Friday, June 3, 2016

Election 2016: Like a George Kennedy Disaster Film



When this election cycle started I signed up for both party's email lists and every one of the candidates on both sides.  Early on I was receiving many emails, mostly looking for money, and some emails containing few hard details on stances.  However, we are now in the semi-finals for the candidates and the Democrats are firing off emails by the dozens everyday.  Here is a quote from an email I received today from Christina Reynolds the Deputy Communications Director at Hillary for America. 

"Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different—they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas—just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies. He is not just unprepared—he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability, and immense responsibility."

When I read the above passage I just about fell out of my chair with laughter.  I am NOT a Trump fan; he has done nothing during this campaign to make me want to continue to support him.  I think that if he is elected then the Republican party will be sidelined from the White House for a generation.  I also do not necessarily disagree with the message of the passage.  The farce being played out here is that this is coming from the Hillary campaign.  



You would have to be the shambling and reanimated corps of Sigmund Freud to even begin to fully deconstruct the problems I have with this message.  Let's try this on for size:

"Hillary Clinton's ideas aren’t just different—they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas—just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies. She is not just unprepared—she is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability, and immense responsibility." 

I think that Donald Trump keeps Hillary Clinton up at night because they are the same person.  From shady business dealings, lies stacked on lies, nonsense strings of words coming out of their mouths, terrible hair, and expensive clothes.  I think that if Hillary Clinton received a gender reassignment procedure she would be Donald Trump with a different pin on her... I mean his lapel.

Trump/Clinton Mashup.  Courtesy of ooyuz.com 


Hillary's email list of complaints seem like a shopping list of her own short comings.     


Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Trump, Cruz, and Rubio Walk into a Bar

Mount St. Helens crater, with the Pumice Plain in the foreground. October 2004

The looming shadow of a contested convention is starting to cast itself across the land of conservatism.  There are several things we need to consider dear reader:

1)  The establishment (aka the Republican National Committee) cannot let Donald Trump become the candidate of choice for the Party in the 2016 election.

2) Following the Establishment candidate of choice has been a bottom up affair.  I am not plugged into the know and therefore cannot prove this, but I believe that the obvious choice for establishment candidate to be Cruz.  I do not believe that to be the case; it's Rubio and I will explain more later.

3) We have a four man race, and with the stakes as high as they are, that is two too many.

4) Both parties face  the threat of independent third party candidates crashing their plans.
patient performs a task in a MEG scanner
The Democrats are gathering the data they need to control you.
The establishment has had a big problem on it's hands since 2008; nobody in their right mind wants to be the President of the United States in this modern era.  Not only do we have all the problems of a modern industrialized country, but we also have a war that has been raging since 2001; we have had a terrible economy that only looks good to a third grader; every system designed to keep humanity from destroying itself (NATO, UN, European Union, OPEC) is unraveling at an alarming rate; the nouveau Soviets are the freaking GOOD guys on the global stage; China is doing as it damn well pleases in the South Pacific; North Korea has actually matured its military into an actual threat to the US and what few solid allies we have left; and the job of President of the United States has been molded into Dictatorship.


This is why in 2008, the Republican field had the biggest RINO of the all who wanted to loose.  John McCain simply handed the future of America to the Communist.  Then in 2012 the field of Republican Candidates was like some freak show.  Every single one of the candidates was from central casting; each was unprepared to make a serious show as being President.  When when Mitt Romney became the candidate; he never acted like he really wanted the job.  Then we found out later that he really didn't have his heart in it.  The Democrats were handed a no restrictions control over the future of our nation for eight years.  There have been terrible leadership from the Republicans; turning Congress as a whole into a joke.  Nobody wanted to mount a serious challenge to the President; the path to reconstruction is bleak and nobody wants to do what it will take to rebuild the Republic.  So it is.  The Republic of the United States, which has a very good record for a continued and mostly uninterrupted government, has finally reached the Thomas Jefferson line.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.      -Thomas Jefferson

The Republican Party has to field a "company man" who will do the bidding of the establishment and be a good errand boy.  The problem they face is that the two people who will likely not play ball by their rules are the front runners.  I mentioned that I thought that Marco Rubio was their boy and I stand by that.  There is no longer any reason for him to be in the race; it is mathematically impossible for him to win.  Yet he is still in the race; because he is following orders.  That also addresses point three; which has to do the mathematics of winning.

In order to win the position of Republican Candidate a person has to score 1,237 delegates.  Since the Republicans have much fewer Super Delegates than the Democrats, it is anybody's game.  Since there are fewer Super Delegates to impose the will of the party onto itself the Party has be creative to stack the deck.  It goes a little something like this.

Since the Republicans cannot get Trump and Cruz under control they have to water down the delegates that will go to them.  By keeping the bottom feeders in play, who may actually win a few states, they deny these votes to the top two and when the convention comes around there is a chance nobody will get enough votes to cinch the win.  This brings further rounds of voting where none of the electors are beholden to vote for the people they were sent to vote for.  This creates a situation where the candidates have to start brokering deals to get votes.  This is where the establishment gets its chance to force its will.  Just watch.

Get along little voters.
The nuclear option.  The Republican National Committee wins its way and gets their candidate of choice.  The slighted parties exact their revenge by running third party; therefore taking all of their supporters with them.  When this happens in a normal election cycle it pretty much means that the party that they are targeting is going to loose.  This cycle has the unique situation of there being a lot of huge egos in play and therefore a high chance of both sides of this happening.  This might mean that we will end up with a four way race; each person would also have the added bonus of actually winning.  


Keep you eyes on the ball and ask yourself what is really going on.  This will be a race for the history books.

Until next time,

Keep your eyes open.





Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Guns and the GOP

Well Trump Stumpers,

The issue of guns has come roaring to the front lines of the GOP civil war, er, I mean race for the candidacy.  Jeb Bush comes out of nowhere and posted a picture of his FN that engraved with his name.



 A nice gift to a visiting politician.  People are wasting time and getting distracted over nothing. There has been a grand tradition of giving firearms to world leaders throughout history.

Here are some famous examples:

Napoleon Bonaparte had a pistol gifted to him by Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Thornton.  This pistol was a three barreled flintlock.



George Washington received this matched pair of French made saddle pistols from the Marquis de Lafayette.  These same pistols would later be gifted to President Andrew Jackson.
George Washington The Father of Our Country was not only an avid hunter but also quite the gun aficionado. Numerous sets of pistols with provenance to the General are currently on exhibit at his Mount Vernon, Va., home as well as at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.


President Lincoln was presented a gold plated Henry Repeating rifle, serial number 6.

Another repeater made famous by its use during the war was the Henry Repeating Rifle. Serial No. 6 was presented to Lincoln with a fully engraved, gold-plated receiver. It was honored with the NRA’s first National Treasure Gold Medal Award in 1998, making it the finest-made, historically significant firearm in the country.


President Theodore Roosevelt was presented with a double rifle, Kornbrath engraved. in .450/500 NE by Fredrick Adolph.  

TR’s big stick was a Frederick Adolph .450-500 NE that he never got a chance to take to Africa. It spent most of its life on display at the Abercrombie & Fitch Manhattan store or at the National Firearms Museum at NRA HQ. A sportsman, described as a wealthy Chicago businessman, drowned in Alaska in 1910 leaving the arms importer, Frederick Adolph, stuck with a double rifle, Kornbrath engraved and in .450/500 NE that he had already taken delivery on. Not one to let a chance for some publicity escape him, Adolph, with some public fanfare, presented the gun to Theodore Roosevelt at his home on Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, Long Island, N.Y. TR never had any occasion to use the gun and asked that it be displayed in the window of Abercrombie & Fitch in Manhattan for a time. Eventually it was given to one of his hunting guides and donated to the NRA through the efforts of Ron Peterson of Albuquerque, N.M. Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt was the Executive Officer of the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry when it embarked from Tampa, Fla., in June of 1898 and headed to Cuba. Most of the infantry of the U.S. Army at that time was equipped with the .45-70 black powder Springfield Trapdoor single-shot rifle and carbine. Roosevelt used his political capitol to equip his men with the Model 1896 Krag Jorgensen carbine in .30-40 smokeless. TR personally took a Winchester Model 1895 Carbine with him and loaned it to Trooper Bob Wrenn who arrived in Cuba late and without a longarm. Wrenn was a four-time U.S. tennis singles championship winner, and a charter inductee in the International Tennis Hall of Fame. The carbine is currently on loan to the National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Va., from the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site of the National Park Service in Manhattan, N.Y.

I think I have more than made my point that famous, and some infamous, people have received firearms as gifts over the history of the United States.  People need to stop losing their minds over it and not get distracted by establishment fluff.  We need to get our focus back and start thinking about what is going to be done to save the Republic we live in, or at least make sure that the implosion is a controlled one.

Here is one last parting picture for you gun fans out there:




This is the 1911 that Elvis gave to President Richard Nixon when he visited the White House.  Can you imagine somebody getting a gun into the White House to give it to Obama?