Weekend at Trump, Hillary and Bernie's

Some thoughts on the events of the weekend....

• The Commie (Sanders) swore to one of his California audiences on Saturday that he plans to continue to "fight" (isn't it great how all liberal politicians "fight" all the time?  It's like they all think they could go eight rounds with Ali) "all the way through the convention".
  
  What this actually means is that he's getting ready to concede the nomination to Hillary Clinton if he loses California on Tuesday, and end his campaign.  If you remember back to the day before the Indiana GOP primary, Ted Cruz also swore to stay in the race "all the way to Cleveland" to an audience of supporters.  By 8:00 Central Time the next night, after a crushing loss to Donald Trump, his campaign was over.
  
  If California goes for Hillary, the Commie is toast.  Best bet of the week.

• Donald Trump has a legitimate concern about the impartiality of the judge in his Trump University case, but doesn't appear capable of appropriately expressing it.  Instead of focusing on the judge's "Mexican" heritage (he was born and raised in Indiana), Trump should be talking about Judge Gonzalo Curiel's membership in a radical organization called "La Raza Lawyers of San Diego", a race-based group that is so racist that its name - La Raza - literally translates to "The Race".
  
  Given Trump's support for a border wall and other strategies to secure the U.S. border with Mexico, he has every reason to be concerned about having this case heard by this specific judge.  Unfortunately, the judge's obviously biased conduct of the case only serves to reinforce that reality.
  
  Trump's unfortunate focus on the judge's "heritage" is entirely wrong-headed.  A focus on his associations and membership in a race-based organization like La Raza is entirely appropriate.

• Many of our fake "news" outlets this morning are focusing on the fact that The Most Corrupt Woman in America, in an interview with George Stephanopoulous yesterday, would not affirmatively state that the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution confers a right to keep and bear arms to American citizens.  Instead, she would only talk about the "right" of the government to regulate firearms ownership.
  
  To me, this focus is kind of a big yawner. After all, all Hillary was doing was expressing the commonly-held belief by pretty much all of today's "progressives" that individual Americans don't have rights, but the government does.  That is the basic, fundamental, driving principle behind American progressivism today.  Tell us something we don't know already.
  
  My big question about that particular interview is why in the hell is ABC still allowing George Stephanopoulous, who served as senior advisor to Bill Clinton, has contributed more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and is really nothing more than a lifelong Clinton toady, to interview Hillary Clinton under the pretense of objectivity? 
  
  Even more to the point, why does anyone still watch that crap?  I mean, am I the only one who understands that every question and answer in that "interview" has been vetted and rehearsed beforehand?  This is not "news", it is theatre.  No different than Broadway, though not  nearly as entertaining.

•  Matt Damon took some shots at Donald Trump during a commencement speech at MIT on Saturday. Some of the lines were pretty funny.  Good for him.
  
  My only question is, what is it in the makeup of most actors that compels them to start taking themselves seriously once they have achieved major fame?  We see this happen over and over and over again:  Actors who begin their careers focused on making great films or TV shows, perfecting their craft to the point at which they become fabulously wealthy and start winning awards, who then decide that winning those awards somehow makes them smart people who should then start dictating to the "little people" out in flyover country how they ought to behave.
  
  Rob Reiner, having won an Emmy for All in the Family, has been out there telling us all how to act for 40 years now.  Ted Dansen was great in Cheers, and then spent most of the '90s making all manner of environmental pronouncements that turned out to be false.  Susan Sarandon has been doing it for 25 years or so.  Barbara Streisand has been babbling non-stop for 30.  George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, the list can go on and on and on.
  
  What is it in their makeup that makes such people believe that, because they can act or sing or dance, that means that the "little people" should suddenly look up to them as authority figures?  Even more to the point:  What is is in the make up of so many "little people" that they possess so little self-esteem that they actually do listen and give these pompous Hollywood asses a platform from which to pontificate?
  
  Truly one of life's great mysteries.

Why Hillary's Foreign Policy Speech Will Fail

                                             This explains it all.

Hillary's Speech, Trump's Response: Who wins?

If you read the entire transcript of Hillary Clinton's "foreign policy" speech that she read from her Teleprompter on Thursday, what you come away with is the understanding that her advisors - who control every word she utters - have decided that her best tactic is to defend this country's "bi-partisan" foreign policy establishment.  By extension, that means that the Hillary campaign will defend the foreign policy decisions made not just over the last 8 years, but over the last 16 years.

She went out of her way to emphasize that Trump opposes the "wisdom" of the "bi-partisan" foreign policy decisions made over the last two presidencies. She is doing the same this afternoon in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN.

She is hanging her hat not just on giving us 4 more years of the last 8 years, but giving us 4 more years of the last 16 years.

Now, understand that Donald Trump has advanced to where he has gotten in this race by running against not only the Obama foreign policy decisions, but against the Bush 43 foreign policy decisions as well.  He has done this because he understands what Hillary and her team obviously still do not:  That millions and millions of American voters are sick to death not just of what they have experienced during the Obama years, but what they have experienced for the duration of the 21st Century.

Hillary's press team in the national news media have done their best to portray her stilted, crushingly tedious recitation as some sort of a tour de force, and she will no doubt get some small polling bump out of it all in the near term.  Maybe even enough of a bump to get her over the hump against Bernie in California next week.

In the long term, however, if this is what the Hillary strategy is going to look like, it's a loser. Big time.  Because the core message here is that 'hey, everything's great, our country's foreign policy over the last 16 years has been terrific, and that dangerous Trump guy might come in and mess it all up.'

That literally is the message of that speech in a nutshell.

If any of you out there reading this really believe that this country's foreign policy decisions over the last 16 years have been fabulous, I'd sure love to hear about it in the comments section.

The bottom line here is that, by this time next week, Donald Trump will have turned every point Hillary read yesterday to his favor.

The Texas "Permanent Drought" Goes Bust

                                               The Brazos River Flooding Ft. Bend County

Some random thoughts as my home city of Houston faces another day of torrential rains and flooding…

·         Ten years ago, Al Gore released his climate alarmist film, “An Inconvenient Truth”.  Ten years later, not a single fright scenario he casually tossed into that masterpiece has turned out to be true.  The Arctic is not free of ice, snow has not disappeared from the United States or United Kingdom, the rate of sea level rise has not increased from its historic rate, and major hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin, despite Al’s prediction that storms like Katrina would become an annual occurrence, has instead virtually disappeared. But Al got filthy rich out of it all, and the climate alarmist industry has grown at an exponential rate, so they’re all no doubt satisfied.

·         I got to thinking about that this morning when I saw a tweet that pointed out it was two years ago that the Obama Administration and the Climate Alarmist community authoritatively announced that Texas was mired in a “permanent drought”.  That announcement actually came just as the drought was ending, but no matter – some Austin-based media outlets are still running pieces that cling to that absurd notion. 

·         Five years ago, in August of 2011, I came in after watering the front yard on our designated watering day at the time, and announced to my beautiful wife that “I swear I will never complain about rain again as long as I live.”  The last couple of months have made keeping that pledge difficult, but I’ve managed to stand firm so far.  And I’m not complaining about rain in this piece, but when you see so many people suffering and being put out of their homes, it’s hard not to at least say a little prayer, asking God if he couldn’t at last shift it around to another location for awhile?

·         But I’m not complaining about rain, let me be clear about that.  Because I lived through that seven-year drought that Texas did actually experience from 2007 through 2014, and know that the absence of rain is worse than too much of it.

·         August 2011 was probably the very deepest point of that drought.  Every Texas lake was far below normal levels, with some, like Medina Lake, being proclaimed by the “experts” as dead.  The Pedernales River was not even visible from the Highway 71 overpass.  Homes that had been built as “waterfront” on Lake Travis now found themselves high and dry.  The entireties of South Texas and the Texas Panhandle country were nothing more than gigantic tinder boxes awaiting a spark, and wildfires raged across the state.   Some Texas towns ran completely out of drinking water;  others teetered on the brink.  Crops failed all over the state, and livestock died by the thousands from lack of anything to drink.  In November of 2011, when we had a thunderstorm blow through Houston, I realized it had been over a year since I had heard the sound of thunder.

No, I’ll take too much rain any day over that alternative.

At any rate, we Texans can be thankful that the Obama Administration and the Climate Alarmist industry were wrong about the alleged “permanent drought”, as they are wrong about pretty much everything else.  And maybe we all ought to be asking more loudly why it is that this industry continues to be funded by billions of federal dollars so it can continue being wrong and misleading the public about so many things.

Trump, Congress, and the Special Counsel Law

[UPDATE]  Many of you no doubt saw the recent news that Facebook's creator Mark Zuckerberg met recently with conservative leaders and assured them that Facebook was a strictly non-partisan entity that did not engage in censorship.  It's fair to let you know a link I posted to Facebook to this piece was in fact censored by Facebook shortly after it was posted there.

Almost forty-two years ago, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the office of the presidency.  He did so for two reasons:

• Because a then-extant independent national press corps did its job as protector of the public interest and hounded Nixon mercilessly for months, revealing as it did so the crimes of abuse of the FBI, abuse of the IRS, abuse of the Justice Department, obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury, among other things; and

• There were enough honest, conscientious Republicans in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to ensure Nixon would not only be impeached in the House, but also convicted in the Senate.

Eighteen years ago, Bill Clinton was impeached by a strong Republican majority in the House for most of the same crimes that had forced Nixon’s resignation, but was able to survive in Office for two reasons:

•  Because the national press corps had by then evolved into little more than an issues-advocacy arm of the national Democratic Party, refusing to report on the crimes of both Bill and Hillary Clinton in any meaningful way; and

• There was not a single honest, conscientious Democrat in the Senate who would do the right thing for the country and vote to convict a president from their own political party.

For the last eight years, we have had to stand by and witness as Barack Obama and his Administration commit, time after time after time, all of the crimes that forced Nixon from office – and many more – without congress taking any effective action whatsoever to curb his abuses of office, for two reasons:

• By now, the national “press corps” in fact exists only in memory and fantasy, having evolved at this point into nothing more than a de facto propaganda department for the current Administration, a reality about which Obama officials now shamelessly and publicly brag; and

• The Republican majorities in both houses of congress are too frightened of their own shadows to make any effort to cut through the media fog and make their case to the public.

The evolution – indeed destruction – of what used to be an independent national press corps into a de facto cabinet arm of a Democrat Administration is why we face our current choice for the presidency.  That choice is between a radical, non-politician presumptive GOP nominee who is often as critical of members of his own party as he is of the opposition, and a life-long criminal, most of whose own supporters will admit in private that she is a pathological liar.

Two of the main institutional pillars that have ensured the existence of our uniquely American form of democracy for more than two centuries are the existence of a strong adversarial national press corps and the presumption that the voters would elect men and women who respect the Constitution and who are capable of being shamed for their misbehaviors.  Bill Clinton proved beyond all doubt that a man who lacks the capability for shaming, combined with a press corps that has abandoned its duty as the protector of the public interest in favor of crass partisan politics can survive in the office of the presidency with impunity. 

Barack Obama learned that lesson well and has followed that model religiously with an even more lapdog-tamed press corps for the last eight years.  Hillary Clinton would have to also follow this model in order to stay out of prison, given the damage she has intentionally and knowingly done to our national security, and the influence-peddling racket she and her husband have run via their “Foundation” for the last dozen years.

The one tool that congress used to have at its disposal in order to curb some of the excesses of a criminal administration, the Special Counsel law, was allowed by the GOP-dominated congress to expire late in Bill Clinton’s second term in office.  This law provided for an independent panel made up of three federal judges that would consider the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate alleged executive branch crimes at congress’s request.

True, the law was heinously abused by Democrat-controlled congresses during the Reagan and Bush 41 years, which was the driving factor that led the 1999 congress to let the law expire.  But wouldn’t it have been a nice tool for congress to have had at its disposal over the last six years, as blatant abuses by this president of the IRS, FBI, Justice Department, EPA and Interior Department have gone largely unreported by the news media, and uninvestigated in any real sense by a completely corrupted Justice Department?

Should Donald Trump be fortunate enough to win this election and have GOP majorities in both houses of congress, one of his very first acts in office should be to propose renewal of the special counsel statute, even at the risk of having future Democrat congresses abuse it against Republican presidents.

Republicans like to brag that we respect the Constitution and separation of powers.  With the death of anything resembling an independent press corps, the existence of a special counsel law is one way to help protect the Republic against future outlaw presidencies like the one we have experienced for the last eight years.

David Who???

That was my initial reaction last night when the rumor began circulating through the social media that the poor schlub who Bill Kristol has convinced to mount a doomed-to-fail third party presidential run is some guy named David French.

Before we get into Mr. French and his background, it is important to remember that, over the weekend, Mr. Kristol promised that his Chosen One would be a high profile individual who would have "a real chance".  Many of us took that to mean that he'd have a "real chance" to actually be competitive in the presidential race, but to be scrupulously fair to the shark-jumping Mr. Kristol, he did not specify exactly what it is that his sacrificial lamb...er, candidate would have a "real chance" of doing.  Maybe he meant that the candidate would have a "real chance" to fail miserably and cause Mr. Kristol to become forevermore a laughingstock in the nation's capitol - who really knows?

Now, none of that is meant to demean the actual character of Mr. French, who has bravely served his country in Operation Iraqi Freedom, earning a Bronze Star in the process.  He owns a law degree and currently is a blogger for the National Review.  He is married and is the father of three children.  Good deal.  I'm sure he's a very fine guy.

All that having been conceded, my reaction remains:  "David who???"

Seriously, this is the depths to which the 173 remaining bloggers and far rightwing DC writers who make up the final straggling remnants of the failed #NeverTrump movement have sunk, their collective influence so minuscule at this point that they couldn't convince any actual politician who someone might actually have heard of to head their Quixotic final effort to derail the GOP presidential nominee?

This is pathetic, really.

Mr. French:  you should really reconsider your decision to associate yourself with these people.  It's like becoming the leader of Pig Island in the Angry Birds movie.   Trust me, you have more productive things to do with your time.

Trump vs. Lapdog Media - a Day in Review, 5.31.2016

Let's quickly review the events of the day:

1. Donald Trump holds a free-wheeling, hour long press conference during which he details where the $6 million raised for veterans has been contributed or is about to be donated, excoriates the press in general for being inherently biased and dishonest - both of which accusations are 100% correct - and singles out one ABC reporter as being a "sleaze".  Also true.
   
2. Bernie Sanders calls a "press conference" about healthcare.  He speaks for ten minutes, takes no questions at all, and no one in the lapdog press corps covering his campaign objects.
3. Hillary Clinton studiously avoids having any meaningful, un-planned, un-staged interaction with the lapdog press corps covering her campaign for about the 180th consecutive day, and no one in the media will object.
4. Finally, at 12:50 p.m., CST today, I went over to the landing page for the very liberal Politico.com, and inventoried the various headlines there.  There were at that time 25 headlines in all, and the word "Trump" appeared in 17 of them, including 9 of the first 10 in order.

This is how Donald Trump has dominated this election season to this point, and how he will continue to dominate it through Election Day.  And neither the Clinton Campaign nor her lapdog press agents in the mainstream news media have the slightest clue what to do about it.