The swamp never changes …

Real Federal tax reform should be a relatively simple thing. 

Eliminate all the subsidies, special tax treatments, tax offsets, tax credits, loopholes and the like, and start over. Get back to basics: tax income however it’s received and from wherever it’s derived. Keep graduated tax brackets if that makes you happy. 

But stop the rest of the nonsense. 

I know that’s hopelessly naïve on my part.  I can always hope. 

Of course, that’s not going to happen. Too many people, too many companies, too many state legislatures, and too many special interests are in the way. Everybody wants to keep what they have now, or even expand what they’re already getting.

That parliament of whores we call Congress are all salivating at the renewed opportunity to kiss the butts of their campaign donors and constituents by bending, twisting, and perverting arcane sections of the tax code to keep them happy.

There’s absolutely no reason – economic or otherwise – that our tax code is so complex.  Our tax code should only be focused on getting revenue to support Federal government operations.  Everything else in the code is crap put there by special interests. 

It’s a tax code; it’s not supposed to be a cornucopia of handouts for corporate welfare or social engineering. As such, it should be designed solely to raise money, not give it away. 

People who expect the Federal tax code be “fair” are fooling themselves. The courts ruled long ago that nothing about taxes needs to be fair or equitable. 

Moreover, those who usually argue vehemently for “fairness” aren’t really interested in that; if they were they’d be in favor of a flat tax where everybody – the poor, the middle class, and the rich – would all pay the same rate on their income. And it would cover all income. 

Don’t hear self-anointed champions of the poor hollering for that, do you?  Nope.  What they want is to dramatically raise the income threshold for who qualifies to be “poor” so more get more tax payer dollars and benefits without paying anything in. And Congress goes along. 

Doubt that? Consider this: Congress under both parties routinely passes laws to give tax rebates and other payouts to people who don’t pay any Federal income tax at all.    

Think about that logic for a moment.

People get tax rebates on taxes they didn’t pay.  Our government also sends checks to non-taxpayers who claim multiple dependents they don’t have, people who have jobs but fall below a certain income level, and others, including people here illegally. 

And now that same Congress is debating whether to raise those payouts even more.  Just to get the votes Republicans need to pass this “tax reform.”

Our media have generally focused on only a few issues in this legislative effort.

First, the rich might pay a bit less in taxes. Corporations would see their tax rates go down. In about 10 years the middle class might have to pay a bit more in taxes.  The poor won’t benefit. And the now heavily subsidized premiums for ObamaCare will go up, affecting millions. 

Got to be honest here: I’m okay with all that. Especially if loopholes are closed.   

The rich pay almost all the Federal income tax already; close all the loopholes and they’ll probably pay more. The lowering of the tax rate on corporations is meaningless – hardly any big corporations pay much if any tax at present because of all the credits, subsidies and loopholes.

The middle class should pay a bit more in taxes when all their specious tax breaks and credits go away; those have never accomplished anything that wouldn’t have happened anyway without them. Most of these are designed more to tilt the marketplace for special interests, like realtors, childcare providers, and solar energy panel installers, for example, by subsidizing their cost. Strip away the tax breaks and  credits and the free market will drive prices down for the middle class.

What about the poor?  Honestly, why should people who don't pay any tax now get an additional tax break? On what? 

Here's a better idea.  How about we stop subsidizing and incentivizing poverty?  If we really want to help the poor then don’t reward able-bodied people for pushing themselves into poverty. Don’t reward getting pregnant at 15, dropping out of school, becoming a drug addict, or committing a felony. That way people can qualify for a real job, make real money, work hard and do better. Tax policy has nothing to do with poverty, defeating it or increasing it. 

Finally, ObamaCare premiums were already skyrocketing long before there was talk of eliminating the personal mandate and payoffs to the insurance companies. The people who couldn’t afford health insurance before didn’t gain practical, useful health insurance under ObamaCare.  If they were only paying a few bucks per month for ObamaCare. but couldn’t afford the deductibles in the thousands, did they ever have real coverage?    

One thing I particularly like about the tax reform package in its present form is that it rights a grievous wrong that's been perpetuated for decades. It could eliminate some of the Federal tax offsets given to residents of high-tax states.   

Right now that’s a $100-billion a year tax break people in high-tax states enjoy, at the expense of the residents of other states. Politicians in those states rightfully worry their current residents, especially the rich, will flee to lower-tax states once they can’t offset their state and local taxes against their Federal tax anymore. That’s a possibility. 

However, what really keeps these state and local politicians awake at night is that they finally may have to rein in their spending on increasing the size and cost of government.  They’ll lose the freedom to raise state, local, and property taxes whenever they want on whomever they wish, knowing the offset minimizes the bite. The speaker of the New Jersey Assembly already said they might need to reconsider the recent “millionaire tax” they passed if they lose the offset.  Boo-hoo. 

Then there’s the supposed closing of other loopholes that continue to favor the rich and corporations.  There are so many of these hardly anyone can keep track of them.

Except lobbyists. Make no mistake, when tax policy is being written, the lobbyists come out in droves, like ants at a picnic. They all want their piece of the goodies.    

That’s when you can see the real swamp in action. 

And that’s when you can clearly see how our elected representatives are willing to sell us out at the bidding of powerful special interests.

How they are willing to trade their vote – or hold up the passage of a bill – for some bit of pork that benefits a single company or handful of companies in their state or district. How they preach about simplifying the tax code at the same time they weave in more complexity, written so specifically that it can only apply to a favored few.  

How achieving the promise of substantive tax reform always fails these days because practically everyone in Congress is beholden to someone or some group opposed to anything that might strip away some of their special deals and require them to pay more taxes.  

Last but certainly not least, how petty they are, using their vote to settle old political scores. Think Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, and John McCain.   

Or as a bargaining chip to get something else that has absolutely nothing to do with the tax-reform legislation at hand. Think Susan Collins.   

Then you have the grandstanders now opposed to anything that might increase the deficit, unless it’s something they want which would also increase the deficit.  Or the clowns on the left like Schumer who never met deficit spending he didn’t like until now; now he’s a budget hawk. 

Does everybody in Congress think we’re idiots? They must. 

After all, we keep voting them in. What does that say about us?    

The swamp never changes. It will never change on its own. The tax-reform package just floats the crap to the top again so it’s more visible. 

There’s only one way to change it. Vote them all out.  Every last one of them. 

Then maybe we’ll get term limits.  Ethics Committees with teeth. And a reduction in the pay-to-play mentality of incumbents from both parties that thrive in the swamp.   

Explaining this country …

It’s usually when you’re travelling. Someone from Canada or from Europe will ask you how we could have elected Trump instead of Hillary, why everybody here can have a gun, and why we don’t have free nationalized healthcare as they do, for example.   

What they really want to know is why we aren’t more like them.    

I seriously doubt citizens of other nations get questioned as much so frequently. I’ve never asked someone from Canada or Europe why they aren’t more like us.

The less-than-subtle implication of their questions is that their country and its people are somehow morally and socially superior to us. And that we really aren’t as smart or enlightened as they are, or we would be more like them. 

It’s easy to chalk some of that up to ethnocentrism. But clearly they don’t understand us. Nor should we expect them to.  

Our own media consistently distort reality here to feed a specific narrative. Foreign media then pick that up and never bother to do their own homework. It’s dishonest, disingenuous, and lazy, but it is what it is. That’s why the world has trouble understanding us.    

If your entire opinion of America is shaped by what’s presented by CNN or MSNBC or the Washington Post or New York Times, or the AP wire services, you’ll never understand us.

There are millions of other Americans that don’t live or work in New York, on the West Coast, or in the D.C. metro. And those millions don’t necessarily share the same values or political views of those places. Or support the same agenda. Those millions are not ignorant hayseeds, they’re not religious bigots, they’re not homophobes, they’re not racists, either. 

Despite how our media and the entertainment industry here typically portray them.    

They’re just ordinary folks. Their concerns are pretty down-to-earth: protecting their families, keeping food on the table, earning a decent living, safety and security. They have about as much in common with the talking heads in the media and Hollywood stars as a fish does with a horse.

These folks weren’t stunned Trump won over Hillary – they voted for him. They weren’t alone. However, they were conveniently overlooked by our media leading up to the election. Their opinions simply didn’t matter as much to big-city journalists, news anchors, and pollsters.

Or the Democrat Party or Republican Establishment, for that matter.   

That’s why so many in the media – and the major political parties – were shocked that Donald Trump won the Republican primaries. When he won the election, the media and their Liberal and Democrat pals were caught completely by surprise; everybody they knew, everybody whose opinion mattered to them, voted for Hillary.

Based on how our media had constantly dismissed Trump as a blow-hard buffoon with absolutely no chance to win, imagine how the world felt. How did this happen?   

The answer is in a map showing which individual voting precincts went for Hillary and which for Trump. There’s a sea of red – for Trump – and scattered little pockets of blue for Hillary. 

That map makes it startlingly clear how ridiculous it is to judge all Americans’ opinions only by what’s important to a relatively tiny part of America – that tiny part obsessively covered by our media as the supposed bellwether of American public opinion.      

Listening only to our media, you’d never suspect that the number one concern of Americans is the economy and jobs – and has has been for years – not protecting illegal immigrants, transgender rights, or alleged Russian meddling in our elections or possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

As widely reported, it's true that healthcare is a top concern for most Americans, too.

But Americans’ concerns are focused primarily on skyrocketing rates and deductibles under ObamaCare, and little on whether women should get free contraceptives. 

Here’s what our media rarely if ever report: most working Americans still get their health insurance through their employers. Less than 3% - 5% of American citizens lack any health insurance, and even they can’t be turned away from hospital emergency rooms because they lack coverage or the ability to pay. Everybody here gets healthcare already. Citizen or not. 

It’s the law.    

Contrary to media reports, there’s no great groundswell of support for nationalized single-payer healthcare either, especially if means higher taxes for everyone and limits on the doctors you can see and longer wait times to see them. That may work for people in Canada and other countries, but it simply won’t fly here; Americans aren’t willing to make those tradeoffs.   

But you wouldn’t know that if all you see are interviews with people and groups focused on promoting liberal and progressive agendas and single-payer healthcare for all. And that’s pretty much all the world sees in our media. 

It’s too much to ask that Canadians and Europeans look beyond that and discover what really is important to most Americans. Honestly, I don’t blame them for their ignorance of us. Much of the time we are woefully ignorant of them, too. 

One thing that would be especially useful for people from other countries to know is how our distrust of too much power in too few hands is such a big part of our cultural DNA.

We always want to prevent the consolidation of power by a privileged few and instinctively distrust anyone or any entity that makes an attempt to gather and wield too much power. We are leery of banks and businesses that get too big, politicians and special-interest groups that get too powerful, and faceless bureaucrats accountable only to each other.

It’s why we don’t think highly of the United Nations or other world bodies making decisions for and about us. We would never tolerate having our lives and our economy managed by something like the European Commission, either. 

Our instinctive resistance to centralized authority and world opinion may be the most puzzling part of our culture and politics to citizens of other countries. They welcome the “one world” concept of some commission or another dealing with global issues. We are the outlier.

Foreigners also routinely underestimate how much Americans in general hate what they see as bullshit. More to the point, especially when we suspect someone is feeding us bullshit, whether that’s from diplomats, our politicians, our media, or even a salesperson.  We have an extraordinarily low tolerance for “political speak” or political correctness.  It’s all bullshit to us.   

Want to know a big reason Trump was elected? Part of it was our aversion to bullshit.  He spoke plainly like a regular guy and cut through the politically correct bullshit; he said out loud what a lot of us thought. Warts and all, he came across as genuine.

Hillary kept spewing the same old stuff, got caught in outright lies, and then tried to pass off more bullshit to distort what she’d done, who she was and what she really thought.  She came across as a phony who relied on bullshit more than honesty. 

Want to know why so many here oppose ObamaCare? Again, too much bullshit – you can keep your plan, you can keep your doctor, rates will go down by thousands per family. All bullshit. 

You can dress up bullshit any way you like, but if it still seems like bullshit to ordinary Americans they simply won’t buy it. That applies to blaming humans as the sole cause of climate change, saying illegal immigrants are a plus for our economy and never receive government benefits, and that lax gun laws alone are why “gun violence” is increasing.           

But that’s what our media keep reporting, even when the facts don’t bear them out. That feeds our  distrust of the media. Our media have been caught so many times making up stuff or reporting as fact what turned out to be false, they’ve lost our trust. When Trump called the media liars many Americans knew that was an overly broad overstatement but essentially true. 

That’s why there’s been so little pushback from the general public to his attacks on the media. Which is probably a shock to many in the world because we put such a high value on “freedom of the press.” Sure, the media are outraged as are their fans on the left, but the rest of us are “meh.” Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Welcome to America. 

Relatively easy access to guns here puzzles a lot of people from other countries, too. They seem to be under the false impression – fostered by our media – that we don’t have any real laws to control the sale of guns.  And that gun owners here, especially members of the NRA, fight tooth and nail to stop any reasonable gun control legislation.     

That, of course, is not true.  Despite our Second Amendment, the right to own a gun here has limitations. The NRA is on record as supporting extensive background checks to prevent the wrong people from buying guns.  We also have more than enough laws on the books to prevent people who shouldn’t have access to guns from getting them. 

But those laws aren’t enforced, not because people ignore them or the laws are too loosely written, but because our sloppy and inefficient bureaucracy doesn’t do its job screening out people legally disqualified from buying a gun. Like people with a history of mental illness. People with a history of domestic violence. Convicted felons, etc.

The laws are there. The requirements for background checks are there. But in almost every recent case of mass shootings in America, some bureaucrat dropped the ball. That, and people close to the shooters failed to step up and let authorities know in advance something was dreadfully wrong; rather than risk hurting someone’s feelings they did nothing. 

Incompetence and political correctness resulted in the mass shootings, not the lack of laws controlling access to guns. And not because of the Second Amendment, or the NRA.   

Now, there’s no way you can expect anyone from somewhere else to sit through all this. Yet these are the real answers to foreigners’ FAQs.

But as long as the rest of the world gets their news second-hand from our own media, they’ll never believe you.     

Just don’t go …

There’s no law that says you have to listen to entertainers you don’t like, go to movies you don’t want to see, watch sports you don’t enjoy, or go to lectures and speeches you don’t want to hear.

You have the right to blow off any or all of these. 

That’s your God-given right as an American citizen. If there’s something on TV you don’t like, change channels. If there’s a book that offends you, don’t buy it.  If you don’t believe in God, fine; you don’t have to.  If you are offended by pro athletes kneeling during the national anthem, you don’t have to watch or go to their games. 

In short, you have the freedom to choose what you want to see, hear or buy.  But your freedom, as they say, begins and ends at the tip of your nose.   

I exercise my right to blow off things I don’t like all the time.  

You could give me free front-row seats to a Rolling Stones concert and I wouldn’t go.  I don’t like the Stones or their music and never have. Not one single song.  At the same time, I wouldn’t bother to talk anyone else out of going, much less prevent them from going. 

Just because I don’t like the Stones doesn’t give me the right to stop other people from going to their shows or buying their music. I don’t have that right. So, if you’re a big Stones fan I may not understand why, but hey, it’s your time and money.  Go for it. 

I’m constantly surprised so many people ignore their right to ignore something they don’t want to see, or avoid listening to something they don’t want to hear. More puzzling is why so many of them feel that just because something offends them, they have the right to decide that others shouldn’t be allowed to see or hear whatever that is.    

If you don’t want to see or hear something, don’t.  It’s that simple. You cross a line when you prevent others from even having that choice. 

What brought this up again was that recently some white supremacist booked a venue at the University of Florida to spew his nonsense.  Over 500 protesters showed up to heckle him, with some even getting tickets to his event so they could shout him down inside the hall.

For the life of me I don’t understand that.  

Sure, he’s got a First Amendment right to speak. He also paid to rent the venue.  That means he not only had the right to speak but also the right as a paying customer to use that facility. As a public university, the school had an obligation to let him do both.   

But nobody had an obligation to attend. So why did they?

What did the protesters hope to accomplish? To diminish him and his followers by showing how many people refuse to accept his racist rhetoric?     

Honestly, if nobody had showed up except for his handful of looney-tune followers wouldn’t that have accomplished exactly the same thing? 

By mounting massive protests and threatening violence, protestors elevated the media coverage of this loser. The university also piled on by spending more than $500,000 for enhanced security just in case things turned violent.  The governor of Florida even declared a state of emergency over this event.  That all made it the lead on nightly news broadcasts and online.   

If nobody had paid any attention to this loon in the first place, he’d be just another right-wing nutjob baying at the moon. Kind of like the jerks in a bar who’ve had too much to drink and want to hold court on their pet peeve. Sooner or later everybody just starts ignoring them. 

That’s what we all should be doing.  Instead of turning our backs on the purveyors of this crap, we give them more attention.  That only encourages the jackasses.  

That seems to be lost on the protesters. 

The tragedy in Charlottesville might never have happened if the counter protesters hadn’t come out in such numbers intent on causing a commotion.  The small number of far-right extremists would probably have just marched around a bit, spouted stupid drivel, and when nobody paid any attention would have skulked away back under the rock from which they came. 

But no.  By aggressively engaging and taunting the right-wing extremists, the counter protestors got what they apparently wanted – a full-fledged riot. It also unexpectedly culminated in the death of one of their own.  What the protesters didn’t realize is that they gave the handful of neo-Nazis and Klan wannabes there exactly what they wanted, too: widespread media coverage. 

The same thing happened at the University of Florida the other night. Hundreds of protesters gathered to challenge a couple dozen white supremacists, catapulting what would otherwise have been a silly evening of crackpot theories into the national spotlight. 

Okay, in their defense some talking heads will quote Edmund Burke, who said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Yet I suspect most of the protesters at UF or Charlottesville weren’t as high minded.  They were there for their own selfish reasons.  They wanted to act up under the pretense of opposing “evil” – which they believe gave them the freedom to break laws, violate the rights of others, and cause chaos.  It had little to do with stopping the “triumph of evil,” and more to do with smug, self-centered, self-righteous overreaction to inconsequential threats just to prove their own virtue.

And to become part of the news.  And part of a “movement.” Kind of a latter-day Woodstock for people to talk about with their like-minded friends for years. How brave they were to stand up to white supremacists and neo-Nazis.  How they risked life and limb to “do the right thing.”  

There was nothing brave in what they did either in Charlottesville or at UF.  It takes no guts to be part of a mob. It takes real courage not to join in. 

Whether it’s BLM, Antifa, far-left liberals, or middle-aged Madge and Tom reliving their glory days protesting the 60s draft, they are the new witch hunters who do more damage than the evil they are supposed to be preventing.

They are always on the lookout for new transgressors, or potential threats. It makes little difference if their targets have no more than a dozen lame-brained followers or the cause is completely nebulous, such as protesting racial injustice or income inequality, they are always ready with hand-painted signs, pepper spray and an excess of attitude to jump into the fray.   

They don’t realize what they are doing, and usually not what they want, either. It’s all about showing a “united front” against whatever.  Being part of the crowd.  And getting on the news.   

The world has changed since Burke. Now the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil and stupidity is excessive media coverage of those who should otherwise be ignored.

There’s plenty of real evil in the world that should command our attention.  ISIS, Al Qaeda, a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Iran, human trafficking, and genocide come to mind. 

Some jerk who thinks we should kick out anyone who isn’t white isn’t up there.  Nor are monuments to Confederate soldiers, or the people who don’t want them removed.  

Get a life.  If you don’t want to hear someone or see something, don’t go. 

But leave everyone else alone to make their own choices. 

It really is that simple.  

My comfort duck …

I was pretty sure I could find someone somewhere to certify my duck as a “service animal.” In fact, after a little research, I found I can even do it online. 

I’ll just tell them I feel anxiety without my duck; I need to take my duck to comfort me and assuage my fears wherever I go. My duck will be an “emotional support animal.”  That’s actually an official government designation: an ESA.   

Then I could get an official “service animal” vest for my duck. Maybe a little leash, too. I could take my duck anywhere – on planes, trains, out shopping, to restaurants, wherever.    

It can’t be all that tough. I see people all the time in airports or out shopping with ancient bug-eyed little rat dogs in service animal wraps. If it’s not chihuahuas, or teeny-tiny Dobermans, it’s miniature poodles or cockapoos with that red-brown gunk under their eyes.

And they are all tagged as service animals. In what capacity?   

I understand real service animals, like guide dogs for the visually impaired.   

I don’t understand that designation for yappy little pets people get certified just so they don’t have to leave Muffy or Sparky at home when they travel or go out shopping. 

I suspect these are the same folks who continue to use handicap hang tags for better parking spots years after they once had some ingrown toenail surgery. Or the ones in handicap spots with twin bike racks on their cars.  It kind of makes you wonder what’s going on.     

I feel the same about so many animals tagged with the service animal designation for no apparent reason. I’ve yet to see a teacup cockapoo, poodle, chihuahua, or other miniature animal with a harness on to guide their owner. So they must be “comfort animals”: that strange, relatively new category seemingly created to indulge the whims of self-absorbed owners.

It’s actually pretty easy to do this.  In fact, here’s a link to get started:

www.usserviceanimals.org

They also sell the cute little vests, and will provide a doctor’s note for travel. Now, there are real rules for service animals to qualify under the Americans with Disabilities Act – those animals actually have to be trained to perform some specific function. But the standard is much, much lower for an emotional support animal.

Go ahead. Go up to that site.  You’ll see that an ESA can be a cat, a dog, a pig, a ferret, a miniature horse, or something else, which, I suspect, would also cover a duck. 

I am not making this up.  

At a time when some colleges are providing puppy encounters and kitten cuddling for students distressed by the possibility of hurtful speech, or even by exams, the idea of ESAs for everyone only seems logical.  Why can’t the parents of these emotionally fragile students have access to the same therapeutic benefits of an ESA?  Aren’t they just as special?  And needy? 

It took these latest generations to teach us how special everyone can be, and the benefits of being special.  And a lot of people have now taken that lesson to heart, in everything. 

Since there are now so many special people in this country, with so many special needs, particularly emotional needs, I’m feeling somewhat left out.  That’s why I think a comfort duck might be a way to join their ranks. 

Of course, I’d go through all the proper paperwork to get my duck certified as a service animal under the “emotional support” category. I might even buy the doctor’s note so my duck could travel on planes with me. (It would be faster than trying to fly wherever I’m going on his own.)

Who is to say my duck doesn’t reduce my anxiety? That’s the beauty of it: I’ll claim I need my comfort duck to keep me calm. Try to disprove that.   

There are so many other benefits to having a comfort duck.  People don’t instinctively hate ducks; most people think ducks are pretty neat.  Everybody loves the Aflac duck, don’t they? Then there’s Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, and the Peabody Ducks. 

I think the biggest problem will be people who want to pet my duck. At which point I’ll have to tell them please don’t because my duck is actually working.   

I just imagine how many people would look at my duck and think of me: “why, he must be some kind of special to have that comfort duck.” Some might be brave enough to ask me if my duck knows any tricks. “He eats, poops and quacks,” I’ll respond, “that’s pretty much his day.”

My comfort duck may look like any other duck but he’ll make me special.   

And in this day and age, doesn’t everybody have a right to be special?   

The myth of the “honest conversation …”

That’s usually followed by “about (fill in the blank) in this country.”

The topic can be any number of things: racial injustice, income inequality, immigration, gun violence, or whatever.

The implication is that we’ve never actually discussed any of these things. At least not had an “honest” discussion. But we need to. Right now.

Anytime someone says this I already know they aren’t interested at all in an “honest” conversation. They don’t want a “conversation.” They want something quite different. They want yet another opportunity to “discuss” something they’ve been yammering about for years.

Nine times out of ten whatever that is has no realistic solution because it’s not intended to ever be “solved.”  Often it’s a purely manufactured “problem,” invented simply to be a wedge issue. Their proposed “honest conversation” will just rehash the same pointless crap once again. 

Let’s take “racial injustice” for a moment.  It seems to be the issue of the day that’s brought pro athletes to their knees during the national anthem. 

What exactly is racial injustice? Seriously, what is it?

It implies that people aren’t getting impartial treatment under the law solely because of their race.  The only “evidence” anyone can present for “racial injustice” is based entirely on outcomes, where blacks are disproportionately more likely to end up in prison than whites. And black offenders are disproportionately more likely to be shot by police than whites.

Here’s my problem with that “proof” of racial injustice – those claims typically and conveniently ignore prior arrests and convictions, and the specific circumstances of the incident. That usually explains any difference in outcomes.

Let’s take perp A and perp B, for example, who are both arrested for selling the same amount of the same drugs. If A has no prior arrests or convictions and B has a record stretching back to when he was 15 with multiple arrests and convictions for selling drugs, the one with more priors is most likely to get a harsher sentence. Race has nothing to do with that outcome; prior bad behavior does. 

Step it up a notch.  Perp C is accused of shooting someone in commission of a robbery, so is perp D.  Both serious crimes. But C has done this several times before, and has also served time in prison for attempted murder. D has one prior conviction for robbery when he was 16, served time in juvenile hall, and hasn’t been arrested again until now.  

Guess who gets a stiffer sentence.  

Okay, it’s time to take on police shootings.  Perp E is found in a stolen car with unregistered guns and a large amount of cocaine during a routine traffic stop. So is perp F. When officers try to arrest E, he races off leading police on a high-speed chase through a residential area before he is finally stopped and gives up.  F does exactly the same thing, but when he’s stopped he refuses to remain in the car as instructed and instead walks toward the officers while reaching into his waistband for something as he screams profanities at the arresting officers. 

Who is more likely to be shot? 

Race has little if anything to do with these outcomes. Except for one thing: black males are significantly more likely to have prior arrest records than white or Hispanic males.   

At any time up to 25% of all adult black males are in the justice system – they’ve either done time, are on parole, or are awaiting trial. Blacks are only 13% of the U.S. population, yet they account for 40% of our prison population. That’s way too high to blame solely on racial injustice.

Consider this: one report speculates that if this trend continues one in three black males will go to prison in their lifetimes. The number for white males is one in 17, and one in six for Hispanics. That’s not about racial injustice; that’s about paying the price for committing crimes.  And that’s also why blacks are far more likely to have prior arrest and convictions than whites or Hispanics charged with the same crimes, and consequently, why they often get harsher sentences.

Proponents of the claim of widespread racial injustice against blacks think that shouldn’t matter. Just because someone commits the same type of crime, or worse, repeatedly, that shouldn’t matter in how they are treated by the justice system. 

Of course it matters.  If a reasonable person on a jury discovers that a defendant has a history of violent crime and is now being charged with yet another violent crime, it’s certain to affect their opinion. Nobody sane wants a repeat offender like that back on the streets. If someone has a history of convictions for armed robbery, and is convicted of yet another armed robbery, you can bet they are going to get more than a slap on the wrist this time, regardless of skin color.  

That’s an “honest conversation” about “racial injustice.” I doubt many on the other side care to have that one, ever.     

As if to prove my point, last night I saw an interview with a Chicago alderman. He was asked about the possible link between so many kids in the black community without fathers and the murder rate in Chicago, especially among black males. He conceded that there was likely a link.

However he blamed the lack of black fathers on the incarceration rate of black males. His solution was to stop incarcerating so many black males for so long. 

Not stop the crimes. Not stop so many black kids being born to single mothers. Not stop a culture that equates manhood with how many different baby mamas some male can impregnate. 

Nope. Just give black males lighter sentences, regardless of any crimes they’ve committed or their prior criminal history.    

In effect, he was asking for a break solely based on the race of the criminal.   

Yeah, that's fair. That's textbook racial injustice if you don't happen to be black.   

So much for an “honest conversation.”    

Or what …

I’m tired of being told I have to kiss everybody’s butt.

Regardless of what they do. Regardless of how they act up. Regardless of how clearly irresponsible they are.  Regardless of how often they try to make a mountain out of a molehill.   

I’m apparently supposed to have sympathy and understanding for those who offer neither in return.  I guess I should be ashamed of stuff I haven’t done, or had no responsibility for.

I have a moral obligation to care about whatever they care about, in other words.

That’s what a lot of people want. Well, you know what, that’s not going to happen.

I’ve hit my limit. I’m fed up with people and the media trying to intimidate me, either with their madness or their misinformation. 

I can’t discuss anything at all with Democrats or anybody on the left. They are insane. They are incapable of listening to any other opinion other than their own. Don’t bother with facts; it’s a complete waste of time because they simply ignore them. When you do bring out facts, they respond with specious bullshit from some left-leaning think tank, or unfounded urban myths.

A common refrain from them is: “a group of experts has determined …” Or “everybody knows,” when, in fact, nobody can prove a damn thing they’re saying. 

It makes me crazy to even endure such childish logic. 

For example, there are the BS claims that Trump’s a racist. That Trump hates gay people. That Trump’s anti-Semitic. That Trump supports white supremacists. That Trump colluded with the Russians to win the last election. Or that Trump fired Comey just to stop an investigation.

He’s got a lot of faults, no doubt.  But not one of those has been proven to be true.

Trump’s been in the public eye for decades and the subject of intense media scrutiny during that time. If he were a racist, a homophobe, anti-Semitic, or a supporter of white supremacists, it would have been substantiated long ago. And as for the claims that he colluded with the Russians, or fired Comey to stop that investigation, that’s just another pile of unproven crap.

Don’t take my word for it. Go ahead, try to find a single substantive thing that actually “proves” any one of these. You won’t be able to, because there’s no there, there.

There’s just speculation about what Trump “really” believes, and his motives, which is about as valid as determining either by reading the bumps on his head. 

It’s all just complete and utter nonsense.  

Democrats, the left, and the left-leaning media know they don’t have any proof. Yet they keep spinning yarns about Trump’s “hidden” motives all the time to make it appear they have the goods on him.  The tinfoil-hat crowd eats it up and begs for more. And they deliver. 

You’ll get more “real” news these days from the supermarket tabloids. There’s just as much truth in tabloid stories about Elvis returning from the dead aboard a UFO with a miracle diet that cures cancer, and that survivors of Atlantis have been found in the Amazon jungle.  

This stupidity and duplicity continue well past Trump.

Professional athletes are taking a knee when the national anthem is played. I couldn’t care less if they kneel, do the Macarena, or the hand jive during the anthem.  Sure, their actions are disrespectful and offensive to a lot of folks, but they are kneeling to raise awareness for something that isn’t true; that black males are systematically being targeted by white police.    

Nobody’s denying that black males are being shot by police at a disproportionate rate to whites or Hispanics. That's absolutely true.  

Want to know why they’re being shot more often?

The simple – but true – answer is that they are disproportionately committing more crimes that draw armed police response than whites or Hispanics, especially in high-crime areas. 

You can argue why they are committing more crimes that get them shot. But blacks getting shot by police has little to do with racism.  The stats show blacks are no more likely to be shot by a white officer than a black officer, either – that rate follows pretty much the makeup of a specific police force and the crime rate in the area where they were shot.   

Go ahead.  Look it up. These are equal-opportunity shootings.

If pro athletes want to protest something, maybe they should focus on the fact that the number one cause of death among young black males is murder, typically by another black male.  The number one cause of death among young white males is car accidents.

Now that’s something valid to protest. 

Given the rampant stupidity on the left and among Democrats, I’m surprised someone hasn’t suggested giving cars to young black males so their deaths in car accidents can equal those of young white males. Clearly there’s a racist death inequality that must be addressed. 

Nope. They are blaming guns. And systemic racial injustice.

I’m also weary of the bald-faced lies about illegal immigrants that have been here for years. If they’ve been here that long, and want to be citizens, why didn’t they ever apply for citizenship? 

Next, there’s the BS that they are a net positive to our economy and give back more than they ever take.  Nobody with the good sense God gave a sweet potato believes – despite what Democrats and activists claim – that these illegals haven’t been fraudulently collecting public assistance, receiving subsidized healthcare, getting a driver’s license, and even sometimes voting, all along.

Of course they have. That’s why they are still here.  

They’ve been getting all the benefits of being a citizen without the bother of doing the paperwork. And as to the amount of taxes they pay, get real; they’ve gotten a lot more out of our system than they’ve ever paid in. That’s if they pay taxes at all. 

They also send more untraceable money out of this country than they ever spend here. Remittances from illegals are a major source of income for Mexico. Doubt that? Just wait in line some afternoon at any grocery store that does money orders.  See who is buying and sending money orders.

These illegals aren’t cowering in the shadows, fearful of being found and deported, either. We know who and where they are – we could easily round them up any time if we wanted.

But our politicians from both parties don’t want to. 

The only reason they haven’t been tossed out by now has nothing to do with compassion.

It has to do with political power and economics.

Democrat mayors in major cities don’t want them out because they fill the population void left by middle class families fleeing urban crime and corruption.  Overall population – not just legal citizens – is a big part of the Federal funding formula. Federal money covers a lot of sins and keeps Democrats in power. It subsidizes projects that reward their friends in the unions, who return the favor by supporting Democrats at election time. 

Big business also doesn’t want illegals out. Illegals work cheaper than citizens. It’s not just big business, either: the agriculture industry here – whether that’s mushroom farmers, poultry processors, or even small family farms – all depend on cheap labor from illegals, too.  Finally, the Catholic Church, which has seen declining numbers of worshippers over the years, sees more illegal immigrants, especially Hispanics, as a way to reverse that trend.        

Then there’s the nonsense about the “dreamers.” True, they didn’t ask to come into this country, but they are still here illegally. What part of “illegally” don’t people get?  

There’s a case to be made that they should be offered a path to citizenship – after all, they’ve been here almost all of their lives already.  Yet that’s not what they want – they want immediate citizenship; total amnesty, with no strings attached. In fact, that’s what they are demanding. 

To which I say, or what? If we don’t give that to them, what can they do? 

Leave?

That’s the problem I keep having. There are so many groups demanding something. They always threaten – something   Pro athletes, social activists, BLM, Antifa, immigration advocates, whomever. But exactly what are they threatening? And should anyone care?  

Nobody in power is willing to call their bluff. Somebody should.   

This nation is enduring what now seems like an endless series of tantrums. Against Trump. Against alleged racist attitudes. Against police shootings. Against deporting illegals. Against building a wall on our southern border.  Against reducing our spending on stupid social programs that don’t accomplish anything. Against eliminating ObamaCare and reining in Medicaid. Against closing failing public schools and allowing parents more choice.  Against restoring Constitutional rights on college campuses. Against draining the swamp that’s DC. 

I have to keep asking this question: If we don’t accede to these tantrums, what happens? 

What is the “or what,” quite simply?

Suppose we simply ignore them. What’s their recourse?       

Not a Hell of a lot. They can protest peacefully all they want. But if they break the law – any law – while protesting just arrest them. Forget about the optics. Forget about their skin color, where they’re from, or where their parents are from. And if the media interfere with the arrests, arrest them, too. 

We need to get back to being a nation of laws, instead of a nation of constant complainers. 

I’m not endorsing a police state, by any means. 

But I am saying it’s time we stop letting the whiners run the show.  If they have a legitimate complaint, and a realistic solution, fine.  Let’s discuss it, rationally, without the implied threats. 

Otherwise, I say call their bluff.  Make them put up or shut up. 

Or just ignore them. That’s what I’m planning on doing. 

Everybody needs to understand that you should never deliver an ultimatum without a clear understanding of the consequences. 

And sometimes people will call you out. 

The revolution is bigger than Trump …

The American public is even angrier now than before.  

I’m not talking about the people who dominate the news – like the NFL players taking a knee, the Black Lives Matter activists, or the illegal immigrants demanding amnesty. For all their bluster and high media profile, they are a tiny, somewhat irrelevant part of the public. 

No, I’m talking about ordinary working-class Americans: those who have always worked for a living, tried to do the right thing, and taken care of themselves and their families.

You know, the middle-class folk politicians always promise they will help, but are conveniently ignored after every election. They have every right to be angry. And they are.     

They see the rich getting richer, the poor living a comfortable lifestyle with essentially free healthcare and food stamps, and the most vocal complainers being rewarded. At the same time, their own lives are getting harder: healthcare premiums are soaring, their deductibles are so high as to make insurance practically unusable, and the costs to feed their families are rising faster than their paychecks. If they complain about the fairness of this, they are labeled heartless bigots and racists. 

To add insult to injury, just about everything they’ve always believed in – family, faith, personal responsibility, love of country, honor, and respect for others – is routinely ridiculed.   

They blame both parties – the Democrats for continuing to focus on meaningless symbolism over substance; the Republicans for accomplishing absolutely nothing with their majorities in Congress and a sort-of Republican in the White House.  

All they see is non-stop bickering and name-calling from elected politicians on both sides of the aisle. They also sense a government bureaucracy increasingly out of control, playing favorites, leaking classified material to wound adversaries, and acting in its own self-interest. They don’t trust the media. They don’t trust our own intelligence agencies. They don’t trust our lower courts. 

Antifa activists are beating people with whom they disagree. Public universities are shutting down free speech. Cities are passing laws to make it illegal for their police to enforce Federal immigration laws.  It’s against the law now in many jurisdictions just to ask if someone is a citizen. Statues and monuments are being vandalized. Cities are removing other statues because someone might be offended. Public schools, roads, and parks are being renamed to spare the feelings of some groups aggrieved by the actions of somebody more than a century or more ago.

Movie actors, entertainers, and other celebrities are openly calling for the assassination of a sitting President, as are some elected officials, to cheers.  Professional athletes – and some team owners – are refusing to stand for our national anthem at games. And the media love all that.  

In the public’s mind, it’s a complete breakdown of order. It’s chaos.

And chaos inevitably leads to revolution. 

It’s been years in the making and it’s here. Now. 

That’s how Trump got elected, folks. That, and because Hillary represented everything the public hated about the political establishment and its mismanagement of the country. 

I can’t understand why so many people still don’t get it.  Particularly the Republican establishment.  You would think they would.  An unqualified outsider with no political experience beat not only the ultimate establishment Democrat, but every single other Republican primary candidate supported by the Republican establishment.  

If that didn’t send a message, I don’t know what will.     

Then there’s the election of Roy Moore over incumbent Luther Strange in the Alabama runoff. Bible-thumping, 10-Commandment-quoting, gun-toting Moore trounced Strange – the darling of the Republican establishment that spent $9 million supporting him. The Republican establishment even persuaded Trump to fly down and do a get-out-the-vote-for-Strange event. 

It didn’t make any difference.  Strange lost to Moore by 9-10 points.

That’s a message. When even Trump can’t stop the onslaught against a nominal incumbent, you have to realize the Republican primaries leading up to 2018 are going to be a bloodbath for establishment Republicans.  Frankly, I don’t think the Democrat incumbents are going to have it any easier, either – they have their own revolution underway from the far left of their party.

We’re already seeing some “moderate” Republicans in the Senate announce they’re retiring at the end of their terms. Expect more to do the same. They see the writing on the wall: they know they would face tough primaries from anti-establishment challengers and could very well lose. 

The sentiment of voters is decidedly against incumbents from either party.    

Most of this is because the American public now sees chaos in virtually every aspect of our society. Whether it’s attacks on fundamental rights such as free speech, attacks on religious liberty, physical attacks on police just trying to do their jobs, and attacks on American symbols such as the flag and our national anthem, it’s too much for many ordinary Americans.

It’s not that they want to return to the 1950s – Hell, most of them don’t even know what life was like in the 1950s. It’s simply that they want some sense of order and direction. 

They aren’t getting either from establishment politicians. 

They see elected politicians continue to skirt the issues the public actually cares about, like putting an end to the chaos, in favor of grandstanding over meaningless crap, day after day. The public increasingly realizes that our government no longer works for the people as a whole, but instead for special-interest groups, big-money donors, and itself above all. The public also has determined that our mainstream media no longer objectively report actual news, but only what – true or not – will thrill their most polarized viewers; it’s become yellow journalism at its worst. 

Against this backdrop, ordinary working-class Americans are genuinely confused, and angry. And they are taking out their frustrations on politicians and the media alike.  

The pendulum started to swing some time ago; it's about to swing even further in 2018.

And when it does, it will swing very hard. 

I expect a lot of new faces in Congress after that.  That’s okay. 

More change is needed, and those in Congress and the government now are clearly unwilling to execute any changes.  So it's long past time for them to go. 

Please, just go away …

I concede I’ve never liked Hillary Clinton. 

I didn’t like her when she was First Lady, and Bill Clinton said we’d gotten “two for the price of one.” I didn’t like the idea of electing our own version of Juan and Eva Perón. 

Soon after, she lived down to my expectations.  It started with her secret meetings – against government rules – to plot her version of healthcare reform. It was as if she fully expected to continue the legacy of Clinton corruption and secret deals in Arkansas to Washington.  Like when, in 1978 as a novice investor with $1,000, she was able to amass $100,000 in about a year. 

She morphed into a full-blown weasel everyone could see when the Whitewater scandal broke. She hid or destroyed billing documents from her Rose Law Firm days during the Whitewater investigation.  The originals were never found.  Then a version of those miraculously reappeared in the White House, “discovered” by an aide in a storage area. Potential witnesses against her and Bill related to Whitewater disappeared, mysteriously died, or chose prison over testifying.

When a long line of women came forward to say Bill Clinton had sexually assaulted them, including one who claimed he brutally raped her, she dismissed them as bimbos, sluts and whores, saying “these women are trash, who will believe them.” She followed that by claiming reports of Bill’s well-documented history as a sexual predator and rapist – stretching back to his days as governor of Arkansas – were merely the result of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

She took a personal role in trying to destroy Bill’s victims, calling Gennifer Flowers, Bill’s one-time mistress, “trailer trash.” Even after Bill had to pay $850,000 to settle a suit against him from one of his victims, Paula Jones, she never let up.

She also took a personal role in firing the White House travel staff so she could give the business to a friend.  She helped her brother’s “pardon for money” scheme in the waning days of the Bill Clinton presidency that resulted in the pardon of known swindler Marc Rich. 

After leaving the White House, she said that she and Bill left “dead broke” because of all the legal expenses incurred during the investigation of Bill’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. She described Lewinsky as a “looney-tune narcissist.” Curiously, despite being “dead broke,” she and Bill soon bought a multimillion-dollar house in Chappaqua, NY.   

But she wasn’t done.  Not by a long shot. 

She sought and won a U.S. Senate seat in New York.  In the Senate, she accomplished absolutely nothing. However, she was able to start gathering more political allies. 

Meanwhile, the William J. Clinton Foundation – started by Bill in 2001 – began raking in money by the millions.  Which, apparently, the Clintons needed being so “dead broke.” It was also a great place to park the Clintons’ political cronies, pay them well, and keep them nearby. 

And also, of course, to fund Hillary’s next escapade – running for President. 

You’ll remember, she lost the nomination to Barack Obama.

That should have been the end, but nooooo … 

Obama appointed her Secretary of State. That was the golden ticket for Hillary.  She and Bill now had the means to rake in millions more by trading her approval of questionable deals for contributions to the Foundation. Contributions, I might add, from some of the most repressive regimes in the world.  She even approved the sale of a big chunk of our own uranium reserves to the Russians in exchange for a big contribution to the Foundation.   

Hillary turned the State Department into the same pay-to-play circus she and Bill had enjoyed in their halcyon days running Arkansas like an ATM. The money kept rolling in. Not just from foreign governments seeking influence – in violation of U.S. laws – but also from corporations who knew Hillary’s next move was to run for President. 

In fact, it’s been estimated that since the Foundation started, the Clintons raised more than $2 billion – that’s right, billion with a “b” – from corporations, largely as a combination of lavish (think $250,000 and up per event) speaker fees and direct contributions.

This fueled an amazing lifestyle for the once “dead broke” Clintons, and for their political allies, as well as financing Chelsea’s wedding to the son of a convicted felon.   

In Obama’s final term, Hillary predictably decided it was “her turn” to be President. She was “owed” it by Obama and the Democrat establishment, after all. She’d patiently waited her turn, was sitting on a huge pile of cash.  And she was a woman.   

She had her allies rig the rules to ensure she got the nomination, which she did. 

And then she proceeded to run perhaps the worst campaign in American history.  She had no plan. She had no policy. She had no message – except that her opponent was a sexist pig. 

And she was a woman. Standing up for women. And against sexism.  

The irony of that messaging was clearly lost on her. 

During her campaign, she also publicly dismissed roughly half the population – Trump supporters – as a “basket of deplorables.” “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that.” You could cut the arrogance with a knife. 

In the end, despite blowing off voters in the states she should have won, insulting traditional Democrat working-class voters, making light of the fact that she used an unsecured private server while she was Secretary of State – in violation of State Department policy, intentionally destroying thousands of subpoenaed e-mails, and wasting almost a billion dollars on ads that emphasized identity politics over substance, she was stunned she lost.

According to reports from those claiming to have been there on the night of the election, when she learned she lost she went to pieces, sobbing uncontrollably.  What is known for certain is that she didn’t even come out do a concession speech until the next day. 

In truth, she was such a flawed candidate – ethically and morally, and with such obvious disdain for most working-class Americans – almost anyone could have beaten her.

Even Trump with all HIS character flaws.  And he did. 

I thought, finally, that’s it.  No more Hillary. After such an embarrassing loss, she’s done.

Wrong again.   

Now she has a new book – “What happened?” The cover only has that title and her name. As one critic said, it’s the first book with both the question and answer on the cover. 

Of course, she’s blaming everyone but herself for the loss. That didn’t surprise me. 

Recently, in an NPR interview, she said she’d be open to a legal challenge to the results of the last election.  She knows, as a lawyer, there’s absolutely no way under our Constitution to overturn the results of a Presidential election. Still, she cited Kenya, where its supreme court just overturned the results of its most recent election, as precedent.

Kenya, really?  As a valid legal precedent for us to follow?  How nuts is she? 

More to the point, why am I not surprised? 

I never liked her. But I’ve now moved beyond pitying her as a pathetic, out-of-touch, entitled whiner and weasel who simply refuses to accept personal responsibility for anything.

She’s dangerously delusional.  I just wish she’d go away. 

Guilt by association …

Hitler liked Beethoven’s music.  

So do I.  Does that make me a Nazi? 

Of course not. 

Yet when David Duke – a well-known racist nutjob – said he liked Trump’s stance on illegal immigration, many on the left and the media quickly reported that as proof that Trump was a white supremacist. And a racist, too. 

When the Family Research Council – opposed to gay marriage – came out in support of Trump, the left and the media used that as proof that Trump was homophobic.  That was probably a great surprise to Trump since he publicly supported gay marriage long before Obama did.    

Last night on Tucker Carlson’s show, some flake implied the “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a symbol of racism. Why? Because this person found that Confederate sympathizers in 1931 pushed for it to become our national anthem.  Forget for a moment that it was written in 1814, and has no lyrics related to race or in support of slavery.

That’s how insane it’s become. 

Because you agree with someone on certain things does not mean you agree with them on everything. Nor does it mean they agree with you on everything, either. 

I have a friend from college who many years later fell on hard times and committed a felony – embezzlement – for which he was convicted and did time in prison.  Yet he’s still my friend, we stay in touch, and I would still do anything for him.

But that doesn’t mean I endorse what he did.  Nor does that mean I am okay with embezzlement. 

You see, having a convicted felon as a dear friend doesn’t make you one. 

Just as having a racist agree with you that puppies are cute makes you a racist. Or having a friend who thinks all gay marriage is wrong means you agree with them. Or having a business relationship with someone who is a socialist makes you one. 

Guilt by association is the last resort of those have no actual proof of your own wrongdoing. 

We’ve been down that road before with Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Committee hearings in the 1950s searching for Communists and Communist sympathizers.  Careers and reputations were destroyed in the process.  Most often with little or no proof, except by some specious association.    

It’s one of the most shameful episodes in our post-war history. 

And here we are again.  The use of guilt by association is now a common tool of the left and the media to try to destroy anyone with whom they disagree. Specifically Trump. 

When Obama was long-time pals with Bill Ayers – a cofounder of the violent Weather Underground that bombed government buildings in the 1960s – no one on the left or the media thought that meant Obama supported blowing up government facilities. When Obama followed a racist Jeremiah Wright, there was no tagging Obama as a racist because of that. 

But let some crackpot bigot say he or she thinks Trump is doing a good job, and suddenly Trump must share their looney-tune beliefs in toto. 

It’s dishonest.  And our media that report this nonsense should be ashamed.   

Waiting for the hurricane …

It’s a lot different than waiting for a snowstorm. 

With snowstorms, you can expect to be shut in for a while. Your power might go off for a bit, but you can always bundle up until power comes back on, which usually is fairly soon. 

Snowstorms are mostly predictable, too. 

Forecasters can pretty much predict with fair accuracy where and how soon snow will start falling. They’re less certain about expected snow totals at times, but when you see the snowstorm pattern on the news, you can be somewhat certain it’s coming, and possibly coming your way.

So you stock up. If you have a fireplace you bring in some wood.  And, of course, you make a run to the store for bread, milk, eggs and toilet paper. 

Now, big snowstorms can be scary.  With enough snow, roofs can collapse.  Even with a little snow, driving can be dangerous, as too many people with a 4-wheel-drive SUVs think somehow they are suddenly professional stunt drivers in a Jeep commercial. 

In contrast, hurricanes, even smaller ones, can be downright terrifying. For good reason. 

Hurricanes are wildly unpredictable. A hurricane can start as a tropical storm somewhere off Africa, gather some energy over warm water, and jump overnight from a Cat 1 to a Cat 3, 4 or 5. Depending on fronts and the jet stream a hurricane can turn and move just about anywhere, and lose or gain speed and strength. At times it can make landfall in one place, lose some energy as it moves somewhere else, cross warmer water again and regain its energy, make a giant loop and pound the first landfall all over again. 

Most of the deaths during snowstorms come from heart attacks. Most deaths from hurricanes come from drowning.  A roof can collapse during a very heavy snow. Hurricanes rip roofs off, blow buildings apart, cause windows to pop out, and turn lawn ornaments into high-velocity projectiles capable of piercing concrete blocks. 

An exceptional blizzard may have snow driven by 50-60mph winds.  The lowest level of hurricane – a Cat 1 – has winds averaging at least 75mph.

Oh, and tornados often accompany hurricanes. 

But the biggest danger from a hurricane is from flooding, especially along the coasts. Hurricanes can easily drop a foot or more of rain everywhere along their path. The circular motion of a hurricane can also pile up water offshore and then push it forward resulting in a deadly storm surge at some point.  Imagine for a moment a wall of water perhaps 10-12 feet tall, or more, suddenly headed for a coastline that’s only a few feet above sea level. That would reach the second floor of most buildings, and the roofs of one-story houses. 

It took a storm surge of 4-5 feet to cause all the damage at the Jersey shore during “superstorm” Sandy. Now mentally double that, and think of the force, and weight, of all that water. And make no mistake, water is heavy – a cubic foot of water weighs more than 62 pounds. The force of a storm surge coming in and then going out is beyond comprehension.   

Everyone who lives where there are hurricanes knows all this. Certainly, some people will die here in a hurricane because of other reasons.  But the real reason so many people in this country die during hurricanes is typically because of their own arrogance and stupidity.

There will always be those who plan to hunker down and ignore evacuation orders. They refuse to go to emergency shelters, they think because they’ve survived other hurricanes they’ll do it again, or they want to prove how tough they are. 

But there are always fewer of them after each hurricane.  Because they are dead.   

The uncertainty over a hurricane makes waiting for one – especially here in Florida – way different than waiting for a snowstorm when we lived in Pennsylvania. Snowstorms are rarely life-threatening; hurricanes are always potentially deadly. With a hurricane, you really don’t have any idea what might happen. Nor when it will arrive. Nor how powerful it will be when it gets to you. Or even if it will get anywhere near you at all. 

So all you can do is prepare for the worst. Instead of stocking up on bread, milk, eggs, and toilet paper, here you stock up on water, canned goods, paper towels and batteries and make certain your car has a full tank of gas. You fill your bathtub with water as a backup to fill your toilet tanks if the power goes out.  You move all your lawn furniture inside, along with your grill, as well as anything that could be picked up and weaponized by the wind. 

You worry whether you’ve done enough to prepare, and worry what kind of damage your home might sustain, and how long your power might be out.  That’s a lot different than wondering if your office will be open tomorrow, or whether your kid’s school will be closed.     

Most of us here have been glued to our TVs for days on end watching the path of our most recent hurricane – Irma. You’ve probably watched the lines of traffic from South Florida heading north to escape Irma. Millions have already left South Florida.

When Irma was projected to go up the east coast, people there fled further inland and some went over to the west coast. Then the projections changed, and now the storm is projected to go up the west coast. I don’t know what those people will do.  I don’t know what the people who drove up to Georgia and Alabama will do, either, since both those areas are now in Irma’s path.   

That’s the nature of hurricanes. It’s the uncertainty.   

No matter how long you’ve lived here, or how many hurricanes you’ve survived in the past, it’s important to have a healthy respect for any hurricane – present or future.

People who don’t have a lower probability of survival. 

The myth of the extreme-right threat …

I heard an assertion the other day that stunned me.

Some talking head said that far-right extremist groups – such as the KKK, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis – experience their greatest growth when Republicans are in power.  They added that their numbers appear to decline when Democrats hold the reins of power.

Huh?

Now mind you, this was said with complete sincerity. The point they were trying to make was that far-right extremists feel more emboldened under Republicans.

So since we now have a Republican President, a Republican majority in Congress, and Republican domination of state governorships and legislatures, that’s supposed to explain why we’re seeing more violence from the extreme far right, more public displays of right-wing hatred and bigotry, and an increase in reported hate crimes against minorities.     

I have a different take. 

I think the perceived difference in the numbers of far-right extremist groups – and how their activities are described – under Republicans versus Democrats is largely the result of what our media choose to cover.  I also believe, and the numbers will likely bear me out, that there are not significantly more Klan members, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists in America now than ever before; if anything, there’s likely fewer. But they get more media coverage.

The question is why?       

When Democrats are in power, the media tend to dismiss the extreme right-wingers as tiny clusters of stupid, ill-informed clowns so far out of the mainstream they are a joke – which they are and have been for years. The media prefer pushing a narrative, bordering on propaganda, that the liberal progressive agenda supported by Democrats is wildly popular, here and abroad.

That narrative of how popular the progressive agenda is here and abroad is questioned if significant numbers of people show up to oppose it, as the Tea Party did and the Brexit movement in the UK did. When that happens, the media downplay the numbers of people involved and portray any opposition as from a miniscule number of angry, ill-informed, anti-progress nutjobs, as they did with the Tea Party and Brexit supporters.

Opposition becomes invisible by design.  In short, nothing to see here.       

Yet sometimes the media do too good a job of hiding the opposition. They start to believe their own propaganda that there’s really no substantial opposition to their beloved agenda. Their polls bear them out; mainly because people who distrust the media won’t answer truthfully if at all, which means others eager to be polled aren’t always representative of the whole.

Consequently, the pollsters get skewed data. And the media report that bad data as fact because it supports what they already want to believe. 

That’s a key reason why the media and Democrats were so stunned when Trump was elected over Hillary.  How could so many otherwise normal Americans – including traditional working-class Democrats – turn their backs on a clearly smarter and more enlightened Democrat?

Especially to elect an inarticulate, intellectually inferior buffoon such as Trump? 

There must have been something else, some evil force, at play. It’s not the first time they tried to find a culprit other than their own candidate’s failings. 

When G.W. Bush beat Al Gore and then John Kerry, Democrats blamed social conservatives, mainly rabid white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.  Democrats and progressives never trust devout white Christians of any stripe, who they see as ignorant backwoods Bible thumpers opposed to “progress.” These white Christians, to Democrats and liberals, are small-minded and judgmental; they cling to such outdated concepts as “good and evil” and “right and wrong.” 

And “traditional values.” What a laugh. 

In the case of Trump, Democrats and the media believe that, in addition to the Russians – another unproven boogie man, it must have been angry, racist white men still incensed that we had elected a black President not once, but twice.

These angry white men also punished Democrats for nominating a woman – a woman, for God’s sake! – for President after Obama.  These narrow-minded white men already hated Obama’s decisions to allow in a flood of refugees from the Middle East, protect illegal immigrants already here, his push for gay marriage and gays in the military, his support for Planned Parenthood, and fostering his Justice Department’s obsession with siding with criminals over police.     

It was obvious to Democrats and their pals in the media that white male homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, racist, bigots put Trump in office. That’s the only way it could have happened.

Since Trump won, there must be a lot of them out there.  But where? And how could they be stopped before they influenced any more Americans?

They looked no further than the far right extremists.  The Klan. The neo-Nazis. The white “nationalists” and white supremacists. These are the hate-mongering enemies of progress.   

Suddenly, these extremists were everywhere.  Or so it seemed. 

But they really weren’t.

Nobody, save perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center extortionists who make millions by manufacturing fake hate-group threats, honestly believes groups like the Klan, the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are growing in numbers.

You wouldn’t know that watching our media, however. When Trump was campaigning, the media breathlessly reported how hateful and racist his supporters were. Except they weren’t. The alleged hateful, racist signs held by Trump supporters turned out to be few and far between, and often plants by Democrat operatives. There was almost no violence at Trump rallies or assaults on minorities there either, unless you count the rare times when paid provocateurs from the left assaulted otherwise peaceful Trump supporters – and don’t be misled, that’s about the only time you saw Trump supporters fight back.

The same thing happened with the “surge” in “reported” hate crimes and racist vandalism once Trump was elected. The media were quick to blame far-right hate groups – who they claimed were Trump supporters – for the “dramatic increase” in assaults on minorities, defacing of mosques and synagogues, and other acts of bigotry and prejudice.

The media were less inclined to report the eventual truth: almost all of the reported “hate crimes” and vandalism that gained national notoriety proved bogus – done by Democrat and leftist operatives to make it appear that Trump’s words fostered attacks on minorities. The widely reported “attacks” and verbal assaults on hajib-wearing women on subways and college campuses, and on other Muslims, supposedly in the name of Trump, also were largely later debunked – most if not all never happened, but came from people seeking media attention.    

Charlottesville is the latest cause célèbre for the media and the left. There a protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee spun out of control when neo-Nazis and white supremacists affiliated with the Klan clashed with counter protesters. Based on media coverage and selective video editing, one would think there were hundreds of right-wing extremists there.

The reality is that there were about 30 members of the Klan protesting, as reported by the New York Times, and perhaps a couple of dozen other right-wing extremists.  

The fighting didn’t start until the protesters against the removal of the statue peacefully concluded their rally and started to leave. That’s when the counter protesters – who did number in the hundreds, and by all accounts vastly outnumbered the motley crew of wannabe neo-Nazis, Klan folk, and white supremacists – started physically engaging with them. Violence broke out and culminated in one right-wing lunatic driving his car into a crowd, killing one of the counter protesters and injuring many others. 

That is actually what happened.  There weren’t hundreds of right-wing extremists there. It wasn’t an epic moment that showed the power and strength of the far-right extremists.   

If anything, it demonstrated once again how lame these right-wing extremists are, and how they can’t whip up more than a few dozen supporters for anything. They’re just a small number of small people who like to dress up and shout stupid things to piss off the rest of us. 

I’ve dealt with worse from the homeless beggars while going to work in Philly.    

So forget about the growing threat from right-wing extremists. It’s a media-manufactured myth. And don’t believe that “hate groups” are soaring to new highs under Trump.  They aren’t. 

Unless you want to believe the Southern Poverty Law Center – which now includes “patriot” groups opposed to illegal immigration, those who lobby for tighter border security, those in favor of maintaining the death penalty for certain crimes, and those who oppose abortion – as equivalent in hate-group status as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis.

That’s right, according to the SPLC, if you are opposed to illegal immigration, want tighter border security, believe in capital punishment for some crimes, or are pro-life, you, too, are a hate group. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Neither did the churches that made their list because they supported traditional marriage. 

When you include all of the above as "hate-groups" the numbers are bound to go up. But again, even with that data legerdemain, there still aren't more actual "hate groups" today.

It's a myth to scare you. And it's pure crapola.