Simply go to the court with affidavits from 7,500 or so white folks who claim they are not black but identify with being black.

    Rachel Delozal wasn’t the only person to do this. Shaun King, a Black Lives Matter activist, said he was black but turned out to be white. Not his fault he was born white; he identifies with being black.

    These are just the people we know about. They are leading the way into a new tomorrow when all of us can be what we want to be. The U.S. government will have to stop labeling everybody because the label that applies today quite literally might not apply tomorrow.

    Can you guess how I know this is true? Because not one of the aforementioned people have been prosecuted for what they put on their census forms. I don’t know what they put on their U.S. Census forms, but I have strong suspicions, and if Delozal checked “black” on the race question, that’s against the law.

    If hundreds or maybe thousands or even millions of others start doing this, it will skew the statistical foundation on which federal programs rest. Congressional redistricting is one such program. Admission quotas are another. Preferences for minority-owned businesses is another. Say you owned a business, and you are a male. You can’t qualify for a federal contract, so you simply “transition” to be a female. Voila! Federal contract.

    And who’s to say you can’t. That boy in Illinois went to court to get unfettered access to the girls locker room by claiming he/she was transgender. Well, when I was in high school, I wanted unfettered access to the girls locker room, but I hadn’t thought of that maneuver.

    The federal government sided with the boy. “Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions,” trumpeted The New York Times.

    Where does this end?

    The U.S. Census Bureau used to be in the business of counting people. It is now mostly in the business of labeling people.

    Why? Ultimately, to make sure incumbent Members of Congress get re-elected. All of us must be divided up into separate racial subgroups so special programs can be constructed to give us money.

    Thus we have such information on our towns and counties and cities and states:

    • Population by Race – American Indian and Alaska native alone; Asian alone; Black or African American alone; Some other race alone; Two or more races; White alone. Population by Hispanic or Latino Origin (or any race) – Persons Not of Hispanic or Latino Origin; Persons of Hispanic or Latino Origin.

    • Population by Gender – Female; Male.

    • Race by Age.

    • Change in Population between 2000 and 2010, by Race.

    • Population by Age and Hispanic or Latino Origin.

    How do they know this? Even the short census form queries you about your race, and “Hispanic” isn’t enough. The form wants to know if you are a Hispanic of Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban descent or other. If you’re not Hispanic, the form wants to know what you are: Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Other Asian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, or Other Pacific Islander, or Some other race.

    They also want to know your sex, and at the moment, there are only two choices. And, it is against the law to lie on your census form. But the Census Bureau said it “rarely” prosecutes anyone for lying. So this is the way we institutionalize racial labeling.

    But thanks to the aforementioned pioneers, that’s all going to go away. And you laughed when Caitlyn Jenner got that hero award.

    January 17, 2016

    Promises, Promises

    Regular readers of my columns know that I believe future historians will judge Barack Obama as possibly the worst president in U.S. history. But I also believe he could have been one of the best presidents.

    How? you ask.

    If he’d just done what he said he was going to do.

    In recognition of his final State of the Union Address on Jan. 12, let’s look at some of the things he promised to do in previous State of the Union addresses:

    2009

    “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime.  I repeat: not one single dime.”

    That didn’t last long. Obama immediately acquiesced to increased taxes on tanning beds and tobacco. ObamaCare alone increased taxes in 18 different areas. The president would go on to propose 442 different tax increases through 2015.

    “That is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists – because living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer, and it makes us stronger.”

    As of this writing, Guantanamo Bay is still open.

    “Yesterday, I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office.”

    Here’s what happened. Deficit in 2008 (George W. Bush) = $459 billion; Deficit in 2009 = $1.413 trillion; Deficit in 2010 = $1.3 trillion; Deficit in 2011 = $1.3 trillion; Deficit in 2012 = $1.1 trillion; Deficit in 2013 = $680 billion; Deficit in 2014 = $492 billion. Obama would claim in later addresses that he had “cut the deficit in half,” but only in the sense that he cut it in half after he had tripled it.

    2010

    “But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives.  And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.”

    Two preliminary licenses were issued for nuclear power plants in the U.S. in the last eight years. None have been built. 

    “Our approach (to health care) would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.  It would reduce costs and premiums for millions of families and businesses.

    As “The Washington Post” pointed out years later, this was the biggest lie of the year, one that was repeated over and over again.

    “Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years.  Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will.”

    Never happened.

    “We face a deficit of trust – deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.  To close that credibility gap … to end the outsized influence of lobbyists … we’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs, or seats on federal boards and commissions.”

    President Obama hired more than 100 lobbyists in his administration, an academic study reports. Scholar Conor McGrath wrote in The Journal of Public Affairs in July of 2013 that he found 119 former lobbyists in the Obama administration. The administration employed at that time former in-house lobbyists from Microsoft, Fannie Mae, insurance giant Wellpoint, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Monsanto, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Raytheon, and Goldman Sachs. Obama has hired from the ranks of K Street firms Cassidy & Associates, Covington & Burling, Heather Podesta & Partners, Akin Gump, Arnold & Porter, Winston & Strawn, Timmons & Co., and others.

    “As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as President.  We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August.  We will support the Iraqi government – we will support the Iraqi government as they hold elections, and we will continue to partner with the Iraqi people to promote regional peace and prosperity. But make no mistake: This war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.”

    The U.S. never pulled all of its combat troops out of Iraq, and is now sending hundreds more to that country, and putting others in jeopardy flying over Iraq.

    “We’re going to crack down on violations of equal pay laws – so that women get equal pay for an equal day’s work.”

    You’d think that would have started in Obama’s own immediate domain, but no. A study released in January (of 2014) showed that female White House staff members make on average 88 cents for every dollar a male staff member earns. This according to “The New York Times.” And, “Today, women make up about half our workforce.  But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns,” said President Barack Obama in 2014.

    2011

    “With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.”

    Despite massive federal spending on electric vehicles, which is expected to total $7.9 billion through 2019, there are currently just 286,390 plug-in vehicles on the nation’s roads today, according to the Electric Drive Transportation Association.

    “So tonight, I’m asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years – without adding to our deficit.

    You who own corporations know the tax rate never got lowered from its current level, which is the highest corporate tax rate in the world.

    “So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. Now, this would reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, and will bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president.

    Never happened.

    “Still, I’m willing to look at other ideas to bring down costs, including one that Republicans suggested last year – medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits.

    Obama may have “looked at it,” but it never went anywhere.

    “In the coming months, my administration will develop a proposal to merge, consolidate, and reorganize the federal government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive America. I will submit that proposal to Congress for a vote – and we will push to get it passed.

    Didn’t happen. In fact, federal employment under Obama increased from 2,692,000 under George W. Bush to a high of 2,776,000 in 2010. Federal employment didn’t come down until the Sequester, which was fiercely opposed by Obama. 

    2012

    “We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.  So let’s change it.”

    There have been no substantive changes to the tax code, even to the so-called “corporate inversions.”

    “I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration.”

    Well, he did. Obama released thousands of illegal immigrants who were in jail because of crimes they had committed in the U.S. – including homicide. Or maybe that’s what he meant by “taking on” illegal immigration.

    “Tonight, I’m directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.

    Never happened. According to a (2014) report from the Congressional Research Service, since 2009 oil production on federal lands is down by 6 percent and natural gas production on federal lands is down 28 percent. This is particularly striking because since 2009 overall oil production on non-federal land is up by 61 percent and natural gas production on non-federal land is up by 33 percent.

    In 2010, 36 percent of our nation’s oil production took place on federal lands. Due to Obama Administration policies, by 2013, only 23 percent of our nation’s oil production took place on federal lands. Production on non-federal lands, in contrast, is skyrocketing as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have increased production dramatically.

    And, from “The Hill,” July 2, 2013: Obama’s five-year offshore drilling plan, which runs through 2017, doesn’t allow drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. His Interior Department chief, Sally Jewell, flatly rejected the idea of making currently off-limit areas available to drilling as the House Natural Resources Committee was considering an offshore drilling bill.

    “In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries.  Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled, and thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.”

    The Solyndra story is well known. But there were others. As of November, 2014, the U.S government’s Department of Energy has so far disbursed $21.7 billion and collected $3.5 billion in repayments and $810 million in interest.

    “I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long-term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors.”

    According to yearly reports from the Board of Trustees for the trust funds covering Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, nothing has changed since Obama took office. The most looming disaster is in the Social Security Disability Insurance program that the trustees say will run out of money this year.

    “And in Syria, I have no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change cannot be reversed, and that human dignity cannot be denied.”

    Pretty clearly, that hasn’t happened.

    2013

    “So tonight, I propose we use some of our oil and gas revenues to fund an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good.”

    President Obama’s plan for a $2 billion Energy Security Trust is collecting dust on Capitol Hill. “We haven’t heard much about it, have we? I’ve been waiting for the call,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, recently told “The Hill.”

    “So tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America. That’s something we should be able to do.

    Didn’t happen.

    “So tonight, I ask Congress to change the Higher Education Act so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid. And tomorrow, my administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria – where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.”

    Educators – of all people – didn’t like it: “Regrettably, the administration’s College Scorecard provides no information about either the quality of college learning or the role of higher education in building capacities we need in a free and democratic society. Its message to students is that they should seek out institutions that seem to promise the highest salaries, with no questions asked about the rigor, breadth, creativity or global reach of the actual curriculum. The scorecard thus accelerates what has been a narrowing of the American dialogue about the purposes of higher education over the last two decades. Many were scandalized when Gov. Scott Walker tried to excise fundamentals like the search for truth, and service to the public, from the mission of the University of Wisconsin system. We should be equally scandalized that the Obama administration has excised all of that — and the quality of learning as well — from its deeply flawed metrics for what the president described as the value of college.” – Carol Geary Schneider, president, Association of American Colleges and Universities in a letter published in The New York Times.

    “Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour. We should be able to get that done.”

    He wasn’t able to get it done. 

    “Tonight, I can announce that over the next year, another 34,000 American troops will come home from Afghanistan.  This drawdown will continue and by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.”

    On Jan. 5, 2016, an American soldier was killed and two others were wounded Tuesday in fighting at the heart of a Taliban offensive in southern Afghanistan. Apparently, the war is not over.

    2014

    More of the same:

    “Our tax code is riddled with wasteful, complicated loopholes that punish businesses investing here, and reward companies that keep profits abroad … Let’s work together to close those loopholes.”

    See 2011 address.

    “Race to the Top, with the help of governors from both parties, has helped states raise expectations and performance…The problem is we’re still not reaching enough kids, and we’re not reaching them in time.”

    See 2009 address.

    “Finally, if we are serious about economic growth, it is time to heed the call of business leaders, labor leaders, faith leaders, and law enforcement – and fix our broken immigration system.”

    See 2012 address.

    “Last year, I asked this Congress to help states make high-quality pre-K available to every four year-old.”

    See 2013 address.

    “Today, women make up about half our workforce.  But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”

    See 2010 address.

    What if he’d done all of most of these things? No tax increase, Guantanamo closed, nuclear power expanded, government spending frozen, lobbyists and special interests banned from the halls of government, war ended in Iraq and Afghanistan, equal pay for equal work, tax code simplified, corporate taxes lowered, tort reform, federal agencies and departments streamlined, oil and gas exploration expanded on federal lands, entitlement programs fixed, pre-school for every child, minimum wage hiked. And if you liked your health paln, you could have kept your health plan.

    It doesn’t matter how you feel about these goals. It would have been a Rooseveltian list of achievements. Obama would have ranked high among effective presidents, but now he’s going to look below average by his own measure of what he should have accomplished.

    Maybe he (and all presidents) should have a cautionary note on the teleprompter: “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.”

    January 10, 2016

    Star Wars Reruns

    I saw Star Wars, The Force Awakens, on New Year’s Eve, and I have to say, this movie franchise needs a new plot line. Either that, or explain how the Galactic Empire can afford to build and lose three planet-sized Death Stars in the last four movies.

    I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but really, if you saw the original Star Wars movie in 1977, you’ve seen this latest one. A death star blows up planets, threatens the good guys, a Jedi knight appears from humble beginnings, joins the resistance, the rebels attack the death star (each one of which seems to have a fatal vulnerability) and destroy it in the nick of time. There’s a villain with a black helmet, a super-sized evil emperor, a cute droid, and a fat guy who looks like Jabba the Hut’s son. There’s even the Star Wars bar.

    The special effects are way better than in 1977, though. Princess Leia looked great (to me). The action was a little more believable (like the storm troopers are better shots), and Episode VII sets itself up nicely for Episode VIII. There are some actual surprises in the movie, and it’s well done, but it’s not the best science fiction movie that came out in 2016.

    The best science fiction movie that came out last year was The Martian, starring Matt Damon. This was the most intelligent science fiction movie I have seen in a long time. There were no monsters, no good guys/bad guys, and not a weapon seen in the entire film. Matt Damon’s character – Mark Watney – survives being stranded on Mars by being educated and smart, not by being fast on the draw. He is rescued by other smart people who have degrees in physics, astronomy, orbital mechanics, and, of course, rocket science.

    Who ever thought that the hero of a science fiction movie would have an advanced degree in biology? We should have more movie heroes who demonstrate the value of education and informed thought.

    At the end of the movie, you and the rest of the world are cheering for Mark Watney and all the people who brought him home. It reminded me of the time Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the moon. It was very uplifting. And something like The Martian could really happen. We could have a super hero emerge from the space program, if we had a space program.

    The difference between the two movies is this: Star Wars is what science fiction writers call space opera, which is a B western made a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and hard science fiction. The latter genre is based on real science, and in the case of The Martian, real planets.

    So, you movie makers out there, many of us are sick of super heroes in tights, vampires and zombies. You have worn out those genres. The beauty of science fiction is you can do anything you want, go anywhere you want, create anything you want.

    So get some new writers for the Star Wars franchise. Try this: In Episode VIII, have overwhelming numbers of storm troopers pushing the resistance to the very brink of extinction when a horde of new rebels appears to confound the Empire’s offensive.

    They are disgruntled taxpayers tired of paying for new death stars every 20 years. They are led by a Jedi actuary, Luke Skycounter, who is accompanied by his faithful droid, CPA-O. Together, they manage to rally the rebellion to produce a stop-work order on Death Star IV just before its completion. The galaxy is saved, and no one gets hurt. Well, some contractors get hurt financially, but no one gets skewered by a lightsaber.

    But probably no one would go to that movie.

 

January 3, 2016

An Expression of Depression

We editorial writers on the first week of the new year usually make predictions about what we believe may happen in the upcoming days, weeks, and months. My problem with doing that now is I don’t want to depress myself or my readers.

But my vision of the future looms darkly on the horizon. I can say with near certainty that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will be president from 2017 through 2021 and maybe beyond.

If the name Obama surprises you, it shouldn’t. I am fully and thankfully aware that the 22^nd Amendment to the Constitution limits a president to two terms. It states in part, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Couple problems with this:

First, President Obama has shown his disdain for the Constitution more than once, and second, the verb there is “elected.” Obama and his lackeys could argue that simply holding on to the office while setting aside the federal election for the presidency next fall would be a perfectly legal way for him to remain in office. After all, there would be no “third” election. He wouldn’t want to do things that way, of course, but a national emergency might force his hand. Or so the argument would go.

Regarding the second point, so what if the Constitution prohibits one person from being elected to a third term? The Constitution also would seem to prevent the President of the United States from making law. “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives,” says Article 1, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

President Obama has articulated more than once a different view from what is quite plainly stated above. The view is this: “If Congress won’t act, I will.” This has now become both principle and precedent. Hillary Clinton has said she would take the same executive action that Obama is contemplating regarding gun control.

Setting aside the 22^nd Amendment could be a touch too difficult at this stage in American history, so the alternative to Obama is Hillary (“I was named after Sir Edmund Hillary”) Clinton as the next president.

That effectively gives Obama a third term. I believe that Clinton’s various lapses over the course of her desperate climb to the top have left too many levers that can be pulled to “persuade” her to do this or that.

Obama has pulled such levers many times. Two examples: When U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez didn’t vote Obama’s way on the Iran deal, bang!, indictment. When Gen. David Patraeus didn’t toe Obama’s line, bang!, forced resignation (over classified information in emails, of all things). The information on both these individuals languished for months with the Department of Justice, but weren’t exercised until needed by the administration. Curious, eh?

Obama and who knows how many others will be able to pull Hillary’s strings should she become president. Obama’s administration already attempted to bail her out of her e-mail conundrum by declaring she did nothing wrong. In Washington, D.C., that’s a debt that needs to be paid off.

In the bigger picture, it’s unfortunate that the American political system can’t find a major party candidate who possesses a high degree of integrity and honor. In a recent poll, the word most people associated with Hillary was “liar.”

Apparently, that’s the best that the Democrats can do, but that probably will be enough. Even if the Republicans pick a decent candidate, they are so splintered that either many voters will stay home – as they did in the 2012 election – or go with a third party, possibly the Buffoon Party headed by Donald Trump.

In either case, Hillary wins.

And see? That’s depressing.