Before You Write Off 2016, What About Tomorrow?

I am trying to be sympathetic to all of you who are completely done with 2016 and all of the bad things you seem to recall, but I've got two days left in this blessed year before 2017 comes in fresh and new and pretends to be better just because it's new.

Don't get me wrong. I'm sad about Prince Roger Nelson , Muhammad Ali and so many others leaving us during the same calendar year, yet I'm hard pressed to beg for a better 2017 when death keeps reminding me to be thankful for today, because tomorrow isn't promised to any of us.

I'm not attempting to make light of a tumultuous year. I clearly realize that the spirits that seemed to make 2016 feel like 20666 came to visit me and you too, not just Hillary Clinton and celebrities. Many of us lost loved ones and/or had relationships tested to the core. Either we experienced true death and dying, or we lived the death and dying of love and friendships that we thought would last forever.

In hindsight, getting Donald Trump mostly felt like piling on. Trump's victory seems like a death of something noble; of an image that WE believed of ourselves right up to the moment of Hillary's defeat. Not only was it difficult accepting the notion of a president Trump, but Hillary's bitter inability to lose with dignity made the entire scene that much worse. In one embarrassing night, WE were announcing to the world that we are lazy voters, semi-crazy voters and also poor losers all at the same time. We did that towards Obama too, but I just assumed that was because of his skin color, not because we don't know how to politically lose anymore.

WE did experience more nasty episodes with gun violence in 2016, which is something I'm admittedly forcing myself to include because I know WE've learned- as a coping mechanism- how to fully forget about domestic terror incidents as quickly as our minds will allow.  Since we forget our own terroristic ways, police across the nation are currently learning the end of year data of officers killed on duty as well as a sharp rise (6 to 21) of those directly targeted for violence. I have to assume that this information is either a message begging those who assassinate cops to stop, or it's an effort to make cops more aware of the level of angst against them.


Either way, is it totally bad that cops have been exposed to the extremity of our collective societal concern about imbalanced policing or policing for profit efforts that disproportionately impact minorities across the land? Is it even horrible that cops are being filmed and confronted for the bad behaviors of the relative few of their brethren? I don't condone the assassination of cops, but I hear the voice of anger that it saying "enough", and so do cops. Isn't it better that we begin the movement towards nationwide mandated chest camera usage and community policing as a standard, not an exception? Personally, I will mark 2016 as the turning point in that crucial conversation?

If that's too heavy a point to consider, what about Pokemon-Go (bad choice?)?  Or how about those Cubs? In 2016 the Chicago Cubs broke a long-standing curse by beating the Cleveland Indians, another team that expelled a curse themselves by simply making it to the World Series.  We could feel sad for the city of Cleveland and the Indians, if not for the exploits of those Cleveland Cavaliers?  Was that an incredible series and an improbable outcome or what?

I'm trying to be a bit humble, but we can't forget about Peyton Manning and my Denver Broncos. While Broncos haters are quick to remind me of our present putrid performance on the field, they seem to forget that this is still 2016, and there will never be another Superbowl Champion crowned in this calendar year. Well, actually, we never allow anyone to forget about the Broncos being a huge part of the 2016 story, even if that's part of the stuff they'd like to forget.

If you aren't a Broncos fan and don't like successful swan song stories of HOF quarterbacks, what about the Rio Olympics? They turned out to be amazing despite the concerns going in and despite the Ryan Lochte nonsense on the way out.

Even if you want to use the seriously draining impact of the presidential election process as a reason for our sucky '16, I would counter you with the fact that Americans are more aware of their personal impact on an election than they ever were before.  We all understand the electoral college, and some of us- including Donald Trump himself- now believe there is a redeeming value for it. Thanks to 2016, we are now capable of debating the finer points of the electoral system against the legions of Americans who are suddenly engaged in politics and believe that a popular vote is a better way to go.  When Al Gore lost the electoral college thanks to a few hanging chads, nobody really understood what the hell that all meant.

We are so sophisticated now that we even understand the difference between a primary and a caucus and how each party protects their own process from the impact of outside intrusion by forcing participants to register for a caucus or primary months in advance instead of allowing an opposing party to taint a primary by participating only to sway the vote one way or another. We don't really like a lot of the realities of all that exclusionary behavior that comes along with caucuses and primaries, but we actually understand it now.

......and what is so bad about that?

If 2016 has been one thing positive for us, it has been muscle building that we sorely needed. We've never needed muscle building that involves paying too much for gas (Thanks, Obama) so hopefully Trump and Putin aren't working on a plan to raise prices for major oil producers like Russia and Exxon who have suffered under the new market reality relative to the price of oil. WE will also never need housing prices that our wages can not afford, yet, we did need some muscle building relative to our family budgets and our ability to make more out of our money by eating more rice and beans and DIY living that we often reject during times of prosperity.

Unemployment is down even if it's partly because of people quitting the workforce altogether. Our unwillingness to accept low-paying work in the months leading up to 2016 has forced the hands of every low-wage employer. Now, whether states increase the minimum wage or not, companies are currently desperate for employees, forcing many employers to offer wages above the liberal pursuit of $15.

Thanks, 2016!!

Maybe, 2016 doesn't deserve credit for people quitting the workforce, but 2016 was the year when the employers gave in and started trying to lure them back with better wages. If we are simply asking for 2016 to go away because we think that 2017 couldn't be worse, how exactly do we know that?

High expectation is the mother of disappointment, and I am not willing to waste all of the muscles that I gained in 2016 begging for easier workouts in 2017. In fact, I don't really want an easy 2017 if it means a return to the flimsy muscles that produced the fake relationships that I let go of already. Sure, fake felt easier, but easy isn't always a sign of substance. In 2016, I discovered much more clearly who is for me and who is not, just as many of you did too. I refuse to go back and nurture fake relationships anymore.

I'd prefer 2016's realness and rawness for the rest of my life. Not the pain necessarily, but certainly the pain if it comes with a deeper well of emotion and a stronger capacity for feeling. In a deeper well, there is a lot more things to hurt you, however, that is the well in which love and hope reside too.

Yeah, we lost Prince. But thanks to 2016, I'll never have to
be too macho to blast "Do Me Baby" while driving down the street again. WE grew in 2016 and have evolved into something new and different. Quite frankly, 2017 had better be ready for the change in US.

Putin Plans Bigger Than Hillary Or Donald Trump

Apparently, Mitt Romney is either not loyal enough or just too swampy to avoid the drain plug that Donald Trump promised to pull within the first 100 days of his administration. Not only that, Trump also promised to implement term limits on the very people he'll need to pass the bill that will limit their terms in office. I've lost track of the other million broken campaign promise' that Trump has either already renigged on or intends to real soon. Should we wait until he get's sworn in to be so critical?  We would wait if those cabinet appointments could wait too.  As it stands, they are the clearest signal of how he intends to Make America Great Again.

As for Romney? He's among the too sane or too unloyal that Trump is being challenged to steer clear of as he forms his cabinet. Indirectly, Trump is deciding that many of the most important jobs in American politics will either be filled by inexperienced novices who will need a fair amount of time to ramp up to their job description, or it will smell a little swampy in a few rooms while looking eerily familiar to the all white male America that used to rule our political landscape.

What America never seems to accept- especially as our future president crosses the dividing line between cronyism and full-fledged corruption in our government- is that WE are our government. Those of us who work in politics (media and lobbyist) or directly for the government become the learned body of knowledge that guides the way through the jungle WE've created for ourselves. The social necessity of finding cabinet workers sufficiently learned in a particular area of government can not be intertwined with some hand slapping agenda of punishing people who campaigned to ensure that you'd lose.

To Trump's credit, Rex Tillerson, the Exxon CEO tabbed to become the Secretary of State, was not chosen because he is a Washington insider, but he is also someone with a dubious history relative to Putin.  Once honored for his innovative efforts while doing oil related business in Russia, Tillerson is now going to be asked to hold Putin to task for war crimes and the like. Is he looking to nurture an existing relationship or test one with the understanding that you too could become a target of Putin if you cross him.

Rick Perry might actually get a job too, because the plethora of people on the list of Trump enemies is much too vast for Trump to function like someone looking to hand down repercussions as well.  Other than Omarosa and a couple of political talking heads, Trump never really had sufficiently learned supporters anyway, so his selection pool of people to put in key positions was depleted from the moment he won. As it stands, he would much rather use his children- the only people he really trusts much at all- and not have to do any business with people who could be hustling him the way he's hustled so many others in his lifetime. If only it weren't the biggest conflict of interest in political history; one so huge, it could threaten his office before it ever get's underway.

Has anyone stopped to think if Putin understands Trump's potential conflicts of interest too?

The Art Of The Deal

Trump is soon to learn that you really can't drain the swamp unless you restock the damn thing with some fresh fish when you are done.  Keep in mind that the new fish will need a little time to grow, so you must implement a catch and release policy for the newbies, or they may never survive to fix our public school problem, much less Putin. Nothing Trump's new swamp creatures do for 2-4 year's can really be counted against them anyway as they learn to replace those knowledgeable swamp critters he promised to get rid of.

What he is really going to learn the most is that Putin is not his friend and certainly not a man to be played with in a friendly manner.  He may not be the devil for his retaliation against Hillary Clinton- someone he loathed- but he is hell bent on restoring the former Soviet Union to Cold War era size and strength, and he needs a weak America to assist with that agenda. His restoration of the Soviet Union started in Crimea, but it surely won't end there.

So whenever Trump repeats the refrain about "is it so bad if Russia and America got along", he must be reminded that it is okay, so long as he's prepared to deal with a dictatorial president inspired by everything damaging to America and helpful to the restoration of Soviet dominance.

Dave Chappelle Says "Give Trump A Try". But Why?

Nobody is happy that president-elect Trump used every raw wound in America to run a campaign of toxicity that incited his own while suppressing the rest.  Although his supporters seem to be, they are only happy they won. They denounced all the toxic parts of our new president weeks ago before voting for him anyway. Why be so mad at his supporters when they told you they would "Make America Great Again" with their crotch grabber just like We promised to be "Stronger Together" behind fear mongering Clinton?

Chappelle and I not only look alike. We think alike too.

When I started chronicling this campaign, I said some time ago that one person didn't want the job and the other didn't even get in it to win. Today, I slightly modify that view.

While I won't fully abandon my theory of Hillary sending Trump to dismantle and mangle the GOP field for her, I am more inclined towards my belief that Trump, Hillary, Obama and I (plus many of you) are all really no different politically. You might have come from a christian evangelical church root like Hillary, Obama and I, or you might be simply respectful of religion while terribly skeptic of its motives like Trump and I are now, but most of US have found a way to love our churchy family and friends just like we love our LGBTQ friends and family too.

By percentage, very few of us really want to jail women who get abortions, nor do we want to arrest our undocumented neighbors. Even the people who say they want all of that don't want the regulatory state or the cost of making it happen. What they want is enough personal income opportunity to not care about the undocumented people and what they might be taking away from them, like they used to be able to do.

WE- those who aren't doing the deplorable dance all in the face of the skeptics- are enraged by the extremity of how far Trump went to win the White House while ignoring his sanguin relations with Russia (is it so bad that they get along?) and how their relationship contradicts the extremity of those God-awful nuclear war commercials Hillary kept running to scare us into giving her the job.

My Modified View of Things 

My signals say neither of these long time friends really wanted the job quite as much as they didn't want to lose and endure the embarrasment of losing. They both ran afraid to lose and reacted to one another like scaredy dogs, not cats since cats have 9 lives and fight with confidence. Trump seems to be the man of many lives, but he's really just the bombastic old guy who finally listened to the regular folks and answered back with hope and change.

How do I confirm my view of things?

No prospective winner would ever delegitimize his own post like Trump did realizing that he would (and still will) need the electors that he crucified to elect him president. Hillary, on the other hand, could not have believed herself a truly worthy winner while relying on NOTHING but fear of Donald to do it.

Donald peddled fear too but we've already established that he was afraid to lose. He was poised to become the poster child for "afraid to lose" politics if our fear of women and status quo politics did not far exceed our fear of him. We could try to complain about low voter turnout, but that's more status quo politics too, so deal with it or fix it.

With those truths rising to revelation, I'm less and less sorry that the grandma- who's taken lots of bullets on the battlefield of politics- lost to the grabby grandpa who was virtually bullet free going in to all of this.

One of these days we simply need to accept that the rich are just too rich not to look out for the rich. If we think tax breaks for them won't remain the only truly republican idea, then we enter the negotiation confused.

Can WE meet ALL goals with tax breaks for everybody? Only if we have the kind of sustained GDP growth that accomplishes stuff like that. Whether we can raise boats without the rich raising theirs or the poor getting drown should no longer be a body of water we tackle in such a fashion.

The travesty of the republican blockade of Obama is that he's always been one of them and their block of him was only one of princple. Our economy would have already reached president-elect Trump's promised goals if not for this over abiding republican principle.

The Principle?

Losing Sucks!

Now, the former republican party has won. They lost everything else including their identity and control over their own agenda and electorate, but they didn't wake up on the day after the election getting autopsy report questions from the media, questions only reserved for the losers.

Republicans still need an autopsy now that the GOP (Grand Ole' Party) seems to be the Generally Old Policies party. They'll need a whole new list of policies to identify themselves by, but they get 2-4 years to realize it fully if they choose not to accept it now.

In that time, how much so-called republican stuff can you accomplish when your number one task is fixing universal healthcare?  For goodness sake, could there be anything more non-republican than universal healthcare no matter what name you replace it with? And for goodness sake, if you have something better than universal healthcare, can you give it more details than just the word REPLACE?

The campaign stuff, except for rich people tax breaks and repatriation of rich people's off-shore money, will be challenged by more than an ideological congress, it will be challenged by means of rallies and riots. Those rallies and riots are so certain, that they've already begun as a way of pre-warning president-elect Trump about the risk of trying to govern like he campaigned. These rallies and riots are likely to go on for several more days if Trump can't reassure people that his Gestapo for rounding up immirgrants was kind of a joke.

Under his republican anti-regulations rhetoric, president-elect Trump has threatened to free up the banks so they could go back to the stuff they did before Wells Fargo got busted. Wells Fargo, however, got busted and fully revealed what happens when bankers are automatically assumed righteous, so even that bill won't be regulation free. If there is something else uniquely GOP, anything else, let me know?

Aside from their new mantra for an old plan, 'a rising tide raises all boats', which offers a wetter scenario for common folks to relate to- the same common folks who don't own a boat or never got wet while waiting on the trickle down rains of old- the republicans have nothing. Not even an explanation for how to replace a socialist healthcare system with anything other than a better name and a firmer hand on the insurance industry, code for regulatory measures that nobody seems discouraged by except the health insurers themselves.

I'm thinking on some of these things and becoming more resolved with seeing the potential good from president-elect Trump because I also recall the last days of the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. I recall the fact that MLK moved away from his version of Black Lives Matter by realizing that ALL poor people bear a similar plight.

Are You Helping Too?

With that in mind, there really is very little that Donald J. Trump, our president-elect, can do for the poor people in the rust belt that won't help me and you too.  If a president can fix poor peoples problems anywhere, sit back and watch how much those changes positively impact blacks and browns.

Assuming the poor whites, alt-rights, regular right and center left whites are asking for the exact same realized relief that progressive democrats have been wanting. The only difference now will be 
"What Makes It Happen"? 

An America that is fed up and crazy enough to elect Trump, that's what could make it happen. His selection alone is a 'cut the bullshit' mandate, because he's the only person that ever really claimed he could fix so much of it, whatever it might be.

Even if he can't fix it, at least it could be worth watching him try. If he can fix it, it would be even better to give him a hand.

I'm looking for ways to help.

Can Trump Change America's Fear Into Hope?

What started out as a wall building joke is no longer funny.

First of all, I would like to apologize to all women for our significant fear of you. Many of you are significantly afraid of yourselves, but that's a conversation for another post.

Hillary Clinton- for all the good she's done and all the cracks she keeps putting into that dreaded glass ceiling- earned that ass kicking Donald Trump gave her last night. You can blame misogyny or Comey or whatever Russian Wikileak you'd like. The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton hoped like hell that WE were way too afraid of that pussy grabbing outsider to ever take a chance on someone never elected to public office before.

The same populist movement that elected Donald Trump
will now be anxiously waiting for certain dividends that
will pit him against his own kind, the rich and powerful.

In the end, she ran a race on fear with commercials feeding into the fear we should have of Donald's decision making, or lack thereof. In the end, she was dead wrong.

Not that she was wrong about Donald.....sorry, president-elect Trump's dastardly ways. She was wrong to use them as a way of stoking the fears of human beings. Fear might be a motivator of sorts, but it is most commonly known to invoke hesitation and doubt, not clear-eyed certainty.

To Trump's.....sorry, president-elect Trump's credit, his campaign of fear was not one that he needed a television ad or any real effort to sell. After all, WE have long since doubted the intentions of the Washington elite, and he waged a campaign of retweeted anger that did nothing more than tell US what WE already felt enough to tweet.

Nothing is sweeter than the sound of your own name or being retweeted, and president-elect Trump used the oldest sales tool in the book to display the art form of negotiation and close another deal.

He listened.

Hillary Clinton spent way too many days wondering how in the hell she was so close in a race that she should have been winning in a landslide while ignoring the fact that she barely beat Bernie for the nomination and never really convinced the Berners that she was really interested in what mattered to them even while desperately needing them to show up at the polls.

In reality, she was terribly interested but listened to the wrong voices (insiders) and took an early victory lap when she decided to drive the down ballot bus instead of focusing on her own. All the pollster deserve the same ridicule I'm leveling at Hillary, but none of them were running for the highest office in the land, and the successor to a president MANY did not consider their own and said so, over and over and over for 8 years straight.

Forget about President Obama's approval ratings right now. Those were one part Michelle Obama and two parts disgust with the two candidates campaigning to succeed him.  Pollsters might have been dead wrong about president-elect Trump's level of voter enthusiasm, but they were totally right about the lack of it for Clinton. She tried to ride the enthusiasm of everybody in the world including Jay-Z and Beyonce in the final days, but no surrogate could transplant their charm into her.

I'm not thrilled about getting someone other than who I circled on my ballot, but I was never going to get the person I preferred anyway.  He (Jeb Bush) got rubbed out early on in the same name smearing fashion that finished off Hillary too.

Will Paul Ryan live to regret opposing
Trump?  Will Hillary Clinton?

The more I reflect on my journey in this election, I recall the question I had a year ago. Why would someone who is able to do so much good around the entire world while making shitloads of money from speeches- in between spending lots of precious time with her grandkids in the waning years of her life- be willing to give all that up for a job she knows is not really that cool anyway?

Hillary Ran For US.

I'm not happy for you sad or afraid voters, but I'm thrilled by all of those quiet people who either didn't vote or didn't take it seriously with that silly write-in name you chose.  Their lack of comical posts right now speaks volumes to the impact this election shall have on all of those who quietly hoped the rest of US could elect Hillary while they maintained the role of sideline ridiculers. Some of you really petty people are more than happy to pretend to relish in your Illuminati theory of the whole system being rigged, but even you thought the system was rigged for the insiders, not pussy grabbers.

I will be more thrilled when WE all get to see what happens when you try to push forward Wall Building Acts or Infrastructure Bills given the reluctance of congress to invest in anything worthwhile. Maybe they were just blocking Obama for 8 years and now understand that they will get Trump'd too if they aren't listening to the voice of America. And maybe president-elect Trump always realized that he was proposing non-republican populist stuff that America is looking for him to achieve, and must now truly roll up his sleeves to get it done. Either way, we are now wide awake and fighting for a front seat at the table of this divine civics lesson we are receiving.

No Trump TV?

President-elect Trump has a 100-day plan promise that involved implementing term limits on the same people he will ask to pass the bill. It involved finally fixing our failing roads and bridges (I guess you can pork-barrel a wall into that bill, but then Mexico doesn't pay for it), and dealing with the income disparity in whatever way first-time presidents who used to run businesses do it.

If he can do it, he and WE are all the big winners. Until he does, even the winners are losers with a difficult mandate ahead. Both insider parties are losers too as Trump systematically proved WE are tired of them all. Both republicans and democrats needed total reconstruction and will be putting out new autopsy reports soon enough.

As for today's true winners?

Saturday Night Live, CGI and Chelsea's children.

God Bless America, and president-elect Trump.

Did Donald Trump Just Tell America To Stay Tuned For His Concession To Hillary Clinton..........Or Not?

We know that George W. Bush will not be a guest on Trump TV. Will Putin?

It would be so great if we could do what we did in the last two debates this time around, but we can't. We can't spin the results of this debate into some kind of convincing reason for the candidate we prefer because Donald Trump did the unthinkable.

On the stage, in his final televised presidential debate, Trump said we would have to wait to decide if he would concede the election or not. He didn't spin the statement to mean, so long as it's not close and a disputed count like Al Gore had. Trump ran with the torch he lit days ago, to start these games he 's playing with our nation, and he intends to carry this torch to the finish line even if it means he'll burn down the entire party and portions of our nation along the way.

Trump's inability to lose is so well documented in his own writing about himself that any person who is voting for Trump but unwilling to read and recognize that he is a self-proclaimed whiner, might be a whiner themselves.

Trump is not tough like he keeps pretending, and neither is Vladimir Putin for hacking personal emails to try to influence an American election. He's especially not tough for his inability to call an email stealing punk like Putin exactly what he is. People who promise you they are tough are notoriously the least tough of them all. We've known this since elementary school even if it took until middle school for you to finally do something about that fake tough guy.

Why is Trump scared to take Putin on as he should? Probably because Trump has business dealings in a nation that could freeze your funds or simply take them and make you do something about it. There is no way that Trump will move from his company line on Putin, in fear that Putin might be listening. So, no matter what you ask Trump on the question, he won't get all Mike Pence on stage and mess around with his own foreign bank accounts or whatever it is that he's hiding in those taxes. He's going to say the same thing over and over again.

"I don't know Putin. But would it be so bad if the U.S. and Russia got along?"

Yes, Donald! If Putin is messing with our free and fair elections, getting along now without retaliation would be bad. It will get even harder if they shoot down one of our planes in that smokescreen of a 'no fly zone' that Russia created as a shield to keep the Syrian president safe from an American drone gone astray.

It's true. President Obama is the king of drone killings and deportation. Trump actually admitted that Obama is the king of deportation, but he also seems to be auditioning for the chance to outdo him in deportations while forgetting that immigration and wall building won't be the only job. He'll also have to deal with America's mortal enemy and Donald's pretty good friend Putin. Russia needs to prop up Syrian president Bashir Al-Assad and save him from an untimely death, but what are the chances that Turkey or an American manned flight doesn't "accidentally" take on Russian air defense fire?

Republicans are interestingly concerned that America and its president should not be talking too tough to Russia when it's already too late for what they've done within our election. Weakness is to ignore Russian Wikileaks without retribution. Weakness is to disregard your own counter-intelligence so you're not cornered into disrupting your own family income.

Donald Trump has done so much to avoid conceding the inevitable that he is conceding the inevitable indirectly. He's conceding that he is nothing more than a television hustler with a bigger agenda towards television than leading this country. He's conceding that the cliffhanger concession he's making of our election is juicier than the admission (or not) of a president's birth, and a perfect teaser to launch a new television network. He's also conceding that he doesn't understand the process of putting his mistakes to bed. As our leader, every misstep he'd make would become a presidential dark cloud that would never leave and never stop raining.

Trump could do a whole lot more not to leave us in suspense on the concession of this election, but that would not be good marketing. It would be presidential, but that's not his problem. At one point he accidentally interrupted Hillary with a "good luck with that" sarcastically referring to something she said she would do as president.

Even in his own twisted mind, he doesn't do a great job at lying. It could be the cause of his sniffy nose and not some other nefarious reason that requires urine or blood to uncover. Trump not only subconsciously congratulated his opponent on winning this election, weeks in advance, he's consciously telling his supporters to prepare for a tainted loss, which is a twisted version of a victory in the mind of Trump.

What Trump may not get, is that his angry alt-right supporters probably won't waste their time standing in line for a rigged election instead of drinking a lot of beers after work and waiting for the results to come out on their living rooms tv's.  One- maybe two- will let anger and those beers push them to behave badly in response to the rigged election that they didn't bother voting in. They'll find liquor induced inspiration for their revolution even though they hadn't the gumption to vote.

Trump's rigged election claim was set ablaze by his unwillingness to say he'd concede the election. For the next three weeks, he'll fan this flame and watch it grow and glow from all of his handy work.  At best, nearly half of America will buy into the tainted election theory and work to delegitimize the first woman president, much like they did the first black one.

At worst, someone will die from this idiot.

Millions "Taking A Knee" On Presidential Vote. Aren't They Making US Choose For Them?

How will that "don't vote for any
of them" plan work out actually?

I had a rather heated response to this question that I posed when I posed it in a FB post, but I think it deserves to be asked again, and in a more thoughtful way.

In order to frame this question, it's important that I ignore the defense of Hillary because I'm doing my darndest to be more sensitive to those of you who've decided that nobody is worth your vote this time around.

I'm going to disregard that Bush (the son) had 13 embassy attacks resulting in 66 deaths including 3 American diplomats and 22 embassy workers. I'll do the same ignoring of the 10 attacks under Ronald Reagan resulting in 318 deaths including 1 US Ambassador, 18 CIA officers and 254 Marines. I can even forget the fact that Bush never had an investigation as a result of the deaths, and Reagan only had one.

None of that matters when the people telling you that Hillary is a murderer are convinced that she is the reason they are dead. The 13 investigations have taken these Hillary haters off of her email trail for the purpose of finding blame over Benghazi, but they still need a Wikileaks to prove some form of pay to play with their very charitable organization, CGI (Clinton Global Initiative).

Keep in mind that the email Hillary's opponents are seeking for pay to play proof is a connection only made possible because THE CLINTON'S HAVE RELEASED THEIR TAXES AND THE BOOKS TO THE CHARITY.

Let me say this again in another way.

In order for me to believe what you are saying about that evil Hillary and her horny husband Bill, I have to connect some yet to be found email, or yet to be authenticated Wikileaks, to the open books that they've provided for everyone to see, just like most presidential candidates do.

I am suspending belief in all that I've just mentioned about Hillary's open documents, and I will equate this yet to be found open book crime with whatever Donald has told us about his closed books. For the sake of argument, I am trusting what a Russian dictator has shared from people's private files (will it be okay if they release any nude photo's since some of you are okay with the rest of this stuff?) and I am scouring through all of it like the gospel truth, trying to connect it all back to THE OPEN DOCUMENTS THAT THE CLINTON'S PROVIDED TO EVERYONE.

For the purpose of this article, and this question, I am ignoring the obvious differences between these two candidates and taking them to be the exact same Bozo's that some dear friends and family have called them.

Now that I've separated myself from my own distorted reality in exchange for your more realistic one, I am now truly, really and sincerely ready to consider the idea of doing the exact same thing as some of you and not vote for anyone as well.

My question is- before I make protest posters or write up blogs to sell the rest of America on the value and virtue of this approach- what is the value and virtue of this approach?

What would be gained if only me and about 600 more people that I can convince join in the "No Vote" ideology? What happens if every American finally see's the light and bows out of the presidential vote too? Other than the Congress being forced to choose for US, doesn't the process of bowing out allow the remaining voters- whoever they may be- to decide which president the rest of US lives with?

That's not really a question because the answer is obvious. Of course, the people that vote are the people that choose for all of us.  That is not really a debatable topic even though it sounds like extortion if you are as firm about the right to "Not Vote" as Colin Kaepernick is about taking a knee.

I am not debating the right to take a knee on an anthem or an election. I am asking the value of it so that I can decide if I will join in myself.  As it stands, I am willing and ready to sell the benefits of not voting just as I've sold the value of taking a knee and every other protest that came before it.

I'm not personally interested in taking a knee against the flag as my way to improve it, but I appreciate the knee people for the conversations and the situational awareness that must happen every time someone gets into another heated debate over the virtue of saluting the flag versus protesting the ways in which the flag has failed.

Protest is important, and comes in many forms and fashions.
I just don't understand this "Not Voting" protest, very much.

I can advocate for this not voting thing in the same vein of free expression if I could just put into words what this decision expresses. With barely 50% of Americans voting these days, how does reducing those numbers to less than 50% and allowing less than a majority decide for all of the rest make sense? What is the magical percent of lack of involvement that will finally make bureaucrats listen and respond to our frustration?

Like it or not, we are all stuck with the president that the majority (or plurality) selects. voters who sit out might hope for more obstructionist government, but even that doesn't change the impact and direction of the Executive Orders that will ensue or the Supreme Court selections that are still the privilege of whoever wins the presidency.

Should Bashir Al-Assad be removed and what happens with Russia if we do it.
Our next president must soon decide if America will honor the Syrian no-fly
zone that Russia claimed to establish against ISIS.......who has no aircraft. 

No, you do not have to exercise your privilege to vote because freedom provides you that privilege. You will, however, have to accept Roe v Wade if the wrong side wins but you want abortion to become a crime. Conversely, your gay friends who recently got married may have their nuptials annulled by the results of this election, depending on who wins.

You don't have to choose from the best of the bunch or write in your own choice if that seems like too much of a long shot. You don't even need to show up if none of this seems like it's worth your time, but you will live with whoever WE choose for you, so please don't curse and whine at friends and family that choose your next president for you. WE invited you to come to the store with US and pick out the best watermelon available. Sorry if we choose the sour one over the seedy one.

We'll be heading back to the store in four years, just so you know.
 

Trump's Rigged Election Claim Is Heard WorldWide

Will nations that normally censor US choose
to broadcast Trump's rigged election claims? 

I'm not sure if I can really write an expose more significant than my headline, but I'll do my best.

Donald Trump's rigged election claims are the most damaging blow to the image of America and our potential for future greatness since Donald Trump won the nomination. No really. The world, manipulated by hacked information from Russian president Vladimir Putin himself, laughed at US just for allowing that television show hustler to get this far. Now even Putin isn't laughing because Trump has essentially declared that the democrats and Hillary Clinton are about to win the election the exact same way that he would do it.

What Trump is way too uneducated or unsuspecting to understand is that his newest rhetoric is only likely to suppress his own voters by giving them very little cause to believe that waiting in the line will matter very much.

I won't attempt to connect this dot back to my nearly year old claim that Trump is Hillary's plant who doesn't really want to win, though documents have been wikileaked showing that Hillary at least encouraged his running and spoiling of the GOP well. Regardless of the impetus, Trump is here, but he is either way too dumb to understand which vote gets suppressed by tainting the legitimacy of an election that he's losing in the polls, or he understands oh too well and intends the results he's influencing.

Disregard the very smart election experts that work for Trump, who have to know the truth about Trump's approach. Remind yourself of the broadcast people that are his key consultants, and remember that Trump's son in law has been reported as seeking an initial contact towards creating a media network.

To win any presidential election, you need a team of people called surrogates and subordinates who speak on your behalf via various media outlets, and they make media productions, also on your behalf. In other words, running for a political office is the equivalent of building a media production organization. The process of transferring that highly functioning organization into a working entity involves paperwork and naming. That's it.

Win or lose, Trump has an alt-right ready media organization and a gang of people motivated to stay on the Trump payroll either way.  It explains why so many people are willing to risk their reputations while supporting things that are ambivalent to the very word democracy.

Things like calling our elections rigged and then hoping to legitimize that same election when it's over. Keep in mind what exactly Trump is saying here. He is saying that our elections are so flooded with illegal votes, that the only way for him to win is for....for what? More illegal votes than expected from the other side or more real voters than expected? And how does Trump gain those real voters while making rigged election claims that hardly appeal to the people he's got? What is the remedy for this inevitable illegality and how in fact would we consider Trump a legitimate winner if he insists he can only win by getting votes from his own millions of dead people just like Clinton has?

Isn't this the statement that political spectators from South Africa- who've fought to gain free and untainted elections themselves- are hearing? We know Russian and Chinese citizens are typically censored from American media, but wouldn't it be rather smart for these countries to broadcast this nonsense uncensored? Doesn't it make those fascist countries look a little less wrong if America no longer has an unrigged election? Doesn't all of this make the world a less hopeful place in the minds of foreign citizens who believe Trump? How hopeful will those who admire US be if even one person decides to take this revolution into their own hands as a result of Donald's dumbness? Was there truly only one Dylann Roof with the balls to stop talking and do something?

How long have conservatives been
so comfortable with Putin?

If alt-right talk show hosts on radio and television have sold the notion that Hillary has a body double- someone who plays her when she is not healthy enough to do it herself (another odd conspiracy that dumb Donald keep's trying to sell, among others), I actually hope that the alt-right is right this time. I am hopeful that Hillary's body double is the unfortunate soul that takes the bullet that, we'll pray, doesn't kill her. I am hopeful that plans are well underway to deal with the toxic situation that no person, who really plans to win the presidency, would ever create.

I repeat. There is no way in the world that any person who plans to win the most distinguished office in the world would ever taint the job before getting it. The only reason you taint that post is not because you don't believe you can win it, but because you never really wanted it.

Maybe he'll have the nerve to admit it one day during an exclusive interview on Trumpivision. While embarrassing, could you imagine his ratings?

Who Else Thinks Kubiak Should Give Up Coaching?

First off, those orange cream sickle uniforms with the throwback helmets were 10 times better than the team that donned them.

I keep it Real for the people who need it, and the truth is that Denver needs their coaches like no other team on the planet. They thrive on their desire to represent their coaches, and their coaches have instilled a never say die mindset that probably comes from the front office too.

I thank Gary Kubiak for what he did for Denver, and I'm hopeful that he can do the impossible and find a way to do it again.

 But Gary, is it not worth dying for.

My concern for Kub's has everything to do with my admiration for the undeniable spirit that shows up in every game we play.  Be it good, bad or ugly, the Broncos fight tooth and nail, and they've done it from the arrival of Wade Phillips and Kubiak. The spirit of our coaches showed up in the four wins and the two losses we've endured, fighting tooth and nail in them all. If we are honest about this year and last, this is the same team that won the Superbowl. The defense is good, not perfect, yet littered with playmakers and instilled with that spirit.

It would be nice to assume that Phillips and the defense are a unique and different aspect of this team, however, the defense knows better than anyone what it will take to remain on TOP.

TOP (Time Of Possession)

TOP is the key.  Without keeping the offense on the field, and the defense fresh, our defense is as compromised as any defense would be.  Why we consistently give up points early in games is not even much of a mystery in that teams know what they are going to get from Denver (consistent man defense), and know they better get while the getting is good against this team. Points come early but not often late and rarely without a TO (turnover) from our offense to help the other side.

Gary is the spirit, and Gary is not a quitter, and Gary had a week and a game at home to watch his team stink up the field realizing how predictable his offense has become, and how much the team looked eerily similar the same team that Kubiak is the regular play caller for, even when he wasn't

I don't expect Gary to quit now because quitting is not in his DNA. Stories say Gary returned to practice after his time off as if nothing had ever happened.  No explanation, no time to waste talking about it. Injuries and setbacks are part of the journey and Gary is nothing if not a great representation of the boss who hired him.

In reality. Joe Decamillis- the interim coach who usually fires up the special teams- was a better choice than Wade Phillips who probably doesn't want the head job. Neither did Gary.

Gary did his best to turn down this job, but John Elway wouldn't let him. Elway was backed into a corner with the firing of John Fox because he hadn't done his due diligence in making sure Fox's replacement was already interested. Winning the championship wasn't a contradiction to the talent Elway had compiled to get it done, but the manner in which we did it was a contradiction to everything you tend to expect in championship teams.

I'm not saying that no other team has won the championship in such a ragtag fashion, I'm saying we criticized those teams for doing it that way and still do.   If we are planning to do it that way again, we are certainly open to whatever critique comes along the way.

Gary.....coach Kubiak, is a fabulous coach who has shown the humility to fix his team where it is flawed, but now it's time that he does the same to himself.  Kubiak is a predictable play caller who really shouldn't be doing the job anymore because it is much too stressful and absent accountability when done by the boss.

I personally do not want Gary Kubiak to call another play, though he can advise and make final decisions on things like 4th downs or 2 point conversions. I'm not certain his buddy Rick Dennison is the right guy for the job, but I'm willing to give him the rest of the season to figure it out since that is the exact amount of time Gary should remain at the helm.

I'm not even certain I am comfortable with the notion of him staying that long, but I know that Kub's is not a quitter and no one, probably not even his wife, will get him to quit on his team.  He was inspired by the fight he saw in his wounded quarterback and in his team because it was the fight he put in them. The willingness of this team to fight and the ability to fight are not questions. What was a question was how hard we'd be asked to fight in every game in this season.

Now we are learning that we'll be asked to fight like the defending champion. Until further notice, ours is a status that ensures the very best from each opponent and demands something similar from the Broncos in response. No way we could expect to be perfect when we weren't perfect last year against less angrily prepared competition and with more experienced quarterbacks on our team to get it done.

Asking Trevor Siemian, Paxton Lynch or any rookie quarterback to repeat the feat has always been a lot to ask.  Asking Gary Kubiak to coach this team to the same success he did last year is sort of a similarly impossible request.  It will take time, and practice, and even more ups and downs to repeat as champions. And from the looks of things, it could look just like before.

That being said, win or lose, Gary needs to hang it up at the end of the year. He can stay on as offensive coordinator because that was the job he wanted to keep when he told Elway no the first time.  When you are accountable to a boss, you push yourself to please yourself and your boss.  The only boss Gary is trying to please these days is himself, and some of that involves proving his decision to go with Siemian, Lynch, and no other quarterback, to be something more than risky football.

Gary has made this bed and must lie in it so that he doesn't ever have to wonder, "what if?"- and then Gary needs to do the right thing for himself and his family and step down from head coaching. Any Denver Broncos fan who is still more interested in winning another title than they are with not having a coach pass away while chasing that title has a dark spirit.

I've enjoyed and appreciated Kub's for all that he has done to restore this team to the realm of greatness, but now I'm not having fun anymore. I'm worried that he is too fired up and too intense to not let this job get to him. I'm also worried that Kubiak realizes just how validated this team and its fans will be from winning another title and proving last year to be more than luck, but he needs to forget all of that.

If the football gods have it as our fate to get back to this years Superbowl, I'm fairly certain that the players will "Win one for Gary" and avenge our first Superbowl loss against the Cowboys when they do it (my prediction). But will we be tempting fate asking that of Gary?  Will he?

I can find a way to excuse the bad behavior of players like Aqib Talib because currently ,he is my playmaking problem. I can even look past the stale play calling because play-calling success and playmakers have a twisted relationship that comes and goes at times.  What I can not excuse will be myself or Broncos country if for some reason Gary doesn't make it through all of this intact.

Stay healthy and stay alive Coach Kubiak.  We aren't the Cowboys or the Raiders. We've won a title during the internet era, and have memes to prove it.

Kaine v Pence Outake: WE Can't Stand To Watch

Did Tim Kaine really just do his best Trump impression?
Did Mike Pence ever answer the actual question asked?

For the few of us who cared to watch the VP debate, my immediate impression was the same as the rest of your impressions- tainted by the emotional desire that we all have towards seeing the other side take a beating.  In that regard, I got exactly what I came for. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton's running mate, beat Donald Trump to a pulp while constantly challenging Trump's running mate (Mike Pence) to stand up and defend the many indefensible and inflammatory statements that have come from the top of the GOP ticket.

Mike Pence never tried to answer the unanswerable. Instead, he did what politicians are supposed to do, pivot, spin and control the conversation regardless of previous errors from the campaign.  Pence doesn't deserve too much credit for controlling the conversation, however, because it is way too hard to be in control when you are spinning and pivoting so much. For that reason, I not only missed that Kaine beat on Trump without laying a hand on Pence- the actual man onstage last night- I also misunderstood how pundits would view Kaine's effort, forgetting that Pence came into the debate with his own questionable record that made him worthy of deserving a few direct blows himself. He got away mostly unscathed.

I cheered and jeered at the aggressive attacks, even some of the flailing swings from Kaine, and I happily rejoiced at the reality that he was doing more of what Hillary couldn't do in her recent debate because Trump refused to let it happen. I appreciated the fact that the important remarks were being stated and placed on the record even if you had to listen over multiple voices (including the moderator) to hear what was being said sometimes.

I enjoyed the dismissive giggling and dodging that Pence was forced into doing while running from the direct opportunity he was given to actually sell us on the values of Trump or defend him from Kaine's attack that ignored Trump's pawn and went straight for the king himself. Pence never really stood up for his boss, and appeared to lose his way to me if for no reasons other than his intense condemnation of Putin (something Trump seems terribly hesitant to do), and for Pence's inability to build a case for his boss other than "we need change". Conversely, Kaine made Hillary's case from beginning to end.

Did Mike Pence just dodge enough poop to
elevate himself to top of the GOP field for 2020? 

And then I listened to hours upon hours of breakdown of the VP debate, in which every station and pundit conceded, in some form or other, a victory to Pence. By virtue of the standard set in the first debate, pundits handed the victory to Pence in the same manner it was given to Hillary, rewarding the person who seemed most polite and thus presidential. A victory by default if you will.

After hours of flipping channels and watching the video outtakes from the VP debate, a few very distinct revelations came to me. Hillary is so serious about not losing this race that she is treating her debate victory as if she had lost. Not by reviewing the entire debate all over, but by making sense of the televised outtakes that followed.

It's important that we recognize how Trump has not only lowered the bar on political decency, he has lowered the bar on his own expectations and that of the party he currently heads.  How can they clean up so many ugly soundbites when they are already on the record, along with the ones he adds each week? Thanks to Trump, his entire camp is now only expected to avoid land mines while begging voters for change. Anything more is way beyond their current expectation, and probably doing too much by virtue.

Despite her brilliance, I wasn't always ready to give Hillary as much credit as I give her now. It is now time we watch, learn and decide. If you are watching, you will easily learn how Hillary has decided to run her campaign. She is showing herself willing and able to adjust to the demands of the undecided electorate, that segment of society that can still be convinced to vote for her. Trump has hit his ceiling some time ago and can only hope to bring dismay to the process and the people Hillary needs for a decisive victory.

Hillary is going about things with reflection and humility, allowing herself the chance to see her own campaign through the eyes of those hesitant to choose her.

It is truly the time to save our children from Trump or with him. As such, it is vital to recognize that the home stretch kick has begun now that voting has started in many states.  In my opinion,those questions I once had of Hillary are laughable compared to the question of what happens under a president Trump. Right now is not the time for any of us decided ones, on either side of this battle, to be confused about who WE support, nor wavering in our efforts to help our side win.

To his credit last night, Mike Pence was neither confused or wavering, though he didn't fully show himself on team Trump. Otherwise, the 2016 VP debate

If Trump is the current face of the GOP, who takes
that position if republicans lose the presidency?

performance from Pence was an excellent example of what it will take for Trump to close the widening gap Hillary has opened in the polls and give himself an electoral chance in hell to win this race.

To enhance that chance, he must do exactly as his running mate displayed by masterfully side stepping all of the piles of poop Trump leaves on the campaign trail for himself and his surrogates to deal with each day. When it comes to big piles of poop, Trump is the head elephant in the GOP arena now, and the primary reason for all of the perfect poop dodging that Pence did last night, providing a clear blueprint for Trump to follow.

Trump's big bombastic poop droppings are part of the reason why MOST Americans have stopped listening to all of this a long time ago.

Not just months ago when Trump first demanded Mexicans leave this land of immigrants, but decades ago when the voter turnout numbers proved that barely 50% of eligible voters in America care to vote in the first place.

WE seem to much prefer television stars over politicians, and our long standing apathy towards politics is doing an awesome job at making a circus out of something so many described as a circus long before now.

 Most importantly, Trump is the ring master of circus outtakes. He not only knows how to talk the kind of talk that fills arenas and sells overpriced, useless swag, he knows how to insure the news programs will play his outtakes no matter how irrelevant or damaging they are to his mission, the subject at hand or the country at large.

You see, nothing that actually happens in politics will ever supersede the hot video outtake television uses to thrive.  While Trump seems stupid to continue saying silly things like "maybe Hillary is cheating on Bill...but why wouldn't she?", he is brilliant enough to know what it takes to make the outtakes.  In the end, there are only so many minutes available to every televised program, and every minute spent on useless but spicy outtakes, is a minute that can't be spent on something substantive.

If So Few Are Voting, How Many Are Not Even Watching?

For those who didn't have the time or energy to endure Hillary v Trump (live or video recording), your only understanding of what happened must be chewed and fed to you in digestible bites for you to swallow and regurgitate to the others who also haven't the teeth for all of this, and demand pre-digested food as well.

Trump understands our fickle digestion like no other presidential candidate before him, and uses bombastic outtakes to drown out the substantive stuff that only 20-30% of us try to chew on our own. That's right. Even if a little more than 50% actually vote regularly, almost half of those people to do it out of civic obligation, and don't necessarily study like they should. As most of us have been watching this foolish circus for months, millions upon millions are slowly and reluctantly taking their seat at the table.

Clinton Changes The Game With Kaine

During her own debate, Hillary mostly kept her poise and was told she won the night, but watched while most of the outtakes were of Trump being an arse, not of her style and substance that were lauded, but was only captured by those who watched the debate themselves. As a result of the slanted soundbites, Hillary and her team have not only caught on to Trump's game, they sent Kaine out to test the game first.

Actually, Hillary's stump speech was the first sign that she has started to display a little more style and way more Johnny Cochran than ever before, and she is now using it to drive the conversation in a way she has not done in previous weeks. Although the most palatable outtakes from the presidential debate were of Hillary tripping up Trump with a few pre-planned lines of attack, Donald's bombastic blast backs and constant interruptions ended up controlling the news streams and forced the pundits to explain to the viewers what the camera wasn't showing.

Consequently, close viewers on either side of each of both of these debates could easily claim a victory. One side based on keeping their cool, and the other for so many hot outtakes, because keeping cool usually ends up on the editing floor.

Whether you watched the VP debate or not, this is what you need to know about last night, and about the Clinton campaign to follow. Hillary has decided to hit a little harder and she intentionally used Kaine's and a few canned phrases to help get it started. On behalf of the democrats, Kaine jumped in the circus ring and left behind piles and piles of seriously unanswerable questions as well as the message that WE all should continue asking Trump the same. Hillary has decided to help us stay on the question even when Trump tries like the crazy to say something new and soundbite worthy for an outtake that might switch the subject and make us forget just how crazed he's been.

Trump's assessment of US is legitimate.  How do I know?  Raise your hand if you live with, or know someone who often says, "I'm so tired of this campaign. I can't wait until it's over"?

Trump has preyed on our politically fatigued and made victims of the politically handicapped who stay in the back of the pack of society, hoping to be fed digestible morsels of information to aid in their voting and to relieve that empty grumbling in the belly caused by civic guilt.

All of this simply because WE can't stand to watch anymore.

I'm not sure if Trump is doing business in Russia, but based on
his choice in wives, I damn sure can't simply assume he is not.

Trump knew it, but now, so does Hillary Clinton. Now, Clinton and her surrogates will proceed to take advantage of every opportunity to blast Trump and his trumpeting Trumpians with the one question that makes very little sense, but was the most resonating outtake from last night's debate.

How can Trump demand Pence release his taxes to qualify as a running mate, but he won't do the same for US?  

If Flag Stands For Freedom, Kaepernick's A Patriot

When this conversation first began, it was way too wrought with emotion to have space for a post of intelligent thought.

Not much has changed emotionally, but lots of things are changing relative to our thoughts and our conversation on this subject. Nothing will erase the fact that plenty of minorities can relate to the emotion that inspired the protest, even if not the protest itself.  What has been a little shocking is how proponents of freedom feel obligated to clearly delineate the difference between standing for the flag from the pride you feel versus standing because OTHERS consider it the respectful thing to do.

Respect is the hallmark of our military, and all respect is earned.

WE haven't done nearly enough conversation about how to combat police violence or address the subjugation of America's minorities like Colin Kaepernick hopes we will, but there is no longer a question about what his protest is pointing a light towards. There is also little question that more money seems to be following the growing group of players willing to put their own money where there protest lies.

You simply don't have to like their protest, or the disrespect it could reflect towards the soldiers that die for OUR freedom. You don't even have to like the attention these athletes have drawn to themselves amidst a team sport environment and on national television at the same time.  In the depths of my passionate desire to find a place of agreement with all people on all topics, I could easily concede each of these points purely on principles that are in line with what we teach our children, if we didn't have so many holidays to remind our children of freedom's provisions.

What I don't see from this topic is that Kaepernick went into  it to do something half-cocked, or lacking acceptance of potential repercussions. In fact, Kaepernick made it abundantly clear that he expected something financially bad to happen as a result of his choice.  If he knew this could hit his pocket, is there any chance he didn't think millions would bend his ear in personal disagreement too?

No way did Kaep', or any of the other NFL patriots that followed him in protest, go into their actions with their eyes shut because the others did it well after Kaep' had already been thoroughly eviscerated with our debates about his protest. If you are willing to concede this obvious reality- that these men expected this would hurt their income yet did it anyway- then you consider them patriots like I do.

How do I know?

Because it takes no kind of patriotism to silently stand and salute with the masses despite everything in your soul telling you that you are doing the wrong thing.

Our flag, Freedom and patriotism are all about doing what few have the courage to do in the hopes of making America a better place for your children and grandchildren.  Even if you are wrong- like all of those who now regret invading Iraq under the banner of freedom- our soldiers who kill and die for good or bad decisions all the same, will always have the distinct respect of being patriots who understand the full risk of their choice, and still serve. Simply put, they do something, and that makes them patriots.

The reason or the way our soldiers stand is never a blemish against their willingness to try; to risk themselves for the noble cause of freedom represented in the flag they defend. Our soldiers might hope they are offering their lives so that every man, woman and child in America can universally respect their efforts and salute the flag in the same respectful fashion, but I doubt that even one of  their life or death decisions entertains dying for sporting event anthems.

Standing before a game is just sort of nice. Sort of.

The Gags On US As Donald Trump Pretends To Pivot

Very few people seem to realize that we already built a wall on the southern
border, and its actually working fairly well. Until recent surges from growth
in the economy, more Mexican were leaving than coming in.

You young folks may not recall these days because of cell phones and Netflix, but we used to eagerly wait for the Harlem Globetrotters to come to town so we could rush to the convention center to take in the show, even though the show never really changed at all.

To this day, the Globetrotters are still somehow big time entertainment despite coming to town with essentially the exact same act every single time- for decades.

Of all the magical moments associated with a Harlem Globetrotter game, we all seemed to be on the edge of our seats while wondering, waiting and hoping for that old bucket of water trick that they still do.

You remember the one.  One mischievous teammate chases down another mischievous teammate with a bucket that appears to be water, but is usually just a bunch of paper confetti each time they throw the bucket. Until the very last time, of course, in which they actually throw water on some totally suspecting patron.

You may not suspect it will be you, but you always know someone would get all wet. Aside from the tricks the Globetrotters display on the court, this one is their Russian roulette of show gags, and we just can't get enough of blowing our brains out with anticipation.

This is the equivalent scenario I think about when I try to make sense of what were experiencing with Putin's friend Donald Trump and this stage of the presidential election. Donald Trump does too many interviews for this stage of fund raising, while Hillary does to much fundraising while the press keeps pressing her for interviews. They both seem to do more for the other side than to help themselves when they speak, however, Trump refuses to be gagged while pulling a gag on US.


 Assuming Jill Stein (Green Party) and Gary Johnson (Libertarian) actually get included in the presidential debate, four people debating on stage for one job will turn this basketball game into a circus show, with more dog and pony acts than we've ever seen on a single televised presidential debate stage. The circus is plenty fun, but kind of smelly and it's really risky to work with so many animals.

Neither the Democrats or the Republicans will take the circus risk of sharing their political market share with an outside party by sharing the stage with them and assisting them in the process of stealing the show.

So they won't.

They won't give stage room to their own external damage, even if the externals achieve the 15% threshold that is required by television networks, as both democrats and republicans fully collude on this ball game we are watching and will find a way to box out the other party's candidates one way or another. If Johnson and Stein are really hoping for a stage to perform, they'll both need to build their own.

From my perspective, whether Hillary is the Washington Generals and Trump is the Harlem Globetrotters, or vice versa, I 've long since believed that they are in this game together essentially playing on separate teams but working for the same measured result.

That result being Hillary gets quietly elected and Trump gets to keep yelling and selling a lot of hats and t-shirts. Rumor says that he is also in this thing most likely to make more money via a television network with his fired Fox friend Roger Ailes and  former Breitbart braniac Steve Bannon, not to take a 4-8 year pay cut of epic proportions by becoming our president.

Though we will never see his taxes to know if he is "that" rich or friends with Putin, $400,000 dollars a year is a good job for Obama the community organizer, not Trump. If the Clinton's are expected to dissolve their relationship with their own organization CGI (Clinton Global Initiative) to avoid conflicts of interest while in office, why doesn't Donald have to do the same thing? Wouldn't his presidential photo ops taken from his own golf course  or Trump towers represent a conflict of interest for him too?

It's All About Money

Donald is currently conducting this presidential election like a concert/speaking tour because it was just too damn lucrative to miss the economic opportunity presented to him. As Hillary runs a conventional presidential campaign in which you avoid media interviews until you step on the gas starting after Labor Day, Trump is running a conventional campaign in which you rent out convention halls, even in states that you have NO CHANCE AT WINNING, and milk the media for free marketing so you can sell hats t-shirts and raucous rhetoric.

This Globetrotter comparison explains why the Trumpians are continuing to rush to the convention halls across the nation, hoping to get their shirt and hat, and to have that bucket of confetti tossed all over them too. Mostly they are afraid that a country that was never only theirs, feels like it's slipping from their grip nonetheless.

Wayne Allyn Root for Foxnews.com wrote these words in response to Trump's immigration speech.

"As a conservative, I’ve waited a lifetime for this speech. Why? Because it was a speech that didn’t back down by even one inch. It was a speech aimed at Americans, for Americans, delivered by a proud American, who values American exceptionalism".  In other words, it was a speech for us...not them.

If you are curious why Trump can't, or won't pivot to the softer center, it's because that old bucket gag is what they came to see. It really doesn't matter how many times we've seen that same old gag, it never gets old. Even to this day it remains a mainstay of the Harlem Globetrotters routine, and is the secret, silent reason that people still can't get enough of this team or their act. If for some odd reason they were to eliminate that bucket gag from the act, I'm not sure that people would be as eager to watch the show, or forced to remain on the edge of their seats while doing it.

Build that wall, and make Mexico pay for it has become the bucket gag for Trumpians eager to feel like they are behind a president smart enough and tough enough to fix the problems besetting our land. When you peel back the layers on this mystery, you discover that these folks just want to be entertained. They don't care about a real wall or that the plentiful employers (the true criminals) in America are what generates the migration demand, they just love the comforting passion of a convention hall full of people screaming the same noise as the guy or gal next to him.

What they also probably don't already know is that we've got a wall on the southern border. Granted, all of the wall is actually fencing, and half of the fencing is actually fencing designed to stop vehicles while the other half is taller, barbed pedestrian fencing. But the wall is there and it is complete.

Apparently, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was originally designated to be handled by the Department of Homeland Security who started the project but quickly went back to congress when the original double fencing requirement proved unreasonable across the entire 700 mile stretch of border.  As a result, they had the Fence Act amended allowing for reasonable adjustments (vehicle fencing) where Homeland Security deemed appropriate.

Before the amendment to the Fence Act, Homeland Security had only produced 36 miles of double fencing and then realized that is was simply overkill to double fence the entire border. Bush passed and amended his own law, yet the wall finally got finished (so to speak) under Obama. (politifact.com)

If and when Trump finally finishes his bigger and better version of a fence, he will need to build unto the existing fencing on our southern border, or build his behind the existing fencing since placing the wall in front would be a real waste of the current fence including all of the time and money spent to put it there.

Don't forget that every time Mexico talks back to Trump about his wall, he will make them pay for the additional 10 feet he'll add to help quench his anger from their defiance. Given his quick tempered nature and the number of years it took to finally build our first fence, Trump's 50 foot wall construction project could be a never ending story.

Sort of like that bucket gag.

Why do we keep running back to see that same song and dance over and over and over, as if there is a mystery to what we are witnessing or what might happen next?  Actually, there is a bit of mystery involved because we never really know when that bucket of confetti will suddenly become water, so you to have to anxiously wait and wonder if this time it will be real.

If you are waiting for Trump to get real and actually appear as if he wants to win the presidency instead of indirectly forcing us to vote for Hillary in fear of him, it won't happen.  In fact, Trump has thrown that real bucket of water a long time ago, and WE're all wet.

Those people who keep going back for more just like to be entertained.