We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
In this election, Clinton’s honesty problem is not a big issue because her lying does not change the voter’s sense of where she stands on the big three items. On the other hand, Trump’s authenticity is a great benefit because it makes him trustworthy. You may not agree with his position on an issue, but you know what you are getting with Trump. His authenticity not only helps him on a personal basis, it helps him overcome the uncertainty issue all newcomers face. It makes him seem less of a risk.
I think the Likeability Factor is overrated in American national politics. It matters more in more local politics where dedicated schmoozers are the usual fare. However, I would rather have a beer with Donald than with Hillary.
Part of it is that I think Donald is educable (and has a long way to go), but she is not. She is a snotty know-it-all, and mostly wrong.
Also, he strikes me as being warm and interested in people, while I imagine Hillary would have half of her attention on the door to see if anybody more important than my deplorable self might come in. Somebody with more money or with higher social status. I think she is that sort of deplorable person.
Pic is from Mrs. BD. She is doing a project there this week, in Mwaukee. Interesting to me that she would never take photos, ever. Felt they interfered with direct experience. Since her iPhone, she takes snaps all the time.
The meaning of the cross is both deeply disturbing and deeply hopeful. I am not sure how it could be construed as offensive, tho, since my religion holds that Christ died on that thing as a human sacrifice to redeem humanity from its sins.
He's not fit for office. This guy doesn't have the temperament, doesn't have the qualifications. He's an embarrassment. He's dangerous. "We can't let this guy get near the nuke button. This guy is so off the wall, he has no business being in this business," is basically her point. "This guy is so gauche, this guy is so uncouth, this guy is so yuck, he has no business being in our business! He has no business being president; he has no business running for president. He's unfit. He's ill-tempered."
Right? Well, I'm sure Hillary thought she had ample opportunity to make that point last night, but she didn't, did she?
I was much younger then. The youth today need a similar song. I hate the way this group of giant rock stars turn the refrain into an insipid, zipless line, but otherwise, good fun. McGuinn's guitar sets the tone. Bob his usual humble self.
People who have only seen Trump in sound bites watched him go the distance without faltering. Were his remarks long on general observation and short on detail? Yes they were. Did Hillary know more than he did? Probably. Does it matter? Only to people who think the President should be a college professor. You don’t have to know how to do anything as President. You have to have the right instincts and you have to hire the right people.
Commenter here: "I expected more from him. I believe average citizens did too."
Can we say that many people hoped he would be commanding and dominate the discussion, but failed to do so? It seems easy for him to be a petty man at times.
The youth will not recall one of the more idiotic TV shows of the 1970s. Tonight's Really Big Show will not be a re-run. It will be live, and it will be exciting. The MSM has been building up the tension for days.
I will welcome your comments below before, during, and after the TV show (9 pm EST). Two deplorable people will compete for your affection or disgust.
So the weekend before the first presidential debate, four major news publications all print the same story, the content and tone of which (calling out one candidate over the other as a serial liar) Stelter concedes is “extraordinary,” and it’s all just a “coincidence” with no coordination between the publications and certainly none with the campaign? Uh huh.
I guarantee that she does not know a single Trump voter. Problem with the writing and talking heads: they observe the common folk from a distance, but they do not live in the world like we do.
There's a Black President There's a Black Congressman There's a Black Chief of Police There's a Black District Attorney There's a Black Mayor until 2014 (Jailed) There's a Black Officer who pulled a trigger There's a Black Man Dead of that gunshot wound
For inexplicable reasons, the Left believes that the violence wrought by angry minorities will benefit them, so they encourage it. They subsidize it. Obama has given his not-so-tacit permission to riot every time one of these tragic events occurs, from the Henry Louis Gates minor incident, to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, the Dallas officers. And now BLM is rolling in money, $100m from "social justice" organizations. Soros gave them $33m.
Probably an inbred trait of human nature renders the attraction of censorship perennial. Most people (the highly literate are among the worst) believe that what is good for them will be good for others. Besides, a regime of censorship must claim to derive its authority from settled knowledge and not opinion. Once enforcement and exclusion have done their work, this assumption becomes almost irresistible; and it is relied on to produce a fortunate and economical result: self-censorship. We stay out of trouble by gagging ourselves. Among the few motives that may strengthen the power of resistance is the consciousness of having been deeply wrong oneself, either regarding some abstract question or in personal or public life. Another motive of resistance occasionally pitches in: a radical, quasi-physical horror of seeing people coerce other people without having to supply reasons. For better or worse, this second motive is likely to be mixed with misanthropy...
Another:
Margaret Thatcher declined to prosecute The Satanic Verses for blasphemy; and once the fatwa was issued Rushdie was accorded police protection from the extraordinary threat. Still, the cravenness of the early reactions has not yet been forgotten. The novel was initially banned in Canada, and US bookstores were slow to risk the title on their shelves. Cautionary words about the need for sensitivity were uttered by academic as well as priestly authorities. ‘We respect each other’s religious beliefs,’ wrote Syed Shahabuddin, who led the campaign to ban The Satanic Verses in India. ‘We do not intentionally outrage the religious feelings of others or insult their religion or ridicule the personalities to whom we are emotionally attached or mock our religious susceptibility.’ The chief rabbi of England, Immanuel Jakobovits, emphatically concurred: it was wrong to ‘tolerate a form of denigration and ridicule which can only breed resentment’. In an essay on ‘Religious Anger and Minority Rights’, Tariq Modood, the director of Bristol University’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, wrote that ‘the group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter of whether a hurt has taken place.’ On this view, to experience the feeling is to suffer the injury.
Rushdie’s defenders were on solid ground when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for conciliation or compromise, ‘it would be suicidal to suppose that any concession made to the superstitious will ever be the last.’ But the odd appearance of the word ‘philistine’, in such a strictly political context turned the argument from a libertarian defence of publication to an aesthetic defence of the contents of the book – a sign of things to come. On the cable network C-Span, on 21 February 1989, Hitchens broadened his criticism:
"Tomorrow, shopping malls of the United States, which contain now one third of the book outlets in this country, will, of their own volition, not sell that book, because they are scared of a foreign despot … To be scared of a crazy foreign tyrant in this way is a really serious challenge to what we think of as the safe assumption of free speech and free inquiry, free expression and the necessity to defend it."
Destruction of subpoenaed evidence, at the request of Hillary's flunkies. A crime that makes Nixon's cover-ups seem trivial. But never mind, it was just about yoga classes - but it doesn't look like Hillary does yoga with her weight and her inability to climb stairs.
Is
Trump the Only Republican Who Can Handle the Media Onslaught? - See
more at:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/onslaught-trump-media#sthash.2PvEMs0W.dpuf
I hope some lefties are reading us because they need to know how many of us non-lefty people think and feel. Case in point, "Alt-Right." First off, there is no Alt-Right. However, there are lots of people fed up with the recent waves of Lefty insanity which we take the trouble to post here because the MSM refuses to.
In other words, the non-existent Alt-Right is a creation of a wacko left fringe which has left truth and reality far behind.
...it remains an advantage for the G.O.P., and a liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent.
Immigration and outsourcing are huge issues for Trump—the cornerstone of his campaign—but they’re not the only ones. It’s also about culture. It’s about the soul-bludgeoning insanity of egalitotalitarianism run amok, about the witch hunts and moral panics and PC tattletales. It’s about the blatant white-bashing and male-bashing and straight-bashing that masquerade as “progress” but merely serve to sow division. Too many people have been politely silent about this relentless PSYOP campaign of cultural demoralization to the point where they’re biting their lips bloody.
Maybe it should be the economy, stupid, but a lot of it is culture wars. The culture radicals and cultural Marxists have won the battles, it seems, so they are pushing their advantages to the point of utter, joke-worthy irrationality. But the joke could lose you your job.
...than listen to this woman screeching at me for four years. What is wrong with her? Her behavior is so inconsistent. Not that it matters. She makes it clear, for sure, that she is against Right to Work. Sheesh. Listen at your own risk.
Who advised her and coached her about talking and looking like this? It's either ludicrous or scary... which makes me think that she's decided to try to sound like Trump. In that view, this is her statement of what Trump seems to be. This is what she thinks Trump's fans are responding to in Trump. It's so wrong on so many levels. And I guess that's a clue why she's not 50 points ahead.
No secrets there. Some drink a lot, some don't. Some smoke a lot, some do not. Some eat "healthy," many do not. Good genetics. In small southern Italian towns, everybody is a cugino.
Like Britain, we assume everyone will eventually become Western and enjoy the same liberties we do if we can just get through this rough patch. The time for this level of naïveté has passed. We are no longer importing “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” We are importing people who want to choke us to death.
I agree with Hanson that Trump was the only person with a chance against the Clinton-Dem-media machine. He begins:
Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views. In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie.
The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.
...the “values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination” are not values anyone in the Cloud actually follows, but they like the way it sounds so they say it a lot. Show up at a faculty meeting with a Trump hat on and these people will run screaming for security. You will be arrested and thrown in a pit, all in the name of tolerance and inclusion. The words no longer have a literal meaning for the Cloud People. They are magic words and the point of using them is make you shut-up so they can boss you around without having to explain themselves.
An AVI quote: "When your current-event justice argument is basically founded on long-past injustices, it means your current argument isn't very strong. "
The media’s new war on their readers is part of the general unrest we are seeing in the West. People in the media have long viewed themselves as the fourth estate, part of the ruling class, but policing the ruling class. This was always nonsense.
“Mexicans? Splendid hard-working guys. Great family folk. Love ’em. And when we’ve got the economy booming again as a result of my policies, they’ll have their place in the sun. Until then, though, we have to give our own hard-working Americans the first crack at the new jobs. Look, the Mexicans are fine people. They’ll understand.”
Former Navy SEAL commanders explain why they still wake up before dawn every day — 
I think the Likeability Factor is overrated in American national politics. It matters more in more local politics where dedicated schmoozers are the usual fare. However, I would rather have a beer with Donald than with Hillary. 
Pic is from Mrs. BD. She is doing a project there this week, in Mwaukee. Interesting to me that she would never take photos, ever. Felt they interfered with direct experience. Since her iPhone, she takes snaps all the time. 
Otzi had 
Fireplace at a place I am quite fond of 
Toddler survives 
How to live to 100: 
Photo from 
A reptilian anachronism: