Month: October 2019

The next Democrat Debate is upcoming. BTW: Unfortunately I will be busy that night, but this only reminded me of something that the Dems do not have.

Last week I was watching one of my grandsons playing youth basketball, and his team won. Now let’s be clear, although he is a good player, he is not a future NBA prospect. He scored about four points, even while missing a couple of free throws. He is very good on defense and stole the ball three or four times from the other team. His defensive assignment was to cover the opponents best player, and putting the clamps on their star player was one of the reasons for the victory. However despite his defensive prowess, his best basketball talent is his ability to pass. He doesn’t panic, and he consistently found one of his open teammates. In fact he found them so many times that I lost track of the number of his assists. Whether he will be able to play basketball in high school is something that is unknown at this time. If the high school coach values teamwork, he has a reasonable shot at making the team . . . that is if he grows another four inches or so.

Teamwork! A word that is seemingly unknown in the cadre of the Democrat’s presidential candidates. Kamala Harris went after Ol’ Joe during the initial debate, and she has sunk like a lead weight ever since. Likewise one of the other “irrelevants” went after Ol’ Joe in the second debate, and we haven’t heard a peep from him since.

With all of this recent furor over Ukraine, etc., I have not heard any of the potential nominees come to the defense of Ol’ Joe . . . Zero, zip, nada! I have not seen any of them try to assist Ol’ Joe. Will someone please assist him. Throw him the ball, so that he can score some points. Everybody loves teamwork. The American people love teamwork. If one of the trolls on the next debate stage were to play some team defense and disrupt the passing lanes by coming to Ol’ Joe’s defense, I would forecast a significant rise in the polls for him/her. But don’t hold your breath!

Please help me understand this Democrat impeachment ploy. It makes no sense! Is there some underlying “secret plan?” I am betting that there must be . . . but let’s think this whole thing through for a few seconds. First of all, in general, the Democrats aren’t stupid. Their policies are often stupid, but they usually are not. Granted they often think emotionally, or in other words they often do not think things through, but again that doesn’t mean that they are all dumb. Certainly with this impeachment ploy, the Democrats are playing to their base, but there must be more than this sucking up to the far left. Everyone who has half a brain realizes that the Senate will never convict President Trump on this impeachment charge, or charges. It would take a 2/3rds vote in the Senate to convict, and this is just not possible, even if a few of the RINOs, like Mitt Romney, are swayed by the Democrat’s caterwauling. Sure the Dems in the House will be able to yell, point fingers, and suggest just about anything, but basically the country has heard their bleating before on multiple occasions. They will convince just a few of the country’s independents, as most of the non-Dems are growing pretty tired of the constant Democrat posturing. In addition many of the Dems in the House will then have to go on record as supporting this nonsense – to their potential detriment in the 2020 elections.

Making this ploy even more potentially catastrophic for the Dems is that if there is a trial in the Senate, the defense (President Trump’s Legal team) will be able to call a multitude of witnesses, including possibly Comey, Biden, and even Hillary, etc. to testify under oath. There will potentially be a number of individuals thrown under the proverbial bus, as c.y.a. will become endemic! Again this makes no sense. Why go through with this version of political suicide?

I can think of only two possible reasons for this frivolity. First, those in the know may realize that the chance of defeating Trump in 2020 is a long shot, and so they are willing to do something desperate to try to alter the momentum and simultaneously fire up their base to actually turn out to vote and thus change the inevitable. Possible, but again potentially suicidal. Second, the Dems may be willing to risk it all in order to win control of the Senate. When this ridiculous attempt at impeachment fails in the Senate, their message to the voters will be to defeat those sob’s who allowed Trump to dodge his “just and deserved punishment.”

In the 2018 elections, it seemed to me that President Trump adroitly put all of his impetus and effort behind those candidates running for the Senate. His gambit worked. He knew that the real power is in the Senate (confirmation of judicial nominees including those nominated for the Supreme Court, and the power on any further impeachment trials that come up from 2020 to 2024.) Undoubtedly Justice Ginsberg will not still be on the Supreme Court much longer after 2020, and another conservative Trump appointee will solidify a conservative majority in the Supreme Court for decades to come. Trump knows this and the Dems know this, and so perhaps they are willing to risk the whole kit-and-caboodle on these upcoming Senate contests. Will this ploy work? . . . No!

Recently while in the Boston area, my daughter and I were walking my daughter’s dog. We happened upon a pond that was covered in green slime. Yuck! I thought, “How can something which was designed to be so perfect be so ugly?” As I pointed to it my daughter said, “We do not let anyone or anything go anywhere near that swamp; No dogs; No children. Everyone knows that it is far from what it should be, but nobody is incentivized to do anything. It just goes on, year after year. What a mess! Those in the town government refer to it as a pond, but we know that it is closer to a swamp! I wish that those in power would actually get a closer look at this. If someone in the town government was honest and objective, he would call it what it really is . . . a swamp! Then perhaps, it could be remedied . . . perhaps they would do what needs to be done . . . to drain the swamp.”

When we had finished our walk, I sat down and began to read about the latest out of Washington. A whistleblower complaint against President Trump alleges that Trump broke the law during a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky but apparently the person making the complaint was “not a direct witness” to the wrongdoing that he claimed Trump had committed. Wow! This sounded simplistically similar to that game of “telephone” that the young children play. It appeared worse than the “he said, she said game” that the Democrats recently have insisted on playing. This version is “he said that she said that he apparently said.” How could this nonsense pass for anything close to credible in D.C.? 

News flash! Apparently the intelligence community between May 2018 and August 2019 secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. A new whistleblower complaint form now does not require potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing they are reporting. A previous version of the whistleblower complaint form declared that any complaint must contain only first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoing and that complaints that provide only hearsay, rumor, or gossip would be rejected. The new version of the whistleblower complaint form allows employees to file complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about” wrongdoing from others. 

Does this sound suspicious to anybody other than me? The intelligence community recently changes the rules concerning whistleblowers, and then, “out of the blue,” President Trump is accused of something by someone that supposedly who had no direct knowledge of what was actually said. Hmmm! To me this looks like another swamp that should be drained! The difference however is that this one is the real swamp . . . and it stinks!

When A and B seem to occur together with surprising frequency there are only a few possibilities. First, they occur together by coincidence. Second, A causes B. Third, B causes A. Fourth, there is some common factor, Z, that causes both A and B. Occasionally the “obvious” relationship between A and B is the obvious. Let’s take for example, the relationship between how a city is doing and who is in charge in that city. Presently the two of the most obvious examples are Los Angeles and San Francisco. In regard to both of these cities, most are aghast when they see the disgusting dirt, trash, excrement, and discarded needles on the streets in parts of these cities. Most of this filth is occurring in the homeless encampments that line the streets in certain areas of each of these cities.Last year we had a similar problem in San Diego. In the downtown area there were blocks of tents and makeshift shelters on the sidewalks that looked similar to what we are seeing in L.A. and in San Francisco today. What brought this issue to a head was a hepatitis outbreak that occurred in part because of these squalid living conditions. Today in the downtown area, those block-long encampments are no more. On certain mornings of the week, city crews can be seen hosing down the sidewalks with some sort of disinfectant, and more than once I have seen police telling homeless men and women to move on. In the last six months or so, to me it appears that the number of homeless in the downtown area is much less. Problem solved ? . . . Not by a long shot as after the “clearing of the homeless from the downtown area,” complaints of an increased number of homeless began to crop up in the adjacent neighborhoods of Mission Hills and Hillcrest. So apparently the homeless were still homeless, and had merely relocated. Now the latest is to open a storage facility in the neighborhood of El Cerritos about ten miles east of the city’s two other storage facilities in the downtown area. In theory, these facilities are a place for the homeless to leave their belongings when they are elsewhere, while keeping sidewalks clear of shopping carts, makeshift  structures, and other debris and clutter. Unfortunately, having a storage facility in El Cerritos is only going to attract homeless to the El Cerritos vicinity.

San Francisco saw a 17% jump in the number of homeless residents over the last two years, according to preliminary results of the city’s point-in-time count. In January, volunteers recorded 8,011 homeless people living in shelters and on the streets in the city of roughly 880,000. Their 2017 count logged 6,858 people.California is spending millions of dollars to stem the tide of homelessness without much to show for it. The latest evidence of that arrived last month when several Bay Area cities and counties (not just San Francisco) reported that their latest tallies of homeless people revealed big increases.
As of January 2018, California had an estimated 129,972 experiencing homelessness on any given day, as reported by Continuums of Care to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Of that Total, 6,702 were family households, 10,836 were Veterans, 12,396were unaccompanied young adults (aged 18-24), and 34,332 were individuals experiencing chronic homelessness.
According to California State Association of Counties (CSAC)Joint Homeless Task Force “Homelessness impacts all 58 counties in California – rural or urban, northern or southern, inland or coastal. It impacts individuals and families of every background.  The causes of homelessness can be traced to a variety of problems including loss of employment, lack of affordable housing, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical and mental illness. There is no one solution to this growing problem.”I do not pretend to know the answer to the homeless problem in California, but I think it is reasonable to say that whatever the Democrats in Sacramento are doing, is not working!