The Democratic party and the makers of the new Ghostbusters movie apparently share the idea that you can foist a transparently awful product on the American public as long as you have females in the lead role(s). Have you watched a Hillary Clinton speech? I yawn and cringe in equal measure. At a campaign stop in North Carolina she actually read the word “sigh” — intended as a cue that she should sigh at that point in the speech — from a teleprompter. I cringed twice, once when she read it and once when I reflected on the phoniness of a candidate needing to be scripted to that degree. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Election 2016
She Can’t Blame the George W. Bush Administration?
Bernie Sanders is Wrong About Everything But He’s Raised the Intellectual Climate
Socialism has been discredited about as thoroughly as possible, but one thing I greatly admire about Bernie Sanders is this: He’s never made a political issue of the fact that he’s Jewish. He doesn’t say “It’s high time we had a Jewish president.” He doesn’t say “If you’re Jewish, you should vote for me because I’m Jewish.” And most importantly, he doesn’t dismiss criticism or critics as anti-Semitic. And because he doesn’t do any of the above, I don’t see his supporters or the media doing it either. It would be easy for him to do those things because it’s what people expect. Political discourse in America consists mainly of people calling each other racists, sexists, homophobes and bigots. It’s hard to complete a sentence without someone taking offense to a trigger word, a microaggression or a dog whistle. Abraham Lincoln once said this: If you have ever studied geometry,… Read more →
The One Thing I Can’t Tolerate is Intolerance: Herschel Walker Edition
NFL great Herschel Walker was one of the early Trump supporters out of the gate but now he says he is losing speaking gigs by anti-Trumpers who are blackballing him. — Breitbart Maybe I’m not paying attention but I can’t remember any people with left-leaning views being blackballed from public discourse. At the risk of being super obvious, tolerance and freedom of speech don’t mean anything if you’re not willing to extend them to everybody — people you applaud as well as people you detest. Read more →
Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson Endorses Hillary Clinton
I’m seeing a lot of headlines today on Henry Paulson’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton, in all of which Paulson is identified as “President George W. Bush’s treasury chief Henry Paulson,” or “ex-GOP Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson,” or something to that effect. There are certainly other ways of identifying Henry Paulson, e.g., Former Goldman Sachs chief executive Henry Paulson Architect of TARP and “Too Big to Fail” Henry Paulson Wealthy Wall Street goon Henry Paulson Henry Paulson, who used his position as Treasury Secretary to bail out his Wall Street friends with taxpayer money It’s hard to see how an endorsement from Henry Paulson is anything but a nail in the coffin of the Clinton campaign . . . I took millions of dollars for speeches to Wall Street banks and investment firms, including $675,000 from Goldman Sachs (see New York Times), and now they’re all endorsing me! (Shocking.) Also: I… Read more →
The Least Newsworthy Assassination Attempt on a Presidential Candidate
Man who attempted to grab gun at rally wanted ‘to kill Trump’ — CNNPolitics.com Am I wrong in thinking this would be a bigger story if a Trump supporter had tried to assassinate Hillary Clinton? Read more →
Be Anything You Want?
To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want—even president. Tonight is for you. -H pic.twitter.com/jq7fKlfwGV — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 8, 2016 And all you have to do is marry a man who becomes president. Inspiring! Read more →
FYI, “Mexican” is Not a Race
All I’m hearing about the last few days is Donald Trump and a Mexican judge and racism. “Mexican” isn’t a race. It’s a nationality, like “Italian” or “Irish.” It’s a reference to a person’s heritage. Just FYI, everybody . . . Read more →
The Consequences of Shenanigans
According to a Fox poll, Trump leads nationally with Republican “men, women, every age group, every income group, and among those with a college degree and those without.” So, if somehow the GOP nominates a candidate other than Trump, the only Republicans who will be angry about it are …“men, women, every age group, every income group, and among those with a college degree and those without.” — Scott Adams Read more →
Ayatollah So
In Iran you can vote for anyone for President so long as that person has been approved by the Ayatollah Khameini. We Americans call that system a dictatorship. Voters in America recently discovered that they live under an Iranian type of system and didn’t know it. In the primaries, voters participate in some sort of ritualistic placebo voting while party leaders select the candidates. . . . Thanks to social media, and Trump, America will get its first taste of real democracy. If it doesn’t work out, we can always go back to the Iranian model and hope for our self-awareness to diminish over time. — Scott Adams Read more →
The Job Is Only Half Done
Pundits say Trump has destroyed the Republican party. I say that's one party down, one to go. The job is only half done. #trump — Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 27, 2016 Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg decides against run for president — CNN Money The only thing I know about Bloomberg’s political career is that he banned the sale of large cups of soda in New York. Forget that I think drinking large cups of soda is one of the great pleasures of life, anyone who can’t mind his own goddamn business a little better than that, anyone who considers himself entitled and qualified to tell people what to do with their lives at that kind of a micro level, should be beaten with sticks, not elected to public office. What would he do as president, institute a national bedtime? Read more →
Prominent Republicans Re: Donald Trump
If our self-indulgent Republican party establishment had really wanted to prevent a takeover of the GOP, they should not have gorged on political power while they failed to do anything to prevent the decline of the country. Our leaders could have led. They could have done more than say ‘no’ to Democrats while offering no alternative. They should have stood up for the change Donald Trump is bringing now but they didn’t. Now, Trump has earned the nomination. He won it, fair and square and we should respect that. Donald Trump whipped the establishment and it is too late for the limp GOP establishment to ask their mommy to step in and rewrite the rules because they were humiliated for their impotence. If Trump is going to be our nominee, as I believe he is, it is our mission to support Trump and make him the best nominee and president… Read more →
I’m Pretty Sure Those Are Nouns
This is a real Bernie Sanders tweet, not a parody, although it has since been deleted . . . Read more →
A Loser Mentality
Don’t hesitate to vote with your uterus. — Hillary Clinton (paraphrased) “Women should vote for women” is a loser mentality. I’m glad to see that it’s not working. The Clinton camp is also tagging as “sexist” criticism that isn’t remotely sexist, just as criticism of President Obama is routinely tagged as “racist,” as though there’s no substantive reason why anyone would not like these two people. I’m not a Bernie Sanders fan but I haven’t heard Sanders or anyone affiliated with him even one time mention that he’s Jewish, that he’d be the first Jewish president, that all Jews should vote for him or that criticism of him is anti-semitic. Embed from Getty Images Read more →
A Different Kind of Voter
[A Republican political operative] described driving down a street on the west side of Manchester[, N.H.], checking out the houses. He noticed Trump signs in front of houses that he knew had never displayed signs before. Seeing that, he began to think that all the talk about Trump appealing to a different kind of voter might be true. — Byron York National elections amount to a choice of which gang of thieves you’d prefer to be robbed by. So of course a lot of people opt out of the process. What is the point? The “different kind of voter” that Trump appeals to is the voter who is equally disgusted with both parties and would prefer to vote for a second American Revolution. Trump appeals to the voter who objects to being told by those in power, “You cannot vote for this outsider, this new person, who has not built… Read more →
Hillary Clinton, Angry Landlady
[Hillary Clinton] is especially poor at the podium, where, when she wants to emphasize an applause line, her voice becomes loud, flat and harassing to the ear. She lately reminds me of the landlady yelling up the stairs that your kids left their bikes in the hall again. Literally that’s how it sounds: “And we won’t let them roll back the progress we’ve made. Your kids left their bikes in the hall.” — Peggy Noonan Read more →
Another Thing I Like About Donald Trump
Embed from Getty Images Democrats don’t like him and Republicans don’t like him either. The overarching theme of American politics is Democrats vs. Republicans, Team Blue vs. Team Red. It’s a freakishly expensive clown show for which we pay trillions of dollars a year to watch the Red clowns and the Blue clowns throw pies in each other’s faces. Nobody really cares about truth, substance or common sense, only whether their team is winning. When Obama replaced Bush, Democrats didn’t care that Obama kept all the same wars going and started a few new ones, kept the torture programs going, kept Guantanamo open, ramped up drone warfare, cozied up to Wall Street, etc., etc., etc. All the things they hated when Bush was doing them were okay now because their team was winning. Elect Hillary Clinton and we’ll get four to eight years of trench warfare against Republicans. Elect a… Read more →
Could Donald Trump Have Made More Money in an Index Fund?
I’ve seen this theory advanced by multiple sources, including the attached clipping, which I saw on Facebook. I don’t know the original source, but the finger-painting reference is a clue that the author has an anti-Trump agenda, hasn’t done the math and is just repeating something that may or may not be true for the benefit of anyone predisposed to believe it. The actual National Journal article, which is targeted at readers who don’t know much about history, math or the Trump family, says this: By putting his inheritance into the stock market back in the 1970s, [Donald] Trump might have been “really rich” without all the drama. . . . Had the celebrity businessman and Republican presidential candidate invested his eventual share of his father’s real-estate company into a mutual fund of S&P 500 stocks in 1974, it would be worth nearly $3 billion today, thanks to the market’s… Read more →
Aside
I can’t wait for President Trump to outlaw “For English, press 1” on automated phone systems.