What a Small, Small, Small Man

At first I thought it was fake news, something you might see on the Onion or Babylon. As I scanned it, I discarded it into the this can't be real category. But I was wrong, this one was real. And it paints out what a hateful, petty and vindictive schmo we have sitting in the governor's mansion in New York State.

The story is, of course about Governor Andrew Cuomo vetoing the Democrat-sponsored Senate and Assembly bill passed by a wide margin that would have expanded the ability of all Federal judges in New York State to perform weddings. Some Federal judges in certain districts can already officiate at weddings and this bill would have simply added all of them to the list of recognized officiants.

Andrew Cuomo's veto was a surprise, and his comments afterward were despicable.

"I cannot in good conscience support legislation that would authorize such actions by Federal judges who are appointed by this Federal administration," said Cuomo after his Christmas eve veto.

"President Trump does not embody who we are as New Yorkers. The cornerstones that built our great State are diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. Based on these reasons, I must veto this bill."

Really? Diversity, tolerance and inclusion? By vetoing it, you just put a fork into diversity, tolerance and inclusion, Mr. Governor. And by giving such a shallow reason for your veto (it's not about the judges, it's a dig at Donald Trump) ... you showed how intolerant you are. Your hate oozed out and vitriolic hate has no place in government. Party politics are okay during the election, but the election is over and now you're supposed to represent both sides, Republican and Democrat. Republican judges are not worthy of performing a simple wedding ceremony? You should be ashamed of yourself, but like your brother Fredo on CNN, you're not. If the Cuomo clan is to be compared with the Corleone family of film, I guess you'd be Sonny, the hothead. Spoiler alert: Sonny's hot temper didn't benefit him well in the movie, and Fredo's attempts at being a big shot didn't work out for him in the end either.

The legislation was sponsored by Democratic Sen. Liz Krueger, who had this to say in response:

"Four years ago we gave the Governor the ability to perform marriages. Two years ago we gave legislators that ability. Marriage in New York is inclusive, equal, and open to all who want it. So when it was suggested to me that we expand it to Federal judges, I thought, 'Why not? The more the merrier!'" ... "I'm certainly no fan of the judges this president is choosing to appoint - but since any New Yorker can become a minister online for $25 and legally perform weddings, I didn't consider this to be a major issue.

And you are correct, Senator. On the big scene, it's small potatoes. Seriously, how much harm can a Federal judge do at a wedding ceremony?

Sadly, by using the governor's office as a bully pulpit,  Andrew Cuomo again showed us what a pezzo di merda he really is. A hateful, intolerant one at that.

I'm ashamed to live in New York State, and Mr. Cuomo, you're the major reason why. With luck, we'll be out of here before you're up for election again.

What Goes Around, Comes Around

December 18, 2019... A date which will live in shameful infamy. Today, the hateful Democrats in the House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump on trumped-up charges. Americans expect such vitriolic hate from the likes of AOC, Rashida, Ilhan, Schiff, Nadler, Pelosi and others. But the supposed blue-dog Democrats eking out a living in Republican territory displayed how weak and meaningless their representation really is. They know what's right and wrong. They know this is a partisan hack job the Democrat leadership has had on the drawing board since November 2016.

They know this is wrong, and they probably suspect history will judge them as such when the dust settles in a few decades. But when you sell your soul to devil in the form of outside money, standing up and doing right by the country is not on their menu. You don't get there unless you take their money, and when you take their money, it comes with strings attached. Once you cash their checks, you've become Howdy-Doody with some power, and the puppeteers are the rich donors. If you cut the strings, you cut the influx of money and ... it's good-night, Irene ... Suddenly, the money is donated to somebody else more suited to their needs.

This sham-impeachment is their method of trying to embarrass the President they've never really recognized as the President. Sadly, they embarrassed themselves and worse, the entire country. Trump's numbers have grown considerably since this began, and I expect the increase to last for a while, probably through the election.

They claim he cheated, and still do to this day. They tried using the special prosecutor law to remove him from office. When that failed, the whistle blower system was used. Never mind that Joe Biden brags on video about blackmailing the Ukrainian government by threatiing to withhold well over a billion dollars in aid unless they fire a prosecutor unfriendly to them, it's Donald Trump's sin that he wondered if that rose to the level of a crime. I think we can all figure that one out, espcially when his son, with -zero- credentials in the energy field, is suddenly appointed to the board of a Ukrainian gas company and made well over a million dollars for basically selling the Biden name to protect them.

This will come back to bite the Democrats in the ass. First, they have to get by the November 2020 elections, and what they did today is not going to help them. The Democrats for Trump numbers are growing. Toss-up areas that lean Republican are most likely going to fire their Democrat Congressmen this coming fall. The representative in my area most likely should be taking a lot of pictures to remember Washington by because the district clearly thinks this is an abuse of power and will give him the pink slip this coming November.

District 22 in NYS is certainly not the only one that is upset with their representative. I predict not only will the President be re-elected with a strong margin, but the house will also return to a Republican majority.

Someday there will be another Democrat President, and I pity that person. The precedents being set today in DC are going to come back and haunt the Democrats. Whether you like it or not, politics does have a revenge factor to it, which we are seeing played out today.

Someday this is going to be used as the model against a Democrat President, and the howls, screams and protests are going to fall on deaf ears. Because as we all know ...

What comes around, goes around.

Conflict of Interest

When an elected representative stands to gain anything personal as a result of their vote, the ethical thing for that person to do is to recuse themselves from voting on that issue. Anything, of course means such things as money, a better position, more power, and similar.

As it becomes obvious the Democrats are going to impeach Donald Trump in the House of Representatives and send the articles to the Senate for trial, it also becomes obvious there are some that stand to personally gain from this.

These are the people currently serving in the US Senate that are running for President. Currently, they are Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bennet and Bernie Sanders.

Sitting in judgement of the person whose job they want and are actively campaigning for is clearly a conflict of interest; by removing the biggest obstacle to their ascending to the Presidency, they clearly stand to personally gain. Trump is a formidable opponent to face in an election, and voting to tarnish him while simultaneously running against him is unethical. And we all know how these people want to show how ethical they are. (cough, cough...)

Considering this, these people should do the honorable thing and recuse themselves from sitting in on the trial and voting afterwards. Honest and ethical people would see this obvious conflict and step aside.

Of course, we are not talking about honorable and ethical people when we talk about jackals like Booker, Warren, Bennet, Klobuchar and Sanders.

Looking at things from the top down, let's add Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris to the list of conflicted also. While they have officially dropped out of the race, the fact that they even entered the race and stayed as long as they did jaundices their ability to look at the facts fairly and render an unbiased judgement. They've clearly heard Hail to the Chief played too many times and thought it was for them.

Also, we ought to have a short list of Democrat Vice-Presidential candidates currently sitting in the Senate, because they also stand to personally gain by voting on this.

Any US Senator that votes in the impeachment trial should remove themselves from consideration in the 2020 Presidential/Vice Presidential election.

That is, if they really, really want to show us how ethical they are.

Don't hold your breath on these people recusing themselves. Why, it's their duty, of course.

Which, of course, makes us wonder why all the missed votes on other things wasn't also their duty to vote on.

Oh, of course! They were too busy running for President!

It's Been About Impeachment From Day One

As I look at the political divide in America, I wonder how it got to where it is. Politics used to be somewhat polite, excepting the occasional kook from one party or the other. Political opponents in Congress were diplomatically tactful when they referred to a member of the opposite party as my esteemed colleague even though in real life they didn't really like them much. In the 2016 election, the Democrats were feeling pretty good about things as election day neared. They figured Clinton was a shoe-in and all the polls seemed to agree. CNN even put Clinton up by about 10 points a week or two before the election.

It didn't go well for the Democrats. They lost, and they lost pretty good. Trump surpassed the minimum electoral college number (270) by 34 votes (total of 304) and would have had 306 if two electors kept their promise and didn't defect. Hillary Clinton fared worse with the electors, 5 bolted from her and voted for somebody else.

Since then, it's been total political warfare on the part of liberal Democrats. Refusing to acknowledge that Trump won, they came up with a plethora of excuses, everything from Fox News playing on the TV in corner bars and uneducated rednecks voting for Trump to James Comey wrecking Clinton. Never mind that Clinton wrecked Clinton, the excuses kept coming. Impeachment resolutions were introduced even when the House was still under a Republican majority; these early attempts at impeaching Donald Trump went as far as the Speakers waste basket. They attacked the electoral college and vowed to get rid of it (good luck with getting 37 states to pass an amendment getting rid of Article II, Section I). Seriously, do you think the states with a small number of electors are going to give up their say in a Presidential election to a handful of populous blue states?

But then the Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the 2018 election, and the soup de jour since then has been getting rid of Donald Trump. They were pretty sure the Mueller-Russia collaboration investigation was going to bear fruit, and when it didn't, they dedicated themselves to finding something else to pin on him.

Donald Trump certainly has his share of enemies in government and after the Russia-Mueller disaster, it didn't take long for one of them to don an anonymous cloak while proclaiming himself to be a whistleblower; now we see the results of what was a forgone conclusion: The Democrat majority in the House of Representatives is going to impeach Donald Trump and send the articles to the Senate for trial as prescribed in our constitution. Never mind the lack of facts, witnesses that gave hearsay testimony (somebody told me somebody said ...), and never mind that Joe Biden is on video bragging about forcing the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor or withhold more than a billion dollars in aid (quid pro quo, if there ever was one).

Never mind the tepid performance put on by Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler. Never mind that they blew their chance at convincing the American public that Donald Trump committed a high crime. After 3 years of constantly attacking Trump, they blew it. Americans are getting tired of this dog and pony show and they're showing it. The good news is, weak Democrat Congress reps in Republican territory are going to get their ass kicked in 2020 for going along with this circus and the likelihood that the House will return to Republicans is a pretty good bet as it stands today. Could change tomorrow, but as it is now, Trump is gaining strength off of this theater in the absurd. And Trump isn't stupid, it's another pretty good bet he will campaign in the Republican toss-up districts which will help Republican candidates retake the House.

In the meanwhile,we have to sit back and watch the Democrats waste time and truckloads of money while things that need real attention are pushed aside. We could have had a new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico by this time, we could have had an infrastructure bill to rebuild our highways in progress ... but no. This is how the Democrats wish to use their power in the House and there is -nothing- we can do about it right now.

Oh, but in November of next year, there is something we can and will do about it. And that is to send another shock into liberals by kicking as many of them as we can out of office... all while sending Donald Trump back for a second term.

I'll close by telling another tale of why I believe it was always about impeachment from day one:

My family members are all liberals (I apologize in advance for their stupidity) and my nephew is a rabid liberal. I mean a Trump-hating foaming at the mouth liberal. Other than politics, we get along. A month or two into Trumps Presidency, I ran into him out and about and of course, Trump came up. After offering his opinion of him, he offered a bet that Trump would be impeached by March 2019. It was his idea, not mine, but I accepted the bet knowing more than a year would elapse before we knew who would win. We both took a $20 bill out of our wallet, signed and put them in a sealed envelope in a very secure place and waited. On March 1 of this year, I went and opened the envelope. I won; the money is mine. (I'll happily take doubling my money in ~2 years). I even started a internet time countdown clock to periodically remind him I was not only going to take his money, but I was going to enjoy taking his money, especially seeing as it was his idea to begin with.

But we both knew that the Democrats were eventually going to impeach Trump ... on trumped-up charges, no less.

Someday, there will be an unpopular Democrat in the White House, and the precedents being set now are going to come back to haunt them when Republicans turn the tables on them.

So, I'll take the both the money and the lesson learned from my nephew:

It's been about impeachment from day one.

Stupid Quote of the Week 16November2019

Stupid is as stupid does says and this week, UC-Berkeley instructor Jackson Kernion blew the bell off the top of the stupid post with these baubles of insanity:

This is the short version. He also said we should live uncomfortable lives and that we should pay more for health insurance. I'm not sure why rural Americans should pay more, but he thinks so. And if he thinks rural Americans, especially farmers aren't already living an uncomfortable life, perhaps he ought to spend a couple of weeks milking the ladies twice a day, 365 days a year. Or 366 days as the leap year comes around. ... Not to mention plowing, planting and harvesting all while playing the weather lottery. That is, if the equipment doesn't break down at the worst possible time.

Jackson supposedly teaches philosophy.  I've got a theoretical scenario for him: Why doesn't he philosophize what it would be like if rural America didn't grow the food he eats every day. Maybe after a few days of not having food, he might appreciate rural America a little more, and not wish us misery.

Who am I kidding? This is Berkeley, California ... the home of liberal brainwashing and probably its capital. 

Perhaps I'm being a little hard on Jackson. I've lived next to a dairy farm in Upstate NY for 41 years and counting, and I'm wondering what Jackson has in mind to make life more uncomfortable than it already is for my farming neighbors. The last time I saw my farm neighbors take a (real) vacation was ... oh yeah, never.

I have to compliment him on his unique choice of words The adverb unironically seems rather ironic in this instance. Nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is another combination of words I hope I never hear again. First of all, nostalgia is not a crime or bad thing, and if we're talking about imagined pastoral things, all the paintings of heaven I've ever seen are ... imagined and pastoral, if I'm not mistaken. If heaven turns out to be like South Chicago or East LA (or the Berkeley campus), please put me on the down escalator. I'll take my chances.

When the tweet went viral, Jackson apologized (sort of) and deleted it. Maybe being held up to ridicule had something to do with that. But the damage was done, and again we get a glimpse of how higher education really thinks. Jackson, if you think rural America is going to forget this one, think again.

In case you need something else to think about, give this some thought:

The big cities need rural America the hell of a lot more than rural America needs the big cities. Ideally, we both need each other, but I'm quite sure that if push comes to shove, we'll last the hell of a lot longer without you than you will without us. I'm not thinking those amber waves of grain have much to do with 1/4-acre inner city vegetable gardens.

Oh, and thanks for assuming some of us are good people. Unironically, we think the same thing about some of you.

PS: About the shaming part... Shame on you for being such a cluck dimbulb. 

I Can't Figure Out if I'm Honored or Insulted

I usually write when I'm motivated; if I'm forced to write, I turn out pulp. When I began a weekly blog about stupid things people said a while back, it quickly became a chore when the weekend arrived and I drew a blank.

Oh, that doesn't mean the week passed without stupidity, it just means nothing rose above my threshold of stupidity that week, or I missed something I shouldn't have. I confess I'm a tad sarcastic in my writings because ... I don't suffer fools easily.

One of the nice things about writing a blog is that the toolset of the blog host is rich; it gives me information on hits, sources, rough locations and the like. Occasionally, I peruse them mostly out of curiosity to see if real numbers are reading my writings. Some blogs are blah and some have some real good numbers. Publishing my work to Facebook brings many readers and if the blog is contentious (as some of them are), it also brings comments. Some are favorable, some are not. Either way, I don't censor them. If people honor me by reading my words, I honor them by letting them tell me I'm a bastard if that's the way they feel.

So it was with surprise that after my last blog, I saw a source visiting my blog I had not seen before: plagscan.com. Curious as to what that was, I googled and visited it. It turns out it's a plagiarism checking website; one with both single-user and business/education subscription tiers. I looked into their rates and it looks like they lean heavily towards educational subscribers to make money.

I asked myself "Self, what is somebody doing running my blog writing through a plagiarism scanning website?"

Initially, I admit I was somewhat miffed that somebody thinks I'm not the author of my written thoughts; so much so that they would check my work to see if it is/was plagiarized. Maybe they were hoping to call me out on it because they vehemently disagreed with my words. If it came back as plagiarized (and looking at how the scanners work, they start with three sequential words and go from there), maybe they could finish their comments with Go to hell, you plagiarizing &*!#@.

Let me assure you: My writings are original and the product of my ideas and work. If I embed somebody else's work inside them (as I did once when I credited Stilton.com for nicely phrasing my exact thoughts), I give them credit.

I've written some unpublished books and don't think I'll bother to ever get an ISBN number for them. I'm working on my third book and that one, I will probably publish. (It's about small town politics, my 12 years on the Town Board I live in and how 5 seemingly good and decent people can reveal what utter fools and sometimes outright crooks they are.) I also construct crossword puzzles when an idea tickles my fancy.

But I don't steal other peoples work, and that's why I'm confused when I see somebody, probably with educational system ties run my work through a plagiarism scanning website. Do they think I'm not capable of writing what they just read? Do they think I'm a word thief? Are my ideas so unoriginal that they deserve to be called out as old news?

I don't know. But now that I'm tuned up on plagiarism scanners, I decided to run my last blog through one of the free scanning websites to see if in fact I was a plagiarizer. It turns out ... I'm innocent.

Here's a snapshot of some of the referring sites that hit that blog including plagscan.

I trimmed the picture to not display now many hits came from plagscan, but I will say it was more than one.

So, should I be insulted or honored that my words motivated somebody to run one or more of my blogs through a plagiarizing scanner? As I jokingly tell people when I'm answering an obvious question ...

I'm ... so ... confused.

Crimes Against Humanity, Then and Now

One of the first decisions of the Nazi war trials held after WW2 was what crimes the defendants were to be charged with. In the first Nuremberg trial, 21 high-ranking Nazis were tried for crimes that fell into 4 categories:

• Conspiracy to wage aggressive war
• Waging an aggressive war
• War crimes
• Crimes against humanity

Nobody seriously disputes that the Nazis conspired and waged an aggressive war and also committed war crimes. Sometimes history softens as time goes by, but not in this instance. Ironically, war crimes weren't limited only to the Nazis; for example American GIs machine-gunned 50 unarmed German SS prisoners of war in a barbed-wire enclosure and the Russians committed many atrocities as an act of revenge as they advanced into Germany. Nobody was ever charged with crimes in those instances.

Crimes against humanity is rather broad and is certainly appropriate for the indiscriminate killing of millions. Humanity definitely suffered, but the question of whether or not crimes against humanity are actual laws or were made up on the spot to address genocide was never asked. Humanity has always suffered during wars and still does to this day. Seeking justice, we tried them, sentenced 11 of them to death and 7 to lengthy prison terms. Three were (surprisingly) acquitted. Goering cheated the hangman a few hours before he was to be hanged and the rest of them walked to the gallows. In 103 minutes, 10 top Nazis were dead.

In total, there were 13 war crimes trials at Nuremburg; 199 defendants were tried, 161 of them were found guilty and 37 of them were sentenced to death. Not all of the 37 were actually put to death and in most cases, the prison sentences were commuted early. For what it's worth, the British were the most prolific at hanging Nazis; between 1945 and 1949 they hung 210 war criminals including quite a few women. Their skilled hangman Albert Pierrepoint practically turned their gallows into a (dis)assembly line.

Ah, but I digress; something I often do. Let's get back to the subject.

To be sure, the Nazis committed war crimes, but crimes against humanity are usually used to address large-scale genocide. 60 years later, Saddam Hussein ended up on the wrong end of the rope for the same charge.

To see how this could even come to pass, you have to look at the rise of National Socialism in Germany and what quickly ensued when they took the reins of power in 1933. First, consider how bad things were in Germany as the Nazis rose to power. The German people were so desperate they ceded power to these extremists (lesson learned - never give power to rabble-rousing rioters or extremists) and that set the stage. Also consider the irony that Adolf Hitler ran in 1932 and lost the only election he ever ran in.

In that same election the Nazi party took a fair number of seats (about 1/3) in the Reichstag and under pressure, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933. Shortly after that, the Nazi juggernaut began rolling towards absolute dictatorial control. Things happened fast after that, very fast. A little more than a month later, the Dachau concentration camp began construction in March 1933, which coincidentally is the month the enabling act was passed. The enabling act gave Hitler and his cabinet power to enact laws without the Reichstag. With this power, Hitlers edicts, laws and decrees set Germany on the path to the holocaust and global war. When Hindenburg died in 1934, the last obstacle to Hitler's total power was gone. In September 1935 the Nuremberg decrees took rights away from Jews and other untermensch. (He wasn't the first head of state to take citizen's rights away with pen and paper; Abraham Lincoln did pretty much the same thing during the civil war when he suspended habeous corpus and imprisoned newspaper editors who opposed him, which clearly wasn't constitutional and still isn't.)

Throughout the 12 years of the Nazi Reich, more laws were implemented that simply made stealing property and killing legal. To them, they weren't breaking any laws at all. They just made what they were doing legal with words on paper as they deemed necessary.

Why am I boring you with all this WW2 Nazi trivia when the subject is crimes against humanity?

What the Germans did was in fact a crime against humanity; also consider that they thought it was perfectly legal. And that is the crux of what I want to emphasize here: Laws may make something legal, but it doesn't always make them moral.

Clearly, laws should always be cloaked in some form of morality. Otherwise, what's the reason for enacting them?

That was the then part, let's talk about the now part.

Fast forward about 3 decades after WW2: In 1973, Roe v Wade made abortion legal by washing the Federal government's hands of the issue. Abortion is legal as I write this, but that doesn't make it moral. Since then, most estimates agree that over 60+ million viable human beings in America have been aborted.

I've heard the arguments on both sides. Women's rights are the motto of the pro-abortion advocates. (They prefer to be called pro-choice and I prefer my description. Since I'm the author, I get to choose the words.) I only ask one question when I hear this: Since when did anybody get the right to extinguish a human life?

Crimes against humanity can take different forms, it seems. What did I say about the indiscriminate killing of millions before? Oh yes. It fits the description pretty close.

America is suffering major political dissension as I write this. In recent years, about 120 million or so take the time to vote in a Presidential election year and it's pretty close as to the split. What's not said is that about 90 million do not vote and not only is that sad, it makes a statement about how much apathy there is in our country. Things are heating up and political parties are now being aligned and weaponized in an attempt to subvert the constitutional election and power of the President; one big reason is that the appointment of conservative judges to the judiciary has the possibility of reversing the big issue liberals really care about, and of course I'm talking about abor, er, infanticide which currently appears to be legal regardless of which side of the uterus it occurs on.

I've seen predictions of civil war a few times already, and I'm not sure what the outcome of this is going to be. I'm approaching old age and the last thing I want is to see the country suffer (and myself along with it) in large-scale civil unrest. If it happens, I hope I'm not around to see it. If I am, I hope to sit it out. If that's not possible, then I will follow my moral compass wherever it leads me.

Looking at it from the top down, I'm not sure those 90+ million are going to sit it out if it happens. I'm betting the radicals are not going to prevail because its an easy guess most apathetic people aren't radical; rather, it just takes a lot to stir them to action. But if it happens, a new day is going to dawn after and I'm betting a whole bunch of people are going to be held responsible, just as they were 75 years ago.

And that brings us back to the question of crimes against humanity. Remember, legality is not always morality.

If the Germans thought passing laws to make mass extermination legal justified it, how is the United States different when well over a million viable human beings are legally slaughtered here every year?

The question begs: If the extermination of over 60 million human beings since abortion became legal isn't a crime against humanity, what is? Worse, if we don't recognize it for what it is and fix it ...

Then we're no better than the Germans were 75 years ago.

Good Riddance

It's rather ironic that NY Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted good riddance after he found out Donald Trump filed papers to change his domicile from New York to Florida ... especially after uttering words quite contrary to that earlier this year. Of course, I'm talking about when he said  God Forbid the Rich Leave  when he was talking about the problem of wealthy people fleeing New York State.(click on the link to read my previous comments).  Here's the tweet, and may I add it's a toss-up as to whether it's a Halloween trick or not.

That's a classic, Mr. Cuomo. Last February you pissed and moaned about rich people leaving NYS. Now it's good riddance? And do you really think he escaped paying your highest-in-the-nation NY taxes? I'll take odds that he's paid far more than you have cumulatively, Andy.

It's not just the rich leaving, it's a good cross-section of New Yorkers. Individual reasons may vary, but inevitably they all end up at the same square in the flow chart: Liberal Democratic policies. Paradoxically, good riddance is something 47 out of 62 counties in NY State tried to tell you when you ran for re-election last time, seeing as you only won 15 counties ... but they were the populous ones (downstate, NYC) and that put you back in office. Meanwhile, upstate still suffers from atrophy and the result of that is a large population loss, the likes of which NYS has never seen before. For example, in one recent year alone, NYS lost somewhere north of 50,000 people. In reality it was over 125,000 long-time NY residents because you imported more than 75,000 from other countries to become proud NYS residents ... and eventually, they'll even pay taxes. But for 5 or so years... they won't. Integration takes time, as well you know.

I love the upstate rural area where I live, but I hate how NYS has been ruined by liberal government. When 2 major things keeping my wife and me here are resolved, we plan on joining the thousands of New Yorkers who leave NYS every year - for good. Oh, we'll come back and visit as we desire, but the lifetime of money and assets we've accumulated are going south with us.

So, Andy ... Another billionaire leaves NYS and you somehow conclude that's a good thing. Let us know how that works out at budget time and how you plan on making up the difference. As you are well aware, he's not the first billionaire to leave and I'm wagering he won't be the last, either.

Also, remember plenty of us poor folks take our money with us when we leave.

As Everett Dirkson, the renowned Senator from Illinois used to say ....

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.

Seriously. WTF, Over?

When something bizarre becomes reality before your very eyes, often you pause. Maybe you wince, maybe you pinch yourself to make sure you're not dreaming, or maybe you just shrug your shoulders and chock it up as another sign of the times we live in.

I'm talking about the people we empower who (sooner or later) display signs of insanity by adopting nicknames or aliases. Some are self-named and some inherit their new name from the public at large for something they said or did. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised; this happened centuries ago in America with the likes of Publius, Silence Dogood and others.

Let's take a closer look at some of them. We'll start with the latest revelation and work backwards.

Oh, Senator Mitt, er, Pierre Delecto. This is truly a WTF moment in your life if there ever was one. It wasn't enough that you occupy a position very clearly opposed to the President on just about everything, you had to add a fake voice to the conversation. Was this sour grapes for losing an election to Barack Obama that you should have won? You'll never live this one down. Pierre Delecto will be your moniker long after you're dead and buried, and the kicker is you chose it yourself. Mitt Romney will soon be forgotten, but Pierre will live on in infamy. You -do- know what infamy means, don't you? Famous for a bad reason... This one is better than strapping your dog to the roof of your car for a 12-hour vacation drive, something we learned about during your failed Presidential campaign. Thanks for the laughs, Mitt, er, Pierre.

But he's not the only elected Federal legislator to have taken a juicy alias. Anthony Weiner (remember him) chose Carlos Danger as his mask when he was sexting females with pictures of his ... muscular body, yeah, that's it. Anthony was a Congressman who was shamed out of office and then NYC Mayoral candidate until he doubled down by repeating what got him kicked out of Congress (sexting an underage teen) and ... spent a while in jail as a result. His wife (Huma, Mrs. Clinton's top aide) forgave him the first time but couldn't take the embarrassment twice, so she divorced him. I'm still trying to figure out if that was a punishment for him or not. As usual, their kid is the real victim here.

Then we move down to those representatives that earned a nickname for something they said or claimed to have done ... That list includes:

Senator Cory Booker, aka Spartacus. He brought that name upon himself when he thought his actions during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings made him some sort of folk legend (it didn't). What Booker doesn't realize was that Spartacus may have started out with honorable intentions, but his army quickly turned into looters and pillagers and those that survived were crucified not only for being rebel warriors, but also for being thieves. On second thought, maybe there is a comparison between Booker and Spartacus's army.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, aka Fauxcahontas. She earned that nickname with her false claims of having a native American (Cherokee) bloodline, which of course a DNA test proved is completely bogus. As more documents turn up (besides her plagiarized Pow Wow Chow cookbook), it appears she used the claim to first further her career in law, then to give herself a leg up as a Professor at Harvard, and finally to get elected to the US Senate from Massachusetts. If there ever was a candidate for Masshole of the century, she'd be in the running. Of course, as she campaigns for President as a closet socialist, she keeps stacking lie upon lie as she goes. Even when her lies are debunked (the latest one being pushed out of a teaching job for being pregnant), she keeps making it up as she goes along. God help us all if this female gasbag ever makes it to the White House.

There are others. How an Irish white man in Texas gets a Latino name of Beto merits mention. Pete Buttigieg now owns the moniker Alfred E. Neuman. Hillary Clinton goes by Killary, mostly due to the surprising number of people in her circle of current or former acquaintances that suddenly and prematurely end up on a table in the morgue. And although CNN's Chris Cuomo isn't elected (big media is a power of a sort), he earned the moniker of Fredo for spazzing out on camera when somebody called him that.

If you're wondering why America is so fucked up, just take a long look at mental midgets like these with power (or formerly with power) and it should become clear to you in no time at all. You just can't make this shit up.

In Defense of Felicity Huffman

I'm not a bleeding heart liberal; in fact, I'm rather conservative. But I also understand that human beings are imperfect and sometimes we lose sight of things we shouldn't. Such is the case of actress Felicity Huffman, Hollywood celebrity and parent of college-age children. She's also politically left-leaning and isn't a big fan of Donald Trump. She pretty much fits the description of a liberal activist, if a definition were ever to be printed in a dictionary. Sitting in my ivory tower, it would be easy for me to sling ha-ha-on-you mud at her with the best of them. But I won't, and here's why.

When the college-payoff scandal broke, she was among 50 people indicted. The other high-profile couple indicted with the group was actress Lori Loughlin and her husband. They have pleaded not guilty and are fighting the charges, something I deem a major mistake. Time will tell; as my mother used to say, The wheel of justice turns slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine.

Huffman, to her credit, never uttered a word of denial. She knew what she was doing was wrong and we can safely bet that if it wasn't an act to help her daughter, she wouldn't have done it. She came to the bar with clean hands almost immediately and pleaded guilty pretty much just as fast as she could. And she made no bones about it - she publicly admitted her guilt without making excuses for her behavior.

I'm a parent myself and I know plenty of other parents who have gone a little further than they should have in acts to protect or help their children. I'm not saying I would have paid somebody off to change their grades, but I damn well used every resource at my disposal to keep them on the right path. This includes using a friendship with a local police chief while I sat on the municipal board that oversaw him to locate a runaway stepson 3000 miles away a few decades ago. I'm sure he would have investigated it anyway regardless of my position, but personal conversations letting him know his mother was besides herself over it didn't hurt either.

Some people think Huffman got off too easy. Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. Opinions vary. She was sentenced to 14 days in jail, a year of probation with 250 hours of community service and a fine of twice what she paid ($30,000). I'm not a judge and I don't know if the sentence matches the crime.

But I do know parents will go to far lengths to help their children, sometimes further than they should.

The biggest thing that motivates me to write about this is her complete and timely admission that what she did was, in fact, wrong. It demonstrates 2 things: One, she has a conscience and two, she knows she is not above John Q. Public in regards to the law.

So, Ms. Huffman, you are in jail as I write this. 14 days will probably turn out to be 10 or 11 days (I understand there are jail credits average people like me don't know about). You will have a year after that to perform your community service and report to probation as required, and that will be your real sentence. I'm reminded of a petty criminal who was our town supervisor 25 years ago and was caught using highway department employees to remodel his own house. He got community service also (besides being kicked out of office) and that was the biggest thing he hated. Friends told me he said he'd rather go to jail than have to go to the soup kitchen and hand out food. As a side bar, his crime was what motivated me to run for office and eventually serve 3 terms on the board, so I guess it wasn't all bad.

So, Ms. Huffman, while our politics are 180 degrees apart, I actually admire you for showing us how to be penitent when we screw up.

And we all have screwed up at one point or another. Somebody else said it better: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Settled Science is an Oxymoron

The biggest lie you will hear repeated in the climate debate is that the science is settled. Science is never settled; it never has been and it never will be. In the 2nd century, Claudius Ptolemy scientifically "discovered" (using observation and charting) that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and planets all rotated around us. For the next 1400 years, that science was settled until Nicolaus Copernicus discovered (through observation and charting!) that Ptolemy was, in fact, dead wrong. And so it is with the climate debate; the science is far from settled and somebody in the future will most likely laugh at the science-alarmists of today who go around telling us that we're headed towards drowning, boiling, starving, or whatever the slogan of the day is. Science often reverses itself; in fact, ~40 years ago the cover of Time magazine told us we were headed for an ice age because scientists used data that concluded that mankind was doomed and we were all going to freeze to death at some point. Often, they can't even accurately predict the weather tomorrow, much less tell us what is going to happen in X number of years. So much for scientific predictions.

For the record, I'm not a scientist and I don't know if climate change (formerly called global warming, until the timetables fell apart) is real, and if it is, if it is caused by our existence on the planet or it is just a naturally-occurring event far beyond our control. There are plenty of real scientists on both sides of the issue and frankly, I don't know who to believe. If these so-called experts can't agree, why should I take a side when I don't know who or what to believe. The media is spectacularly good at spreading half-truths and whole lies, so you can't believe much of what they have to say about it either.

Climate change science has also spawned a cottage industry that depends on government money and once that teat is suckled, we all know how hard it is to wean off of. It's easy to keep beating the drum when the revenue stream is flowing, and nobody cashing their paycheck seems to be in a rush to turn that faucet off.

Ah, but I do know when a charlatan is brought before us, and recently Greta Thunberg wore those clothes. With her bold speech that we'll be watching you...  how dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood ...People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you... she showed us what a tool she is.

Greta, we didn't steal a goddamn thing from you. In fact, we have instilled at your fingertips the sum of all that man has accomplished to date. You whored yourself out to the panderers of doom and gloom that knew it would be hard to attack a naive and pretty 16-year old girl. How dare you allow yourself to be used this way... You spout disputed "facts" and numbers as if you're some sort of expert, when in fact all you are doing is regurgitating their we're all gonna die because you're idiots mantra. In fact, if the predictions we heard a decade or so ago were right, major cities would already be underwater. They aren't and again, that should tell you enough about scientific predictions and their accuracy.

But I do agree with you on one thing, but for a very different reason. We are headed for a mass extinction, but it has little to do with anything you've said. And it has nothing to do with a big asteroid or meteor crashing into the earth either. 

The mass extinction in the US began in 1973 when we legalized the killing of unborn human beings, Greta. In America, we've lost 60+ million living beings since then (probably hundreds of millions worldwide) and if that's not a large number, you tell me what is. When human beings can't agree on what a human being is or what being alive is, then we're headed down the tubes. When we so easily discard our values about human life and somehow justify the arbitrary slaughter of our future generations, we are doomed. You're 30 years too late to the party, sweetheart. The mass extinction already began almost 5 decades ago. How many Einsteins, how many Beethovens, how many Van Gogh's have been lost because some people couldn't be bothered to do what was done for them? If there is anything to get angry about, if there is anything you should wear a scowl over, it's that, Greta.

So while you have your 15 seconds of fame and cash the checks associated with that, the rest of us are going to go about our daily lives. And we're not going to chuck the inventions and innovations of those that preceded us because of a cult of people that think the sky is falling. Neither are we willingly going to open up our wallets wider to fund what you think ought to be done about it, and that's because if there's one thing government is good at, it's wasting money while taxing us to the nines. Frankly, we all read the story about the boy that cried wolf too many times, and we're getting tired of it

You were used, Greta and you don't even begin to understand how.

Stupid Q of the Week 21Sep

What a dog and pony show it was this week. First, the grey lady (NY Times) threw yet more mud at Justice Brett Kavanaugh with a hit job accusing him of inappropriate sexual conduct decades ago. Problem was, the details were sketchy and the "victim" refused to talk about it. It was another case of "all the news that's shit to print" from the biased fake newspaper. It's obvious this isn't about what Kavanaugh did or didn't do; rather, it's another attempt to remove him from the bench before another Roe v Wade redux hits the SCOTUS. Of course, all the turkeys calling themselves candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination immediately joined in calling for his impeachment .... and the irony of it all is they have more sins in their collective closet than Brett Kavanaugh could ever amass in 2 lifetimes.

Elizabeth Warren should impeach herself for falsely calling herself a native American Indian to further both her law and teaching career. Beto should be reminded he drove drunk and crashed a car, and then tried to drive away from the accident and probably would have, if somebody hadn't caught up to him and stopped him ... not to mention his arrest for burglary, of all things. Bernie Sanders ought to get on his prayer rug facing east and thank the deities that let his wife off after her stint running a college into oblivion while cashing some pretty large checks along the way. Kamala Harris ... well, I already wrote about her and she's no Mahatma Ghandi either.

In fact, all of the people running for President have skeletons in the closet. By the time you get to high office, you've trod on more than one set of toes. BTW, this includes the incumbent, but in spite of of that he still garnered over 300 electoral votes, mainly because his opponent was a bastard of epic proportions.

But all that changed when I read what MSNBC's Joy Reid said on Tuesday of this week. With no shame whatsoever, Joy clued us in that she's just another racist posing as a journalist, albeit on the airwaves, not in ink.

She said that white Christian men in America are "increasingly open" about their willingness to enact apartheid to ensure control of the government.

She said America has a problem because it has "a very determined minority—in this case, wealthy white men and wealthy white Christian men and Christian Americans who are of the fundamentalist variety."

She said those men, who support President Donald Trump as an "avatar" for their movement, are happy to use South Africa's infamous system of racial oppression to "maintain power forever."

This is the same Joy Reid that also came under fire for failing to provide evidence of her claim that hackers created a series of fake posts on her blog to discredit her. The posts, which were up for years on her blog "The Reid Report," contained homophobic language, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and other inflammatory material. She apologized but also alleged some of the posts were the product of "hackers" and called for a federal investigation. After a while, she dropped the request for an investigation, which pretty much tells us there were no "hackers" at all.

So here's my Ode to Joy, with apologies to Beethoven. I'm pretty sure that if he were still alive, he'd be glad he was deaf considering the felch the liberal media is trying to foist off as genuine journalism.

SQOTW 14Sep

It's Friday the 13th and a full moon is trying to peek out from behind the clouds as I write this. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with stupid people saying stupid things; maybe somebody will squeak one out tonight for honorable mention next week. We'll see.

This week's winner won twice; once for stupid quote of the week and also for stupid liar of the week. Of course I'm talking about Kamala Harris, who used her position (in more than one way!) as San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown's mistress to climb the political ladder all the way into the US Senate. California is, of course, so avant-garde that publicly dating a man 31 years older than her while he was still married didn't raise too many eyebrows. Often, Willie was so proud of his women that he would go to parties with his wife on one arm and his mistress on the other. Kamala "dated" him for quite a while, but when she was elected District Attorney and then Attorney General she realized she didn't need him anymore and dumped him with this comment:

"His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing."

I'm guessing Willie is regretting "dating" her now. And we can kind of take a guess at Kamala's character with that statement; it tells us she's a user of people to further herself, and when somebody can't do anything for her anymore, it's hasta la vista, baby.

But that's not what made her the winner this week. She's running for President (God help us all if she ever wins) and at a Town Hall in New Hampshire this week, after somebody in the audience called President Trump "mentally retarded," she replied Well said .... well said as she brushed her hair back and laughed. The man spoke very clearly and everybody heard his words. Not one word was mumbled. Her body language also tells us she was very much engaged in the conversation.

Of course, cameras were rolling and on replay, it dawned on her this was raw stupid for a supposedly politically correct Presidential candidate to do, so she attempted to spin her response with this tweet:

Kamala Harris

✔@KamalaHarris

When my staff played the video from my town hall yesterday, it was upsetting. I didn’t hear the words the man used in that moment, but if I had I would’ve stopped and corrected him. I’m sorry. That word and others like it aren’t acceptable. https:///1170434381003001857 

Denying she heard the words is something nobody is going to believe after watching that video, Kamala. A better approach would have been a sincere apology for your words and giggles, laced with a promise to try to do better next time. We're all human and most of us are familiar with the word "retarded." It still gets used often and I sure most of us have said it at one point or another.

Doubling down on her error and throwing away the chance to ever repair this, she followed it up with this bold lie:

"I heard him talk about the other stuff and then that came later and it was not something that I really heard or processed or I in any way condone. That's for sure," Harris told CBS News afterward.

Um, no. You heard it, you processed the words and you laughed. And then you honored the words, Kamala. The video doesn't give you any leeway to make that claim. It is patently clear you understood what was said.

I'm wondering if her pants burst into flames when she tried to spin it, but apparently they didn't, nor did they during the Kavanaugh inquisition confirmation hearings so I'm guessing that old adage really doesn't quite carry the penalty it says it does.

Besides, I'm betting Kamala realizes she needs the "retarded" vote when she tried to buff that scratch out, seeing as that's probably one of the prerequisites of being one of her supporters.

And you say Donald Trump is a liar. How ironic.

PS: If anybody comments on this blog entry, please don't say "well said, well said." That would seem ... retarded, considering the context.

SQOTW 7Sep

It was a slower week than last, but as always somebody or a group of somebodies said something stupid. San Francisco, the Gomorrah of the west coast qualified when their Board of Supervisors named the NRA a "domestic terrorist organization." Never mind that the NRA encourages patriotism, defends the Constitution of our country and promotes safe and responsible gun ownership with ongoing education, it is now a group of "terrorists". Thanks for the heads up; knowing ~5 million citizens of the US are now terrorists merely because you said so reinforces my thoughts about Trump Deranged Syndrome having infected the entire west coast of the US.

The irony of naming the NRA as terrorists but ignoring the radical violent mob of street rioters known as Antifa as much more worthy of the description strikes me as what happens when brain atrophy has reached critical mass in a Liberal. I visited SanFran decades ago ... and at this point, I can say with fair accuracy I'll never return. I never left my heart in San Francisco, but I'm pretty sure the majority of residents left their brain there long ago solely because they tolerate walking around human feces on the sidewalks as they conduct their daily business. I'm thinking some new strain of the black plague is going to arise out of this fertile environment because if government won't fix it, I'm betting mother nature is going to take a stab at it at some point down the road.

But this week even that stupidity loses to MSNBC's Chris Hayes, who, in a moment of sermonizing why the electoral college should be abolished came out with this gem:

 And the weirdest thing about the Electoral College is the fact that it wasn’t specifically in the Constitution for the presidency, it would be unconstitutional.

No shit, Sherlock. It wouldn't be legal if it wasn't  ...legal. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Congratulations, Mr. Obvious. Those words earn the dunce cap this week.

Oh, and good luck with that electoral college thing. Good luck trying to amend the Constitution to get rid of it. Do you really think 3/4 of the states are going to vote to diminish their say in Presidential elections? Do you really think the heartland of the US is going to allow 4 states to elect a President ... forever, going forward?

I doubt it. Wax philosophical all you want, it's not going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

But then again, who can really see the future, anyway? The best answer to that is historians, who already have a hint of what happens when the ability to choose representation suddenly goes away.

Stupid Quote of the Week (SQOTW) 31Aug

Oh, Lordy Lordy. What a smorgasbord of stupid quotes I had to choose from this week. Bill Maher led the pack early when he opened his piehole about the death of Billionaire David Koch. Instead of dipping into my lexicon for the right words to tell the story, I'll steal this post about Maher with credit to Stiltons Place blog who took the words right out of my mouth:

Which is why on "Real Time with Bill Maher," the obnoxious comic celebrated David Koch's passing with the following monologue (repeated here verbatim):

Fuck him...I'm glad he's dead!
(pause for laughs)
He was 79, but his family says they wish it could be longer. But at least he lived long enough to see the Amazon catch fire.
(pause for laughs)
Condolences poured in from all the politicians he owned, and mourners are being asked in lieu of flowers to just leave their car engine running.
(pause for laughs)
As for his remains, he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes blown into a child's lungs.
(pause for laughs - then it's time to get serious)
He and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate science deniers for decades, so fuck him. The Amazon is burning up. I'm glad he's dead and I hope the end was painful.

It's not rare to hear Leftists like Maher puke up naked hate speech, but to actually celebrate the pain that someone felt while dying of cancer is a new low.

We would never wish for the death or illness of anyone, and certainly not take pleasure from the pain someone experienced during an agonizing death. But if and when such a fate befalls Bill Maher personally, we're willing to make an exception to our rule.

This humorless bastard needs to start worrying a lot less about climate change, and a lot more about Karma.

FOR THE RECORD

David Koch once told the Wall Street Journal that he'd rather donate money to a good cause rather than "use it on buying a bigger house or a $150 million painting." Unlike the Obama family, clearly.

So to whom did David Koch donate?

$185 Million - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for cancer research, childcare center, biology building, and school of chemical engineering.

$150 Million - Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The biggest gift the center ever received.

$128 Million - New York Presbyterian Hospital

$100 Million - New York State Theater at Lincoln Center

$66.7 Million - Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

$65 Million - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

$35 Million - Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

$26.5 Million - M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

$26.2 Million - The Hospital for Special Surgery in New York

$20 Million - American Museum of Natural History

$20 Million - Johns Hopkins University, for a cancer research center.

If this was the Asshole of the Week contest, I'm sure Maher would have won hands down. Noting that he also hopes America will suffer an economic recession to hurt Trump's re-election chances elevates this cretin for the Asshole of the Year award. Can you imagine the uproar from liberals if it had been, say, Ruth Bader Ginsburg that died and Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity said those words about her on the air? 

Why do liberals ignore their own sinners but attack the other side with absolute rabid ferocity?  ... But I digress. (Hey, maybe I should start an Asshole of the Week blog post to complement this one ... Hmmm.)

I thought surely Maher would take top honors this week. But I was wrong; CNN came through again. It was a tough choice with CNN's April Ryan explaining why she had her (now, suddenly "former") bodyguard eject a cameraman (and steal his camera which ended in an arrest for assault, among other things) ... and then deny, in typical Sergeant Schultz fashion she told him to do anything. Suddenly, she knows nothing.

Ironically, April has sermonized about the sanctity of the freedom of the press with this tweet:

But April Ryan lost out to yet another CNN commentator who stooped lower than whale shit on the floor of the ocean to (again) prove CNN has -zero- credibility to match its paltry viewer ratings. Many Americans already know this after watching them air potential Democrat Presidential candidate and (for a little while more, anyway) Attorney Michael Avanatti over 200 times while he bashed Trump ... well, until he was arrested for such petty crimes as extortion, defrauding his clients and tax evasion.   ... But I digress again.

CNN's media pundit Brian Stelter outdid them all when he put on a credentialed whack-job psychiatrist who, unchecked, uttered these pearls of lunacy on the air:

“Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were,” psychiatrist Dr. Allen Frances told Stelter.

Instead of challenging him or outright stopping him, Stelter let him ramble on. When asked later why he didn't, Stelter offered this lame excuse:

“I agree that I should have interrupted after that line. I wish I had heard him say it, but I was distracted by tech difficulties."

The Blaze media critic Rob Eno said that he’s “not buying” Stelter’s excuse.

“That would be believable if Stelter hadn’t spent the last three years telling us that Trump was a threat to established norms and that the media should talk about Trump’s mental state,” Eno wrote. “Frances’ characterization is exactly the path Stelter wanted to go down, because it fits his agenda.”

The psychiatrist that was booked by Stelter has a long history on social media of anti-Trump tweets, among other things.

The fair question in this whole scenario is would be a multiple-choice question as to who is more non-compos mentis, Dr. Frances or CNN's Brian Stelter?

And finally, for Dr. (and I use that term loosely) Frances who uttered such off the wall poppycock, I offer this:

The Goldwater rule is the informal name given to section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Principles of Medical Ethics, which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures whom they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements. It is named after former US Senator and 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

The issue arose in 1964 when Fact published the article "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater". The magazine polled psychiatrists about US Senator Barry Goldwater and whether he was fit to be president. Goldwater sued magazine editor Ralph Ginzburg and managing editor Warren Boroson, and in Goldwater v. Ginzburg (July 1969) received damages totaling $75,000 ($512,000 today).

Yeah, I had the combo-platter of stupid quotes to work with this week. Gee, who could have seen CNN would have a qualifying entry 2 weeks in a row? But if anybody won the the stupid quote of the week, hands down it is the fruitcake psychiatrist who proved liberalism is a disease that robs logic and lowers mental capacity, as evidenced by those words.

I'd say physician heal thyself, but in this case I'm rather doubtful it's even a possibility at this point. Thanks for proving my previous points about higher education often being a complete waste, "doctor."

Added PS: Yes, I saw MS-NBC's Lawrence O'Donnell lie about Trump and then retract it under threat of a libel lawsuit. But that's just ordinary fake news excrement and most of us (save the idiots who actually believe what they say) know it as such. I also thought about mentioning James Comey (the disgraced former head of the FBI), but I'm going to save that for a coming blog about how obscene it is when both state and federal justice departments get hijacked for political purposes. ... When I get time, that is.