1/27/2019

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a quiet weekend for a change, with no real chores needing attending to or places I needed to be. There’s also no football games other than the Pro Bowl and I have no plans to watch it. Weekends like that don’t come along very often so I am enjoying it as much as I can.

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Seen at Powerline:

NFL has changed the name of the Super Bowl to New England Patriots Invitational!

Hmm. Seems about right considering that out of the 53 Super Bowl games, the Patriots will have played in 11 of them.

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Some people are saying that President Trump has caved in to Pelosi and Schumer, funding the government without any promises for funding a wall. But others are saying he has done no such thing because the funding Trump has signed is only good for three weeks and that it is a calculated move on his part.

Of the two options presented, I am more inclined to go with calculated move as Trump is not one known to cave when there’s something he really wants. Too many people are judging Trump as if he were the usual Washington politician. After two years in office one would think that the Washington establishment/media/insiders would have stopped trying to fit Trump into the usual political pigeonholes because he doesn’t fit into any of them. But they haven’t which is why they constantly underestimate him.

Keeping that in mind, what Trump has shown is that he’s open to compromise and negotiation and that Pelosi and Schumer are not. He’s the adult in the room and they’re the spoiled children throwing temper tantrums unless they get their way.

Should the Nancy & Chuck show drive the government back into shutdown it will be them taking the heat, not Trump. He’ll be able to show he made the effort to solve the impasse and Pelosi and Schumer are being closeminded and stubborn, not for the benefit their constituents but for their egos.

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Are we seeing another victim of the Mueller investigation’s overreach in the person of Roger Stone?

Yes. Yes we are.

Has he been charged with activities that could be part of the alleged collusion between Trump and the Russians? No.

Has he been charged with crimes that are tied in to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016? No.

Was he charged with helping the Trump campaign ‘steal’ emails from the Democratic National Committee or their publication by Wikileaks? No.

So what’s he being charged with?

There is nothing wrong with what Stone did. Mueller charges, rather, that Stone lied to a Congressional committee about his actions. If that is true, Stone is in trouble. But the charges against him do not support the theory that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to invade the DNC’s email system. On the contrary, the Stone story is just more confirmation that the Trump campaign had nothing to do with it.

That’s it? He allegedly lied to Congress about his actions even though those actions weren’t themselves crimes? So as it has been pointed out before, he’s possibly guilty of a process crime, not an actual crime.

That’s pathetic…and desperate on the part of the Mueller investigation.

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Here’s yet another history lesson that will be devoutly ignored by the socialists amongst us. The latest lesson? Another nation having run its course of socialism – Venezuela.

A very wise person once said that "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." Venezuela has reached that point and now is paying the price, for once you're out of money in a socialistic country the only thing left of value is blood. It is indeed a tragedy as this nation was once South America's wealthiest.

Venezuela's dictator, Nicolas Maduro, is fighting to retain power. At least four people are dead in rioting that broke out today. Millions have left the country due to a failing economy, hyperinflation, no food, no medicine … you know, socialism at its best.

Fraudulent elections have a way of supporting socialism and Venezuela is no different. The Presidential elections last May were plagued with allegations of fraud and rigged voter registration.

This is the path that those like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, and Nancy Pelosi would like to see the US go down. But of course they believe it won’t happen like that here because they’re smarter than the others that have gone before them.

Yeah. Right.

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I don’t know if you have experienced this:

You get a call from a phone number you don’t recognize and when you answer it you find you are being asked if you are in pain.

I certainly have, sometimes as many as three times a day. So has David Starr and he’s tired of it.

I am getting a phone call every other day now. It's a robocaller who starts out asking if I am feeling any pain, and goes on to point me toward a pain clinic that will prescribe any kind of happy pill I might want. I wonder how many opioid addicts get started by such drug pushing robocallers. For that matter how many opioid addicts get started at those pain clinics…?

Another question to ask: Who is paying for these robocalls?

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It looks we’ll be heading back into the deep freeze later this week. While we won’t see the kind of temps that the upper mid-West will be experiencing – they’ll be experiencing temps as low as -30°F, and that’s before any wind chill is factored in – and we’ll be seeing temps in the single digits below zero. Though with wind chills we might see down to -20°F. It will mean I might need to start up the trusty RAM 1500 a few minutes before I depart from The Gulch for work.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where bobhouses are dotting the ice, ice fishing has been increasing daily, and where we’re looking forward to the Ice Fishing Derby in a couple of weeks.