" I can do math in my head."

"I can do math in my head."

And with that comment, the guy sitting next to me made the point better than I could ever have hoped to do.

I was sitting at the bar when he came in. I had run into this same guy about four times in 3 days. First I was in a waiting room at the gas station with him where we were both getting our tires serviced. Then ran into him at the bar, about an hour later, and then at the bar the next two days. So it wasn't all that odd that he sat down next to me and started talking. But it was different that he started talking politics. Most people don't dare go there. But everybody who knows me, knows that I relish talking politics, particularly if you disagree with me. That may strike you as odd, but I determined a long time ago that arguing politics is a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say. There are two reasons for that. First, I have always felt that if I'm going to state my support for a policy or candidate, then I better be able to back that up. I had better be able to argue my position at the drop of a hat. (My mother always said that I would argue at the drop of a hat anyway, so I'm just making her proud.) And secondly, it's the only way I change my mind.  And that happens when my BS detector goes off on myself. Like most people, I want to win the argument. So when the back and forth starts, I'm just trying to out maneuver the other guy and win. But it's at the point where I hear BS coming out of my own mouth that I realize something is wrong with my argument. And that's when I change my mind. Anyway, the point is, I think arguing is good for us.

So Tommy sits down next to me and starts in about how unhappy he is with the economy and Trump's election. He explains that he works in a lab. He performs tests that determine whether or not you have certain types of cancer. He then disparages financial managers, and points out that there are some companies that NEVER make a profit, losing millions quarter after quarter, and year after year. So I'm thinking this may be the guy to prove my point about economic education.

I say, "You're probably very well educated, do you have an advanced degree?"

"Yes, I have a Masters."

"So you've gone to school for what, 18, 19 years?"

"Yeah, that's a lot of money isn't it?

"But it's also a lot of years, a lot of education right?"

"Yes"

"So how many classes in economics did you take during those 19 years?"

"Oh I can do math in my head."

"So the answer is none."

"I learned all that stuff on my own."

"What stuff?"

"Profit and losses. I can do math in my head."

"That's not economics, and you're proving my point."

Deplorable Voters

Many liberal voters were shocked, to say the least, when Donald Trump won the election. And they seem to have very hard feeling for those deplorable voters who took what was rightfully theirs, the presidency.

Their logic in directing their anger at the Trump voters, goes something like this:

     Trump is a racist, sexist, ignorant bully.
     I can't imagine anybody voting for him who is not also a stupid, racist, misogynist.
     Therefore, all Trump voters are stupid racist and sexist.  

And I have to admit, at first blush, this seems to make perfect sense. But then I put the shoe on the other foot, and viola! It doesn't fit.

I firmly believe, in my heart of hearts, that Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt, vile and dishonest person to ever seek the presidency. Really. Liberals tend to let their jaw hit the floor when I say that, but that's only because they refuse to pay attention. She has lined her pockets selling influence, and pocketing bribes since the 1980's. And at the crux of every one of her scandals has been HRC herself, lying and then lying about her lies. Don't believe me?


Whitewater - insider real estate deal while Bill was governor. It was a bust, but not before Hillary lied repeatedly about it.

Travlegate - fired the White House travel office and accused them of embezzlement so that she could steer the business to cronies she had promised the business. And then lied about it.

Cattle futures - A thinly disguised bribe from Tyson Chicken of $100,000. Set up a phony futures account so that the crooked broker could assign her one of the winning bets from the multiple trades he handled each day. Real investors got the losers, and never knew what hit them She claimed to have turned $1,000 into $100,000 in nine months by reading the Wall Street Journal.

Rose Law Firm billing records. During the Whitewater investigation, the billing records became a point of contention. But when they looked for them, they were nowhere to be found. A few years later, after the statute of limitations passed, they miraculously showed up in the White House living quarters. Nobody knows how they got there. (You know, it's the White House, people are coming and going all the time. Anybody could have dropped them off there.)

Benghazi, The Video - Forget the details about security, this whole thing started with her lie that the riot was caused by a Youtube video. The she had to once again, lie many more times in order to srevice the first lie.

Private Server - Better question here is when didn't she lie?

The Foundation? It's a crime syndicate that serves as their personal jet charter service.

She took her net worth from zero to a quarter of a BILLION in 15 years, while working as a public servant.

You can disagree with me, but that doesn't matter. This is what I truly believe about Hillary Rodham Clinton. And yet, I understand that you don't have to be a corrupt liar yourself, in order to vote for one. For some reason, liberals can't make that calculation.

Career Politicians

For a good number of election cycles, the term "career politician" has indicated somebody who is on the bottom rung of life's ladder. A career politician never held a "real job." never produced anything of value, and never gained any experience in the real world. It was the biggest, by far, knock on Barack Obama. He was mocked as the community organizer who had never had a real job. He'd never been a manager. He'd never been an executive. Worst of all, he'd never run a business. He'd never met a payroll and he never lost sleep worrying about not meeting one. He was a career politician. And he won.

I think the first time this notion struck our collective fancy, was 1992. A billionaire Texan spent an hour or so talking to Larry King on CNN, and suddenly everybody was enthralled with the idea of letting a non-politician take a swipe at it. "Let's a businessman run it like a business!" became the cry, and a permanent lane was created for the non-politician. Ever since then, there has been one lurking around the edges of every primary. Their main appeal is that  they are NOT a politician. The idea of an outsider coming in to clean house sounded so good. In fact, it sounded so good that people forgot why we even had professional politicians. I mean, what good were they? What skills did they have, other than skillfully lying  to us?

The answer is so obvious that is makes me feel stupid now. Their skill is getting elected.

And make no mistake, it is a skill. It is a skill to be able to debate a point without loosing your cool. It's a skill to deflect criticism, without seeming to dodge the question. And yes, it's a skill to lie the right way, and to an acceptable degree. It's a skill to charm those with whom you disagree slightly, and to not appear to be mean when you disagree wholly. It is a skill to be gracious, either in victory or defeat. It is a skill to win the support of opponents you have defeated.

Oddly these are the skills that people say they despise in career politicians. They are also the skills that win elections. If you were to make a list of those people who best exemplified these skills, it would have Obama, Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, JFK, LBJ, FDR and Richard Nixon topping the list. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would be nowhere to be found on that list.

Following Trump's epic defeat this November, I predict a new found appreciation for the skills of career politicians.

Exactly Who are the Cowards Here?

      This morning CBS did a lengthy segment on the Democrat’s sit-in to force a vote on two gun control measures that have been on the administration’s agenda for years now. Background checks at gun shows, and barring anybody on the no-fly list from buying a gun. The latter measure is usually expressed as “keeping guns out of terrorist’s hands.” Trying to portray Republican’s as puppets of the NRA, the Democrats are calling them cowards for not even allowing a vote.

CBS showed the story mostly from the Democrat’s side, which is hardly surprising. They had quotes from John Lewis, Gabby Gifford, and others decrying the lack of action by Republicans to keep guns away from terrorists. But they did allow a very short clip of Paul Ryan saying that he was not going bring up anything for a vote that would deny somebody their constitutional right without due process.  It was the first and last time in the entire broadcast that anybody used that term. It went back to cowards-who-won’t-protect-us immediately.

I’m not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV. But I do know what Ryan was talking about. It’s really a shame that the Democrats don’t have any top notch legal minds available to answer the Speaker’s concern. You’d think that somewhere over there they would have some Ivy League lawyer, maybe even a Constitutional expert and scholar, maybe even graduated magna cum laude from Harvard (Obama) or Yale (Clinton.) Hell, I’d settle for the law schools at Syracuse (Biden), Boston College (Kerry), George Washington (Reid), and UW (Tammy Baldwin.) But apparently they don’t have anybody like that to explain it.  No, the only thing they seem capable of is making a statement that sounds ridiculous on its face. Who doesn’t want to keep guns out or terrorists hands? It’s that simple right?

Well, except for that 2^nd amendment anyway. And that’s where we find out who the real political cowards are. The very definition of a coward is somebody who does not have the courage of their convictions. The dilemma for Democrats is that the 2^nd amendment prohibits any infringement on the citizen’s right to bear arms.

 And if there is one thing that gun control advocates most definitely want to do, it is infringe on that right by any means necessary. So the path to that end would seem obvious: Repeal the 2^nd amendment. Except that that requires political suicide. In my assessment, the only honest player so far has been, ironically, Rolling Stone magazine. They are the only ones I know of who have endorsed repeal. Of course they are not a politician, and after discrediting the entire profession of journalism with a fake rape story, they may be just trying to regain relevance. So what’s Tammy’s excuse?

Do you know how one gets placed on the vaunted no-fly list? Me neither. In fact, Tammy Baldwin can’t tell you how. So I think it’s safe to say that getting on to the list does not constitute due process. You see, your constitutional rights can be taken away after due process. If you get convicted of a felony, you lose some of your rights, including the right to own a gun. The conviction in court was the due process. You may also lose your right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness due to a conviction. But there is no process to getting on the list and therefore no legal way to deny a citizen their rights. Now, do you think that any of the numerous Democrat lawyers in congress understand this? Well they certainly pretend they don’t.

The Catcher In The Rye

Donald Trump is an asshat. As Antonin Scalia might say, his speeches are "pure applesauce." His "big" foreign policy speech the other day, was an incoherent and contradictory mess in spite of the fact that he read it off a teleprompter. He has to walk back something every week as a result of his off the cuff comments. ("Women should be punished for having an abortion.") He regularly displays his astounding ignorance of even the most basic concepts such as the Nuclear Triad. But most of his supporters don't seem to mind a deficiency like that in their Commander in Chief. He says things like, "I'm gonna make you people so rich." Which sounds a lot like his pitch for Trump University. He has been a loyal Democrat contributor for decades and within the past few years has openly praised Obama, Hillary, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. He supports Planned Parenthood and thinks universal health care is imperative.His favorite bible quote is from Two Corinthians.

So why do I feel like the catcher in the rye?

You'll recall that in the book of that name, Holden Caufield has a dream where he is standing in a field of rye, near a precipitous cliff. The field is full of children running and playing. Holden takes it upon himself to "catch" the children before they come to close to the cliff. That's how I feel these days, but it's not children I want to catch, it's Trump supporters and they seem more like lemmings. They are trying to go off the cliff and I can't stop them all. They are obviously delusional, even proudly so. They are impervious to facts. I have one Facebook friend who was a raving liberal just a few years ago. Now he seems to have two obsessions: electing Donald Trump and making sure everybody goes to the bathroom that includes their gender at birth. He is quite concerned about the latter, and is appalled to think that a transgendered person might go into a restroom that isn't really theirs. He is totally for the South Carolina law, yet seems unaware that Trump is opposed to it. Sarah Palin had a signature issue when she ran for VP, she was pro-life above all. Now she endorses a man who gives money and praise to Planned Parenthood, and wants the pro-life plank removed from the Republican platform. 

Today it looks as if I will be overwhelmed and the lemmings will all make it to the cliff and jump. I can only shake my head and walk away. It is so stupid.

Conservative's Last Stand

Tomorrow is March 15th and likely the day that Donald Trump either secures the Republican nomination, or opens the door to stop him. It's all going to come down to who wins Florida and Ohio. If Trump wins both, it's over. He's nominated and a Democrat is elected president. Any other scenario leaves the door open to a brokered convention and (IMHO,) also a loss in November. If Ted Cruz were to end up actually beating him with more votes, the Republicans might prevail in the general. But if he, or anybody else is handed the nomination in a convention deal, they would be toast.

The Republican party is not my party. I am a conservative-libertarian who has voted Republican with virtual exclusivity since 1976, because they always had the most conservative candidate, be it for president, governor, senator or county supervisor. When Ronald Reagan ran in 1980, moderate Republicans said he'd never get elected. Too extreme they said. Shades of Barry Goldwater! He'll be portrayed as a right wing nut, and we'll never get the center to vote for us. But they were wrong. He engineered two landslide victories by being consistently conservative. That goodwill carried over for exactly one election cycle. George H.W. Bush won four years by pledging "Read my lips, no new taxes," and then tossed it all away by doing just what he said he wouldn't. Four years later we ran Bob Dole to get that moderate vote, and whiffed again. W unveiled compassionate conservatism, which I detested because it clearly implied that conservatism lacked compassion to begin with. Instead it turned out to be conservative light. His unpopularity lead us to put up John McCain and then Mitt Romney in a lurch, once again, to the middle, which got us nothing.  

And the entire time Rush Limbaugh kept telling us, "Conservatism works every time it's tried." Then Donald Trump took up his pet cause (No amnesty!!) and he promptly threw it all overboard in order to "win." He thinks Trump is Ronald Reagan now, and has an excuse or counter argument for each Trump outrage. Today, he tried to cover for him inciting his people to attack. His argument? Rush remembers how angry he used to get watching leftists get away with all this same stuff, and nothing happened to them! He starts by saying two wrongs don't make a right but..... And then proceeds to lay down a smoke screen so that the Trumpster isn't seen as the complete jerk that he obviously is. This is all rather sad to me. I always thought Rush to be an honest broker. But all he can do these days is "explain" Trump. And he does so without end. He firmly believes that people just don't understand him, so he'll spend hours telling the audience about how all those evil moderates have acted so traitorously that the conservative masses have just risen up and yelled "STOP." And lost in all this is how conservative principles have been kicked to the curb. It's all about winning now, even as they secure defeat with Trump at the helm. Not conservative now, and never has been. Neither are his supporters.