All The Political News Fit to Print

Lindsey Graham is at the Iowa State Fair.  Gram is not married and has no kids.  He wants to send ten thousand troops back to Iraq and enlist the Saudis, the Turks and the Egyptians and other sunnis, and go in there in there and kill every last member of ISIS.  Of course he is against the Iran treaty.  “I won’t be a President who allows the USA to be walked on.”   He believes, “We are in a religious war” and would kill everybody here if they could.   Well I guess the silver lining in all this inflamed rhetoric, is that Lindsey is only one percent in the polls.  He said “When I’m president we’re going to drink more, like Reagan and Tip O Neil.”   He says it’s necessary to raise the age of retirement, and if you’re drunk enough, that’ll make sense.

I must confess I didn’t listen to Donald Trump’s exposee that carefully with Chuck Todd on Sunday.  So let me right now downgrade my “term paper” grade of Donald Trump to a “D”.  I didn’t realize how bad the totality of the immigration policies were.  Not only does he want to steal the birthright of people born on American soil, which is unconstitutional, but he wants to conthiscate or impound all the money that illegal aliens earn, and want to send back to their poor relations in Mexico.  He also wants to pay for this boarder fence “the Trump wall” with terrifs and other fees from Mexico.  (Terrifs are taxes WE pay)  But worst of all more than “self deportation’ that Romney proposed, Trump wants to massively deport twelve million aliens whose legal status is in question and make them reapply and ‘let the good ones back in’.  So his solution to “keeping families together” is to send ALL the family members back to their country or origen at a cost of billions of dollars of US taxpayer money.  Other republicans such as Lindsey Graham have referred to this series of Trump proposals as “gibberish”.

An official court ruling states that Northwestern University football players are not allowed to Unionize.  As you know I’ve always felt the idea was insane to begin with.  After all they are supposedly primarily ‘students’ with football as just an extra-curricular activity.  These players have it made already with free auditions to the NFL and stand the prospect of earning millions of dollars when they graduate, and at times BEFORE they graduate.  But the specific ruling the court made was that they lack the jurisdiction which is properly the NCAA who sets the rules for ALL the college football players and not just one team.  So the court reasoned that if ONE team was unionized, then logically they’d have to unionize All the NCAA teams.

Julian Bond died over the weekend.  I thought I heard his name as the head of a delegation at the democratic convention in 1968 or something.  Julian Bond was born on Jaunary 14^th 1940 and he co-founded SNCC at age twenty in 1960.  SNCC (student non-violent coordinating committee) has been associated with Malcolm X in the past.  Julian Bond attended the legendary March on Washington in late summer 1963.   Julian Bond ran and won a contest as Georgia State legislator but in January of 1965 the racist state house refused to seat Julian.  So Julian Bond took them to Court and won.  Julian Bond was head of the NAACP from 1998 through 2008 (ten years) and now he is dead at age 75.  A Civil Rights hero.

The I Phone and I Pad get their value (cost) not from parts and labor to assemble, but rather the value of the “intellectual property” and marketing.  Only ten or twelve dollars of each I Phone or I Pad go into the Chinese property.  The rest is sheer profit for Apple.   Perhaps Apple should start paying the Beatles their due royalties on the name Apple Corp itself.

If we’re going to be political realists, at some point we have to admit that neither Trump nor Hillary are going anywhere.  Political demise of both is predicted on an almost daily basis but Trump’s poll numbers only increase.  And in a 2008 head to head contest with Joe Byden, Hillary demolished him in whatever primaries both of them were in together.   None of Shawn Hannity’s thundering against Hillary has dented her in the slightest in a popularity polls.  And Trump has only risen from 23% to 25% largely at the expense of Jeb Bush who is now fizzling into political oblivion along with Lindsey Graham and Bobby Jindell and Rick Perry.

 Right now Thom Hartman is arguing with a Black conservative who is kind of trying to say he agrees with Thom on a number of issues.  He says that Dodd Frank is racist because the small community banks where Black people got the majority of their loans, were being driven out of business because of the solvency requirements of Dodd Frank..But in general the Black guest is resorting to word play to make his point.  Patches had her kittens last night.  Phyllis has heard them meowing and everybody thinks there are five of them.  It’s apparently on the north side of the shed or the NW corner of the property.  I saw the cat briefly this morning as she walked past.  Phyllis heard the kittens meowing but she said she hadn’t actually seen them.  Phyllis has been making sure she’s been well fed.   I had Stephanie Miller on who had the Rude Pundit and other gueses, and Jim Ward was in the studio.  We had corn flakes for breakfast followed by toast and butter and jelly.  The coffee was drowning in milk.  Phyllis believes Yadera would be a good sales person to give away the kitties when it’s time, but this might be after Phyllis leaves in a couple weeks.  I got a Clipper from Dan and Phyllis gave me a long short.  Last night I stood in line for medication from Donnie at the med room.  They had getaway time on “Eye on LA”.  You repelled down a rock cliff with a rope in Zion Ntl Park.  They there was cable sliding in Catalina, and ballooning in Tenecula at sunrise.  America’s Funniest Home Videos was on.  I was out around dusk and Phyllis said “It’s too hot now but patches will have her kittens tonight”.  Glenda gave me about half of her cigarette, which was the last one I had this day.