Thoughts On A Sunday

This is going to be a somewhat abbreviated version of TOAS as other duties took precedence. Hopefully I can make up for it during the rest of the week.

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It's been a very wet weekend here in New Hampshire, something I'm not complaining about because we've needed rain for some time. It was very dry during the summer and the lake was down two feet below its normal level, something that has caused all kinds of problems with boaters hitting submerged rocks with their stern drives or outboards, severely damaging them.,br>
The usual draw down of the lake that occurs every November isn't necessary this year because the water level has been so low. Even this late rain isn't going to do a lot to move the water level up all that much as a lot of that rain will refill streams and pond that have been dry since late August.

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The 'October Surprise' about new FBI investigations in regards to Hillary's e-mails and her private e-mail server has her campaign and the DNC in a tizzy. Some of her campaign spokescritters have been claiming that FBI Director Comey's announcement is some how unfair and it will affect the election. But we all know that if it had been Donald Trump who was the target of such an investigation, Hillary's campaign would be shouting it from the rooftops.

In regards to this, Smitty has a suggestion about what to do with Hillary.

I think he may be on to something.

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And speaking of how the Clinton's and the Democrats would react to such an October Surprise were the tables turned, here's a flashback to 1992 when just such a thing happened to the Republicans that helped usher George H.W. Bush out of office.

It seems the Clintons and the DNC are only upset about such things when the same tactics are used against them.

Democrat double standards all around.

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The Democrats keep insisting voter fraud just does not exist...until someone is caught red handed doing so, filling in unmarked sections of absentee ballots she was opening as part of her job.

And then someone else being caught filling in fraudulent voter registration cards, some for five people who didn't give her any consent to do so as well 17 forms for people who don't exist, and a number of others for people who are dead. One thing to notice about the report – the political affiliation of the two perpetrators is not mentioned. That means they are most likely Democrats. If they had been Republicans it would have been right up front in the report.

These two cases took place in just one county in Florida. Election fraud in Indiana is being investigated in 57 counties. So please don't tell me there is no voter fraud.

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Interested to see what the 100 most damaging WikiLeaks releases are in regards to Hillary?

Then go here.

Frankly, nothing there surprises me as the Clintons have been sleazeballs for decades.

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The EPA wants us all to “Party like it's 1899!”

I find it interesting that an unelected head of a rogue government agency is demanding we go back to living in the 19th century.

[Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina] McCarthy was appointed by President Obama. She runs a political agency for a political administration in maybe the most political city in world history. She's neither prophet nor angel.

Yet she makes a pronouncement as if she has the moral authority, the heavenly justification, to tell others how they must live. She demands we return to an era in which humans produced less carbon dioxide emissions and therefore lived much more primitively.

As I always like to tell these Progressive jerks when they make such pronouncements, “You first!” After all, shouldn't they lead by example? If it is such a crisis, then why aren't these jerks acting like it's a crisis? It's simple – there is no crisis. As the Good Perfessor keeps telling us, “I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who are telling us it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.”

Amen.

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And that's the (abbreviated) news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is warming up (and drying out), Halloween is being celebrated tomorrow night, and where we all can't wait for the political silly season to be over and done with.

The McCarthyism Of The Left

As more WikiLeaks revelations come to light, one of the less publicized actions taken by Democrats and those working for them is right out of the history books - McCarthyism.

What Podesta and Clinton have done to the rule of law and promoting sleaze, Tyhink Progress and Tom Steyer have done to a critic of the global climate alarmism critics, in this case Roger Pielke Jr. Rtahr than addressing Pielke's criticism, they did everything they could to destroy his credibility, and then bragged about it.

A July 2014 e-mail from Judd Legum, an editor at ThinkProgress, to billionaire Democratic climate activist (and former coal-mine investor) Tom Steyer exposes the climate-change McCarthyism that the Left — and its myriad allies in the liberal media — use to discredit or silence anyone who doesn’t adhere to the orthodoxy of the climate catastrophists.

In the e-mail, Legum boasted to Steyer about how ThinkProgress had silenced Pielke by preventing him from publishing at Nate Silver’s then-new website, fivethirtyeight.com, on the issue of climate change. Legum was also asking Steyer, indirectly, for more money. Steyer and Podesta both sit on the board of the Center for American Progress. Between 2008 and 2014, Steyer gave the Center for American Progress some $3.85 million.

So rather than answering Pielke's observations and opinions with those of their own, they decided to take the sleazy route, silencing him, threatening websites and publications to prevent Pielke from making his opinions about the warmist alarmism and the faulty reasoning and bogus science they been using to lie to the people.

One has to wonder who will be their next targets, though it we can count on it being anyone who has the gumption to disagree with the self-anointed 'betters'.

That is the action of thugs who know they can't win the war of opinion if they allow the other side to speak out.

What a bunch of scumbags.

Quick, Vote Before I'm Indicted!

I find it interesting that Hillary Clinton urged voters to "vote early in those states that have it" during her press conference about the bombshell revelation that the FBI is re-opening the investigation into her e-mails.

I guess she doesn't want them to be able to change their vote once more information about her perfidy becomes public.

'Fixing' The Poll Results - The John Podesta Method

You've probably heard the bleating from ABC News about their latest poll results showing Hillary with a 12% lead in the polls. But according to e-mails by John Podesta released by Wikileaks, the numbers might not be what they appear to be.

How can that be?

Oversampling.

In this case, ABC admits it skewed its sampling of voters by splitting their sample percentages thusly: 37% Democrats, 27% Republicans, and 31% Independents.

The problem? The registered voter rolls do not match the sampling percentages used.

Of course, while democrats may enjoy a slight registration advantage of a couple of points, it is nowhere near the 9 points reflected in this latest poll. 

Meanwhile, we also pointed out that with huge variances in preference across demographics one can easily "rig" a poll by over indexing to one group vs. another.  As a quick example, the ABC / WaPo poll found that Hillary enjoys a 79-point advantage over Trump with black voters.  Therefore, even a small "oversample" of black voters of 5% could swing the overall poll by 3 full points.  Moreover, the pollsters don't provide data on the demographic mix of their polls which makes it impossible to "fact check" the bias...convenient.

So if you heavily sample Democrats in urban areas (particularly poorer neighborhoods) and more lightly sample Republicans in more moderate suburban areas, the polls will skew heavily in the Democrats favor. The age of those surveyed can also heavily skew poll results.

If you want to get an eyeful of how polling can be influenced to give the results those hiring the pollsters want, Read The Whole Thing.

As the line from Don Henley's song Garden of Allah says, “I can get you any result you want. What's it worth to you?”

Another Example Of The Democrat Double Standard

This cannot be said enough: If the Democrat Party didn't have double standards they'd have no standards at all.

(Photo by way of Granite Grok)

Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been a wet weekend, between much needed rain that started Friday night and continued on through Saturday, then changed to snow briefly early Sunday morning. It was 63 degrees Saturday morning. It was 42 today.

In other words, it wasn't an atypical fall weekend in New Hampshire.

With the colder temps we were induced to fire up the Official Weekend Pundit Woodstove for the first time this fall. While we could have used our furnace, as we have on a couple of the cooler mornings, this was different as the high temp for the day wasn't going to be above 50°F and it was quite windy.

While we didn't have to stoke it to the level we would need during the depths of winter, both BeezleBub and I were brought in enough fire wood to last for a couple of days.

And so it begins.

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Isn't this the pot calling the kettle black?

A Vice President who has problems keeping his hands to himself has the audacity to say he “wished he could physically confront Republican nominee Donald Trump over lewd comments the real estate mogul made about women that were captured on tape in 2005.”

Maybe Biden should take a look at his own actions before he condemns others for doing something nowhere near as slimy as he's done.

Yeah, like that's going to happen.

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Skip has the right of it, in this case about the coarsening and devaluing a moral people.

It has taken generations for the Left to get things to this point, but it appears it has reached a tipping point and that does not bode well for our nation.

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Along this same line, Skip also points us to a quote from John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The Left has worked very hard to make the Constitution go away, to declare it a “living document”, one that means absolutely nothing because it can be interpreted to meet the needs of the state at whim.

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The NFL athletes who refuse to stand for the national anthem have finally met their match in the person of Arek Trenholm, a 16-year old wheelchair-bound Florida teen.

Trenholm, who has spina bifida, uses his arms to 'stand' from his wheelchair when the American flag passes by or when the national anthem is played.

Maybe the athletes and others who refuse to stand for the anthem could take a lesson from Arek.

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Have you heard about the so-called 'miracle' of energy production, that being scientists accidentally discovering a means of producing ethanol from atmospheric CO2? Sounds great, right? But there's a problem that the media have overlooked, that being those pesky laws of thermodynamics.

I have received over a dozen inquiries about this story, with some pointing out that the researchers claimed the energy efficiency of the process was 63%. That’s not true. What they claimed was that the yield was 63%. In other words, 63% of the carbon dioxide fed into the process got turned into ethanol.

The big piece that is missing is the amount of energy it took to drive that process, and the bad news there from thermodynamics is that it necessarily requires a lot more energy to be consumed than is contained in the ethanol that is produced. In other words, if you produced a gallon of ethanol by this process, it is 100% certain that the amount of energy consumed is greater than the ~76,000 British thermal units (BTUs) in a gallon of ethanol.

In other words, the process to turn the carbon dioxide into ethanol uses more energy to do the conversion than the ethanol contains, so it takes more energy to make the ethanol than you'll get back from the ethanol when you burn it for fuel. But then this is also true of the ethanol made from corn used to mix with gasoline if you take into account all of the energy used to plant, grow, harvest, and convert the corn into ethanol.

You just can't get around entropy.

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If Hillary truly ran on her record, both as a US Senator and Secretary of State, she'd lose to Trump by a wide margin. That's why she's running on (bogus) women's issues.

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David Starr answers the all-important question, that being Who should I vote for? Hillary or the Donald?

He makes some good points, but in the end it is up to you to decide.

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Have any of you out there been paying attention to all of the election polls? I know I have, but not so much to see who might be 'ahead' or 'behind'. Instead, I'm curious to see just how wide the difference is between the various polls. At times it's staggering. So why is there such a difference between the results from various polling agencies?

It's not that they're rigged, but that they aren't scientific.

Properly done, an election poll tries to determine as accurately as possible how voters will vote in an upcoming election. To do this, pollsters survey a diverse sample of people who they hope are representative of the entire population. But since this group is never a perfect representation of the population (because it may oversample some voters and undersample others), pollsters "weight" the results. If a sample has few minority voters, for example, the pollsters will inflate the answers provided by minority respondents in order to counteract the effect of undersampling. More complex polls, such as "likely voter" polls, ask a series of questions to screen out people who are unlikely to vote. 

Some polling results depend upon weighting some factors and if they get those weightings wrong (usually by either over or underestimating some factors) the polls will be wrong. Other polls have respondents that are self-selecting, and that can seriously skew the results as the respondents aren't a cross-section of the populace. Yet others are what are called 'push polls', polls that ask a series of questions to drive the respondent to give the 'proper' answer the pollsters are looking for.

In either case, take the results of all of those polls out there with a grain of salt.

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Anthony Watts posts an Andy May review of Daniel Botkin's 25 Myths That Are Destroying The Environment.

Some of the myths:

The first myth discussed in the book is that man is the only creature that changes the environment. In truth, all creatures change their environment and the environment of the world to some degree.

The next myth is that life and the environment are fragile and man is precipitating the next great extinction event.

Myth #3 is that extinction is unnatural, but today there are an estimated 1.5 million species on the Earth and roughly one species goes extinct every year on average. Most species that have ever existed are currently extinct due to the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing. And if you like what the book says, consider buying it...or not.

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It's now official: Venezuela is now a dictatorship. But have we heard anything from the MSM on this matter?

Nope. Not a peep.

Thursday evening, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Socialist government arbitrarily suspended the recall effort against “President” Nicolas Maduro, demonstrating beyond any doubt that the South American country now functions as a dictatorship.

Actions by the establishment press’s gatekeepers at the Associated Press and the New York Times appear to betray an interest in keeping the news downplayed at least until after Friday’s morning network news and cable shows.

At 10 p.m. Friday evening, the Associated Press had no story in its “World Top 10″ about developments in that country. The AP broke the ice sometime Saturday morning. As of 8:26 a.m. Eastern Time (as saved here), its story about the country was ninth on the list, below one concerning the Nobel Prize committee’s inability to contact literature prize winner Bob Dylan.

So the elimination of what little freedoms that remained in Venezuela rates far lower than Bob Dylan? Really?

These people need to be fired. Out of a cannon.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has gotten wetter, colder, and windier, woodstoves have been fired up, and where Monday is yet again returning all too soon.

Society On The Brink - And They Don't Realize It

It has been said that the nominations of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are symptoms of political parties reaching the breaking point. Both are horrible candidates. Neither is likely to be good at the job. One has so much political baggage that governing will be damn near impossible. The other has issues with a lack of self-censorship and a need to be right no matter what. He also doesn't always know when to shut up. But he has touched upon what so many in the country feel, and that's anger against those who treat them as those who can be safely ignored. You know, the Deplorables.

But there is another view of what these candidates represent and it may be worse than many among the so-called elite may realize. It's not the parties that have reached the breaking point. They are but another symptom. It is society itself that has reached the breaking point and the elite haven't a clue about what's going to happen.

I can tell them this: It's not going to be pretty, and particularly for them.

(The following was reformatted for easier readability, but none of the content was changed – dce) What I find most surprising today is that the insiders and the elite have no idea what is percolating just beneath the surface.  Okay, maybe their arrogance actually produces its own fog, so it should not come as a surprise that they are blinded. They do not look at the calendar, which, if one really looks, says "1788" on it.  Something is close.  Very close.  Society is near the breaking point.

My own experience is that Hillary’s so-called Deplorables are actually the most reserved, most polite, and most honest demographic in the country. They are more informed, more self-reliant, and among other things, better armed.  Regarding their arms, they are incredibly responsible, and not the source of the violence for which the implement, and not the person, is too often blamed.  The Deplorables have the longest fuse.  It is, however, a fuse.

Alt Left, on the other hand, are the Neo Fascists and Neo Neocons.  It is Alt Left that thinks Free Speech means THEIR speech only.  It is Alt Left that needs 'safe spaces' and wants to enforce thought crime.

It is Alt Left, and its media lapdog sites, that is heavily into censorship of ideas that diverge from their approved ideology.  It is Alt Left that champions regime change and ratcheting up the rhetoric against Russia. It is Alt Left that believes it has an inherent right, even an obligation, to lie and obfuscate if it serves their greater purpose.

Perhaps most significant is that it is Alt Left who so quickly resorts to violence and vandalism when confronted with people and ideas with which it takes exception.  Never has that been as clear as in this election cycle.

The Deplorables, however, are not possessed of infinite patience. Like a capacitor, there is a charge building, and at some point it will be released into the circuitry of society.

The media and other insiders believe themselves to be immune.  That thought no doubt results from being immersed inside a cocoon where dissonant voices are not allowed.  When the levee breaks, or the capacitor releases its charge, they are going to be gob smacked.

Precious few of them are anywhere near as immune as they believe themselves to be.  Additionally, what they might think, or hope, is their support, their security, their safe space, doesn't really exist.

They don't realize (or most likely, don't care) that it is the Deplorables that make their lifestyles possible. It is the Deplorables that police their streets, that man their fire stations, that clean their streets, sidewalks, parks, and subway stations, that fill the shelves in their stores, that fix their cars, that provide water, electricity, and broadband, that serve drinks and take their food orders at their favorite clubs and restaurants, and a lengthy list of other services upon which they are dependent.

What would happen if the Deplorables decided they were going to stop doing those things for them? What would happen if for three days the Deplorables went Galt? Would that kind of upheaval get their attention and make them understand that “they ain't all that”, or would it push them to do something incredibly stupid?

I'm betting on 'stupid'.

The elite exist in a self-created bubble that is, in effect, an echo chamber. All they hear is whatever their peers say and not what anyone outside their circle has to tell them. They haven't really shown all that much wisdom, or more accurately, common sense.

If one has been paying attention, this is right out of Atlas Shrugged. It wouldn't surprise me to find our 'betters' have been using it as a how-to guide rather than the warning it was meant to be.

So be it.

Not Watching Tonight...Again

Will I be watching this last debate between Clinton and Trump tonight?

Nope. I'm not going to waste my time. If nothing else, neither one will change my mind in regards to who I will vote for at the upcoming election on November 8th.

Between what I read in the blogs, news websites, and other online media, my mind was made up a long time ago. I certainly don't need the MSM bleating at me about who I must vote for. Nor do I need the endless political ads on TV and radio to tell me both of the major candidates (as well as the minor third-party candidates) aren't people I want to vote for.

Hillary should be in prison.

Donald should go back to running his financial empire.

The others should go back home and stop wasting donor's money on a lost cause.

None of them are worth a damn.

I will cast a vote for the Vice President, that being Mike Pence. Of all of the candidates at the top and second tier of candidates, he's the only one I feel is a responsible and capable candidate. The rest suck.

So why should I waste my time watching tonight's debate? I'm not going to hear anything new...unless a bunch of FBI agents come on to the stage and slap cuffs on Hillary. But since that isn't likely to happen, I have no real need to waste my time.

Amazon And Netflix Are Kicking Butt

If we need more evidence that the traditional TV programming paradigm is broken and that it will soon go the way of the 8-track tape, there's this little tidbit of news:

The original programming budget of Amazon and Netflix is bigger than that of CBS, HBO, and Turner.

What does this mean for traditional network and pay TV viewership? Let's just say that it doesn't bode well for many of the legacy TV and cable networks.

Netflix and Amazon more than doubled the capital they invested in developing original TV programming annually between 2013 and 2015, according to IHS Technology’s forthcoming ¨World TV Production Report 2016.¨ Amazon’s jumped from $1.22 billion to $2.67 billion, while Netflix’s rose from $2.38 billion to $4.91 billion.

“The levels of investment we are seeing from Netflix and Amazon are only topped by Disney ($11.84 billion) and NBC ($10.27 billion),” IHS Technology Senior Principal Analyst Jim Westcott was quoted in a press release.

There are a number of reasons we're seeing the ascendancy of Over-The-Top (OTT) Internet streaming video services, probably the biggest being that they cost a heck of a lot less than traditional pay TV. Another: viewers can watch when they want to and binge watch an entire season of programming should they choose to do so. The old linear TV programming model has been broken for a while, but the traditional programmers are only now beginning to realize that services like Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, just to name a few, are stealing away viewers and with it, revenues.

Frankly, it's long overdue and it's about time the linear TV programmers realize it. Otherwise, they won't survive, nor should they.

Why Trump Has Risen

When I first read this, I admit I was skeptical about its seriousness, considering the publication is which it appears. But as I read it I started nodding in agreement with much of what David Wong wrote, that being that half of America has lost its effin' mind.

He delves into the six reasons why Donald Trump has risen and how the whole thing boils down to Blue counties (cities) and Red counties (country) and the growing divisions between them, many of which are being created by the folks in the Blue enclaves and it's being done so on purpose. (As a note, I live in one of the red counties here in New Hampshire.) He tries to explain why so many in the Red counties support Trump and he pulls no punches. It all boils down to cityfolk have absolutely no understanding of people outside the city. They don't understand that folks out in the country have different issues, different problems, and require different solutions. Things that work in the cities won't necessarily work in the countryside and vice versa. But of course they really don't give a damn about it either.

"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"

Of course they aren't. It's a case of mind over matter – they don't mind because we don't matter. But they still don't realize where a lot of the things they consume, like food, come from. They assume it comes from supermarkets and high end specialty shoppes, appearing on shelves like magic. They don't yet understand that if the rural parts of the nation wither away and die, so will a lot of things they take for granted.

Then there's the perception that those of us who live out in the country are unintelligent bumpkins who can barely read and can't count past ten without removing our shoes. A lot of us are just as intelligent and educated as our urban brethren. In fact, some of us are just as wealthy as they are. We just realized we didn't want anything to do with the Blue enclaves and their decaying society and decided to move away and live more simply. We tend not to have the problems those in the cities must face every day.

Of course if the 'fit hits the shan', it's likely the rural areas will survive while the urban areas will be just like all of those post-apocalyptic scenes we see in movies. The surviving urban populace will evacuate the cities and find they have no place to go because those of us in the country – you know, those of us with all those guns – will tell them to keep moving because we can't take care of them. We hope no such thing will ever happen, but it won't be pretty if it does.

But what it all really boils down to is that we hate being ignored by our self-anointed 'betters'. It's but one reason Trump has risen to the point he has. He isn't ignoring that 'basket of deplorables' so disgusting to Hillary and her followers. He may be an awful candidate while being an inveterate entrepreneur and capitalist, but he also understands that if we do better, everyone else (including him) does better as well. That's something that seems to elude Hillary and the rest of the Blue elite.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was a long weekend for me, between taking Friday off to deal with the cord wood delivered to The Manse that morning (it took all day to get it moved and stacked away and part of Saturday to clean up the detritus left behind), prepping the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout (aka The Boat) for winterizing, and getting ready to take delivery of a new refrigerator to replace the lightning damaged fridge that has recently stopped keeping food on the refrigerator side cold in a reliable manner (the freezer still works except for the icemaker, which stopped working the day of the lightning strike two summers ago).

The firewood is all stacked inside the garage and ready for use in the Official Weekend Pundit Woodstove once it's needed. The Boat will be hauled down to one of the local boat shops to be winterized and shrink-wrapped now that I have emptied out all of the gear and accessories from their storage lockers. The old fridge was emptied of all of the food and stored in coolers just prior the the new one being delivered.

Then there were my regular weekend chores to attend to as well.

And so it goes here in central New Hampshire.

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I still find it amazing that many leading Democrats can't understand why Obamacare is imploding at an accelerating rate.

If they had actually paid attention to congressional Republican's warnings, they never would have voted for such a obviously flawed (and doomed) P. O. S. legislation. A large majority of the American people certainly understood what a crap sandwich Obamacare was, didn't like it then and like it even less now. But our 'betters' knew better and it passed through a legislative sleight of hand. But it turns out our 'betters' didn't know better and have helped dismantle one of the best health care systems in the world all in the name of 'fairness'. (Whenever I hear Democrats use that term, I know to hold on to my wallet because it means they want to take even more money from me and everyone else.)

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You know it's gone too far when know-nothing leftist college students say “science is racist”.

As best as I've been able to determine, science knows no race, color, creed, or political affiliation...and I'm not talking about soft sciences like Political Science, Sociology, or any field of study ending in the word “Studies”. No matter what, the speed of light is the same as is Avogadro's Number and Planck's Constant and pi and a whole host of other scientific concepts and discoveries, race not withstanding.

These kids have got to get an effin' clue.

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You know it's even worse when an institution of higher learning, the University of Florida in this instance, is offering counseling to those poor fragile snowflakes because someone's Halloween costume might cause them some kind of discomfort or might offend them.

Here's a clue, U of Florida administrators: everything offends them, including you. If you're going to offer them counseling, I suggest you move them to a different institution, preferable one where they can get the psychological help they so desperately need in order to become mature functioning adults and not the perpetual spoiled children they are.

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The New England Patriots played the Cincinnati Bengals in Foxborough today, beating them 35-17. It was Tom Brady's first home game after his 4 game suspension.

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There is one issue where I do agree wholeheartedly with Hillary Clinton, that being her disdain for extremist environmentalists who demand we keep all of our natural resources, specifically oil, natural gas, and coal in the ground.

I find that many of them are willing to talk the talk, but not walk the walk. I also find they have no real grasp on reality – specifically things like energy and the environment – and make all kinds of demands that are in no way realistic or doable, at least not without plunging most of the world into abject poverty. Then again, they really don't care because they feel they shouldn't have to make the sacrifice because, after all, they are our betters and the deserve to live in the 21st century and not the 18th.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

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Members of the Party Of Tolerance showed just how tolerant they are of opposing points of view by firebombing a GOP headquarters in North Carolina.

A swastika and “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” were spray painted on the side of an adjacent building.

Gee, it sounds like the miscreants did not understand that significance of Kristallnacht, using the same tactics the Nazis used in Germany back in 1938. So who are the real Nazis here?

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David Starr has some nice fall foliage pictures he took up in Franconia Notch in northern New Hampshire. Swing by a and take a look.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer temps are returning for a few days, the gear has been emptied from my boat, and where I've gotten my winter firewood all stacked away.

Throw The Monkey Wrench!

After talking to a number of my fellow townspeople as well as some of my co-workers, I think I have underestimated the dis-satisfaction with both Clinton and Trump. While I am not surprised that quite a few people are voicing their displeasure with them, I am surprised by the increasing number of them doing so.

One co-worker had said she doesn't want to vote for any of the presidential candidates, including Gary Johnson. I said to here that she didn't have to vote for any of them, either leaving that portion of the ballot blank or writing in another name. It was then that the proverbial light bulb (an ancient and less used lighting technology created over 100 years ago, for those who may not understand the reference) lit up over my head.

While I have advocated for making “None Of The Above” a valid selection during elections, this may be an opportunity to exercise it starting at the grass roots level.

I suggested to my coworker that of she really didn't like any of the candidates running for president that she write in None Of The Above. Were “None Of The Above” to receive the most votes, I have to wonder who would be declared the winner? Or would this create a constitutional crisis, leaving the Supreme Court and/or Congress to decide who will be the next president?

There is a certain appeal to throwing a so-called monkey wrench into the election works, seeing as the leadership of our two major political parties and our so-called political elite have failed us yet again, and this time spectacularly. They've left us with a choice of two equal evils, neither which is a good choice (for different reasons). Both Hillary and Donald are symptoms of a primary and electoral system that has been corrupted by too much money, too much greed, and a lot of hubris.

Perhaps “None Of The Above” as a write-in will send a message they have been ignoring for too long. So if you really don't like any of the candidates for the highest office in the land, write in “None Of The Above”!

Thanks, Glenn!

It was nice getting a mention by Glenn Reynolds.

Origin Of The Snowflakes

You've either heard or read of the “precious snowflakes” or “fragile snowflakes”, specifically when referring to the overly sensitive and perpetually offended young men and women infesting our college campuses. They're the ones who have a knack for pissing off many of their fellow college students, professors, and administrators.

The need to be 'protected' from all kinds of things that normal, well adjusted adults shrug off with nary a flutter of the heart or the need to retreat to some semi-mythical “safe space”. The need to be protected against microaggressions (whatever the hell they are), speech with which they disagree, and ideas that they find uncomfortable.

In other words, they're big babies and they aren't doing themselves any favors by acting like one.

With this in mind, one has to ask “Where the hell did these damaged and deluded souls come from?” The answer – their parents.

Howard Schwartz, professor emeritus of Oakland University, has for years studied the psychology underlying political correctness, and in his new book Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order: Chronicling the Rise of the Pristine Self, he offers some clarity on why the term “snowflakes” is now synonymous with college students today.

Schwartz, who taught classes in social and behavioral science within its business school, said the term stems from what he calls “the rise of the pristine self.”

Schwartz writes in the book that “this is a self that is touched by nothing but love. The problem is that nobody is touched by nothing but love, and so if a person has this as an expectation, if they have built their sense of themselves around this premise, the inevitable appearance of the something other than love blows this structure apart.”

--snip--

Schwartz points to the rise of helicopter parents and capitulating campus administrations as contributing to this phenomenon.

“People now experience the entire world as a form of bullying. The helicopter parent protects the children from real dangers but also fantasy dangers. These precious snowflakes are the children of political correctness, their parents and schools lead them to believe that the world is perfectly moralistic — they don’t live in the real world, it is a fantasy,” he said.

Schwartz said the pristine self is a sort of narcissism – individuals who regard themselves as pristine selves cannot handle the unlovingness of the world, even if it manifests itself in indifference rather than malice.

To them, everything is an act of offense.

And therein lies the problem. To them everything is offensive and it is up to everyone else to make those offensive things go away. But it is they themselves who are offensive to a very large majority of the population, yet the expect everyone else to change.

Here's a clue, snowflakes: If you think everyone else is an offensive a**hole, then you're wrong. It's you who are the offensive a**hole.

Their parents, they politically correct 'friends' and teachers and counselors didn't do them any favors. Then again, the purveyors of political correctness had an agenda that had nothing to do not being offensive and everything to do with making sure that emotionally fragile snowflakes like them would be psychologically incapable of being independent. They would be totally dependent upon a state that wants to make sure they are incapable of acting up, of questioning The Powers That Be or the status quo. They wanted perpetual children and they got them.

The rest of us wonder just what the hell is going on, why these immature and spoiled children seem to think they can demand anything from the rest of us? That these snowflakes will be dependent upon the rest of us the rest of their lives is something I find both repulsive and offensive. That it was done to them on purpose just makes it worse.

While I haven't run across but a very few of these damaged children, I do have a response to any of them who might make the mistake of trying to get me to conform to their twisted view of the world - “Piss off, snowflake! I've got better things to do than waste my time wiping your ass!”

Words Or Deeds?

Which is more powerful, words or deeds?

While the argument can be made that they can have equal power (and in very rare instances, they do), in general that is not the case. We are most often judged by our deeds, good or bad. Words are easy, cheap, and can be meaningless if not backed up with action.

But to hear the DNC-MSM tell it, Trump's words from 11 years ago are far more important that Hillary's deeds...or misdeeds. Common sense should tell us that's absolute crap.

Donald Trump's gutter talk about women shows yet again that he is bad news. The problem is that Hillary Clinton is far worse.

Trump's talk is indefensible. But Hillary Clinton's actions as Secretary of State, carrying out the Obama administration's foreign policies, have cost many lives in many places, including the American ambassador and others killed in Benghazi.

See the difference here? Trump's words may have hurt someone's feelings. Hillary's deeds left Americans dead, Americans that should not have died if she had acted. But then that's what's more important to the Progressives - feelz not facts.

Women have a right to be offended by Trump's words. But women have suffered a far worse fate from Secretary Clinton's and President Obama's actions. Pulling American troops out of Iraq, despite military advice to the contrary, led to the sudden rise of ISIS and their seizing of many women and young girls as sex slaves.

--snip--

Meanwhile, President Obama tried to downplay ISIS with flippant words, by calling them the junior varsity. His half-hearted, foot-dragging military response has allowed ISIS to parade before the world as triumphant conquerors, appealing to disgruntled people in Western countries to carry out terrorist attacks in support of their cause.

That is a lot worse than some stupid and gross words by Donald Trump, which even he has had to repudiate. Make no mistake about it. Neither party has a good candidate for President. The choice is between bad and disastrous.

Are women more in danger from Trump's words or Hillary's actions? Are Americans in general more in danger from Trump's shallowness on issues or Hillary's ruthless grabs for money and power -- a track record that goes all the way back to the days when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas?

This is where the Democrats fail, believing American women are in more danger from words uttered by Trump eleven years ago as compared Hillary's illegal and immoral deeds, much of which has been well documented in the thousands of e-mails hacked and handed over to Wikileaks.

So which of the two is really the reprehensible one? Trump, for his locker room talk? Or Hillary for the growing list of dead bodies, inhumane treatment of women by monsters she helped bring to power, and the long list of foreign 'friends' who bought access to her, her husband, and the State Department with millions of dollars worth of 'donations' to the Clinton Foundation?

None Of The Above - A Proposal

As the election grows closer and we all see that neither major candidate for President is fit to attain that high office, as well as there being no real viable third-party candidate, I feel I must once again bring forth an idea that I and a number of others have put forth more than once over the years.

While our present ballot system gives us a number of candidates to vote for (or against) for a number of offices small and great, it still leaves out a good portion of the electorate who feel they cannot in good conscience vote for any of the candidates listed on the ballot. While write-ins have at times won some elections, usually local elections, it isn't enough. The present system does not allow the electorate to truly show their displeasure at a slate of candidates. Since staying home and not voting signifies nothing and shows nobody our true feelings, it's time to make a long overdue change in our ballot system.

To what do I refer?

None Of The Above.

None Of The Above should be a valid selection in every election, local, state, or national. None Of The Above gives those who would otherwise be silent a true voice in our election system. None Of The Above allows the people a true means of voicing their displeasure.

This is how it would work:

In any election, if None Of the Above receives a plurality or majority of the votes, the election must be run again for the office or offices affected. The new election will be held in a specified time not to exceed two months from the original election date.

Here's the kicker: none of the candidates who ran during the first election will be eligible to run in the second election, period. After all, the people already kicked them to the curb because they didn't want them to represent them in the first place.

A new slate of candidates will file to run and a committee to choose new candidates will be selected by lot from the pool of registered voters. Democrats will select the Democrat candidate(s), Republicans will select the Republican candidates, Independents will select Independent candidate(s), and so on.

If the offices needing new candidates are for President and/or Vice President, the same process will be used at state level and the political parties will hold a national convention to choose their candidate for each office. The convention cannot last more than two days from the time it convenes. The candidates wishing to be considered will have three weeks to file for candidacy in each state for a small nominal fee. Use of properly vetted proxies or representatives to file the necessary paperwork in each state will be allowed.

While this can create chaos if not handled properly, it does give those who would otherwise not vote because of the poor quality of candidates a chance to let their opinions be known. If candidates are so awful that the electorate doesn't want to vote for them, this gives the people a chance to remove them from consideration and replace them with more acceptable candidates.

Is this plan perfect? Of course not. In fact I'm sure it needs major revisions. But we need to start somewhere.

Thoughts On A Sunday

This weekend is the so-called Last Gasp weekend of the season, with a lot of summerfolk up to close out their summer cottages and camps as well as the increasing hordes of leaf-peepers up to look at the fall foliage.

The farm where BeezleBub works has seen one its busiest weekends since the Fourth of July. (Labor Day Weekend is the third busiest.)

Rain dampened out some of the activities for the first half of today, but Columbus Day will certainly help make up for it.

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While I can condemn Donald Trump's comments in regards to some of the women he's come on to, one must remember that he said these things over 11 years ago, not yesterday.

Something to remember, Bill Clinton went far beyond that and was elected to a second term. The DNC went out of its way to minimize the effects of Clinton's affairs and assaults. Hillary did what she could to demonize his victims. You know if it had been a Democrat uttering what Trump did, they'd be putting as much spin as they could, bringing up that it was a long time ago and didn't reflect the beliefs of Democrat in question.

The old double standard rides again.

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Yet another example of the Democrat/Liberal/Progressive double standard: They're pushing to strip the non-profit status of any group opposing the Obama Administrations foreign policy.

So if any one group expresses their disdane and opposition to the disastrous foreign policy and “smart diplomacy” of Obama and his cronies, they should be stripped of their non-profit status, a means of silencing them that is only one step below arrests and incarceration in 're-education camps' or gulags.

Somewhere in the depths of Hell, the ghosts of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are chuckling.

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That whirring sound? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr spinning in his grave.

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Have you noticed how politics has increasingly been intruding one every aspect of life, particularly Progressive politics? Their politics have ruined everything fun.

Writes Skip:

[T]he Progressives, with their constant shoving of politics into everything, are basically ruining everything.  They can’t just leave well enough alone and have to constantly be screeching at us from their positions.  You name it but there’s hardly no place to go without some Progressive policy or stance thrown in our faces.

Skip goes on to link to a piece by Peggy Ryan that delves into the destruction of fun by the Progressives by intruding into every aspect of our lives, even recreation.

What kind of people do this kind of thing? That's simple – totalitarians. After all, that's what Progressives are at heart because they believe they know better how we should live our lives and what we should believe because they are our 'betters'.

Perhaps it's time to disabuse them of that notion and show them for the pathetic deluded misanthropes they are.

****************

David Starr has some ideas about repatriating all of the trillions of dollars stuck overseas and eliminating the incentives for US corporations from performoing inversions (buying a foreign company and them 'moving' their corporate headquarters to that foreign land in order to get out from under the draconian US corporate taxes). It may also help keep jobs in the US.

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Stacy McCain offers some advice about learning not to argue.

One of the important lessons in life — and it took me a long time to learn it — is to avoid arguments. That is to say, when you find yourself in a situation where someone is determined to dispute about facts, as opposed to mere opinion, just leave it alone and walk away. You have stated what you believe to be true, and the person trying to have an argument with you is, in effect, accusing you of ignorance and/or poor judgment. You are being disrespected, and there is no possibility that someone who has no respect for you will be persuaded by anything more you have to say. Change the subject, or politely excuse yourself from the conversation, because continuing such an argument will only give further offense to your antagonist, and likely cause harm to your reputation.

McCain goes on to illustrate why, including a lot of personal experience.

Read The Whole Thing.

****************

It will be interesting to see if Tom Brady's return to the Patriots lineup will put the team into a much better position to win against the Cleveland Browns today. Last week's outing with and injured Brissette at the helm proved to be a loser for both the offense and defense, with the Patriots being shutout at home, something that hasn't happened for decades. That the Patriots had to play their third string quarterback against a healthy Buffalo Bills team didn't help at all.

We'll see if Brady can light a fire under his team.

UPDATE: The Patriots beat the Browns 33-13!

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Will I be watching tonight's Presidential Debate?

Nope. I'm not going to bother, particularly since two of Hillary's media shills will be co-moderating.

Why the heck can't these folks use moderators with no agenda? Or are they afraid someone might ask Hillary a question that she might actually have to answer without the help of a script?

****************

Cap'n Teach point us to a Politico poll showing most citizens want Trump to stay in the race.

The poll was based on hearing the Trump comments and then his subsequent apology. It creates an interesting dynamic, where the political class are abandoning Trump and calling for him to step aside, while the rank and file are not (really, he shouldn’t have been the nominee in the first place, but, that’s a different post).

--snip--

Let’s face it: we know Hillary and Bill, among other Democrats, have done and said far, far, far worse. And are give a pass by Democrats and their compliant media. Trump’s comments were despicable, but, then who among us is without sin and can throw the stone?

Of course, we aren't running for President, and, shouldn’t we be better than the scum of the Democrats?

Yes. Yes we should.

****************

I have to agree with this 100 percent.

The GOP owns Trump because it rejected and destroyed the TEA Party.

The GOP had the chance to reform itself along TEA Party lines, to push for fiscal restraint, to make the government live withing the limits of the United States Constitution, and to promote free markets. Instead, it turned on the TEA Party after they had helped secure wins during the 2010 elections, treating no better than the Progressives did.

And because the establishment GOP did so, they are finding themselves with a candidate they find they cannot support. The Republican rank and file have basically given the GOP leadership a big “Screw You!” in nominating Trump.

They are reaping what they have sown.

****************

And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rain has finally come to an end, the leaf-peepers are still arriving, and where it's time for me to put our boat up for the winter.

I Feel Relaxed Already

Socialism For The Uninformed

While this was first posted back in May, it is still timely and informative, particularly for those who still think socialism is the answer to all our ills. But as history has shown us over and over again, socialism, while sounding great in theory, doesn't deliver on its promises. It's a lesson that appears must be learned again and again.

As such, I have linked to a simple primer about socialism titled “Socialism for the Uninformed” written by Thomas Sowell.

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.

--snip--

The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it?

But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts -- such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there have been a number of experiments doing direct side-by-side comparisons between capitalist and socialist states. Time and again the socialist states failed to thrive and eventually collapsed. There are only two long-running experiments that stand as perfect examples of how not to do things – Cuba and North Korea. Even Communist China came to realize their socialist system was doomed and could never compete with the capitalist system, so they abandoned their moribund economic model and embraced capitalism only to see the wealth of their country and its citizens grow by orders of magnitude. It is what socialism promised, but never delivered.

In any case, Read The Whole Thing. If nothing else it will give you ammunition during your next debate with another “useful idiot” of the socialist Progressive movement.

Irony Writ Small

What's the definition of irony? I guess it depends upon the circumstances. Sometimes it can be profound and other times fanciful, or even foolish.

In this case I'm not talking about something with national or international implications. I'm not talking about something that will show up on YouTube (though I wish I was). This time around, it was something local and something to which those involved with the event I am about to relate will likely be living down for quite some time.

Our town hosts a fire training ground that is used by a number of fire departments here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. In fact, our town had just handed the scheduling, maintenance, and upkeep of the training facility to our regions Fire Mutual Aid organization.

This past Tuesday one of our neighboring towns used the facility, and particularly what is called a burn house, for training. Once finished, the firefighters packed up and returned to their station.

A few hours later our fire department was called out to the training facility to extinguish a now fully involved structure fire. The facility was deemed a total loss.

Ironic, indeed – a fire department causes a fire that burns down a fire training facility.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been quiet here around Lake Winnipesaukee. The summerfolk are pretty much gone, their cottages and camps closed up until late next spring. There are a few holdouts, but most will be done by the end of Columbus Day weekend.

The leaf-peepers have not yet arrived, at least not here. There are some colors up north of the White Mountains, but other than a few trees that tend to turn early, everything is still green.

That will change soon enough.

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The Democrats still claim there is very little, if any voter fraud. Yet we've seen a number of dead being registered to vote in places like Virginia. Hackers have been going after voter rolls in at least 20 states. Whether it is to create false registrations or to steal voter information isn't known, but in any case it's troubling.

One of the more vulnerable aspects of voting is the use of voting machines, specifically electronic voting machines. They are, after all, computers and computers will do what they're programmed to do. A hacker can rewrite code to make sure a certain candidate wins or loses regardless of the actual votes cast. It's one reason why a number of states are still using paper ballots and will continue to do so. My home state is one of them. While there are machines used to tally the votes cast on those ballots, hand counting to verify the results is often done, particularly if a particular race has a difference of 1% or less.

While it is still possible to commit election fraud by such a system, it is more difficult. It requires fraudulent voters to actually cast votes. So-called 'ballot box stuffing' is almost impossible to pull of because the ballot boxes remain in sight of the overseeing officials at the polling locations at all times. There's no “Gee, I found this ballot box in the trunk of my car. We should count them...” incidents. All counting is performed at each polling place, not a central location where the ballot boxes have to be transported.

While old fashioned, it works.

****************

Watts Up With That asks the question “What brought down the South Australia electrical grid?”

Answer: Violent fluctuations from the Snowtown wind farms.

It looks like a natural disaster but brought on by the fragility of the South Australian power system caused by the size of the variations in wind power.

The failure is most likely to have been triggered by the violent fluctuations from the Snowtown wind farms [...]. Shortly after 3 pm there was a loss of 200MW with a partial recovery some twenty minutes later of 100MW. The total wind farm supply for South Australia also shows these variations [...].

This shows the fragility of power sources that can so easily vary, in this case because of heavy storms that failures all over the grid. That the wind energy was varying all over the place just made it that much worse as there isn't the granularity of control as seen from conventional fossil fueled, nuclear, or hydro plants.

And the watermelons want to base a large percentage of our power generation on systems that are too susceptible to the vagaries of weather. That's never made any sense to me, at least not on an engineering level.

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I don't know who those guys in the Patriots uniforms were down in Foxborough today, but they sure as heck weren't the real Patriots. No offense. No defense. Stupid penalties against them and missed penalty calls against the Bills. Hey lost 16-0 at home. They've never been shut out at home.

Frankly, I expected a lot better from them even with their third string quarterback calling the plays. That the Patriots lost to the Bills, a team that isn't nearly as good as they are, shows there was some serious disconnects between the players. It's like they were just going through the motions.

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David Starr has it right in regards to Wall Street – they need to have some skin in the game.

Right now the system is set up where they've privatized the gains but socialized the losses, meaning if the do well they and the stockholders make money, but if they do poorly, the taxpayer bails them out. That gives them no incentive to not play poker with their clients' money because they know Uncle Sugar will bail them out. As David writes:

Since the risky games are high yield (except for when they become high loss) they keep on playing them.  Step one, is making it perfectly clear to everyone, that the next Wall St operation to go broke will stay broke, no bailout, and the executives will be prosecuted for fraud. 

Forbid banks playing the stock market.  Glass Steagall had it right. 

David has a list of things that need to be done in order to give some discipline to Wall Street. As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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A number of Dems are castigating Donald Trump for using the tax code to his advantage. It's the tax code passed by Congress. Hillary is painting him as a tax cheat because he didn't pay more taxes than he owed.

But you notice not one mention is made about multimillionaires and billionaires who happen to be Democrats and support Democrat candidates who use the same tax code exactly the same way.

It's the old Democrat double standards coming into play...again.

No surprise there.

Another question the Democrat-owned MSM is failing to ask: Which IRS employee is behind this? Do they realized they committed a felony be doing so? Do they really care?

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summerfolk have dwindled away, the temps have plummeted, and where Monday is approaching far too quickly.