dem convention

Although at this point I have no intention of voting for Donald Trump, I'm also beginning to get an uneasy feeling about the Democrats.  In a nutshell, it's this: I'm beginning to think that the Democrats wouldn't really mind if the US became a third-world country-- which is, of course, precisely what this blog is trying to prevent. There's a  failure to take problems seriously, an unwillingness to criticize when criticism is called for. The Democrats' response to the abysmal failure of urban public schools, for example, is simply to throw more taxpayer money at them. Make class sizes smaller, provide universal pre-K, things which haven't shown they actually work but are, conveniently, jobs programs for the teachers' unions.

As for Trump, I just wish he'd get the memo on climate change. He's even more dismissive of climate change than other Republicans, many of whom privately acknowledge its reality but are unwilling to say so publicly. Why is that? The only reason I can think of is the reason the Democrats give-- that they're in the pocket of the fossil fuel companies. What else would explain it?

There was a time, back in the 1990s-early 2000s when the GOP did acknowledge climate change. Newt Gingrich actually made a PSA about it with Nancy Pelosi. When asked about it now, Gingrich simply says, 'I don't know what I was thinking.' Really? And what does he know now that he didn't know then? People forget that the idea for a cap-and-trade system to manage greenhouse emissions was actually a market-based solution that came out of-- are you ready for this?-- the American Enterprise Institute!

My major objection to Hillary Clinton is that she's a rather weak person whose approach to dealing with problems is simply to provide more and bigger handouts to various constituency groups. The problem is that she hasn't really gotten to where she is under her own steam. Does anybody think that if Hillary Rodham hadn't married Bill Clinton that she'd be the Democratic nominee for President? Of course not. She hitched her wagon to that star and has stayed hitched through her husband's multiple, fairly public, and evidently ongoing infidelities-- and it has indeed gotten her to where she wanted to go. It would not have happened otherwise.

So Hillary Clinton is not really a leader, which is why she draws such small crowds and elicits no genuine enthusiasm. I think she would be a very ineffectual President as a result. Trump, on the other hand, is a leader, but exactly where he intends to lead us is anybody's guess. More later.

the gop and climate change

Reading this blog, one might get the impression that I'm very right-wing on just about everything, but a quick perusal of my other blogs will show that this simply isn't true. In fact, this blog is the exception. Although I am very right-wing on issues of crime and law and order, there is one issue-- the all-important issue, in my view-- on which I am way to the left:  climate change.

When it comes to climate change, the Republicans are simply out to lunch. How it has come to pass that a major American political party thinks it can ignore an overwhelming scientific consensus on this all-important subject is simply beyond me, but it can’t be allowed to stand. Of course, a majority of Republicans don’t even accept Darwinian evolution, so in that sense it’s hardly surprising. What’s unacceptable is not much the GOP’s ignorance of the science, but its arrogance in assuming such ignorance is acceptable.