Who IS Voting for Mr. Trump?

As the campaign for president wanders curiously forth, one of the recurrent themes is the characterization of those who are voting for Donald Trump.

Apparently, in that view (which the media choose to perpetuate in their slavish devotion to the Clinton campaign), we are bigoted, misogynistic, racist fools clinging, as Barack Obama once stupidly declared, to our guns and our religion.  And we are following, or at least voting for, a man who shares all those traits.

Now, I am one who cringes when presidents do their State-of-the-Union addresses and single out someone they have brought to the audience, someone who has experienced the exact crisis they are trying to bleed the taxpayers to squeeze out more to pay for.  I cringe when on the campaign trail, a candidate will say "... and I support payments for people with blah-blah disease, like Mrs. Etaoin Shrdlu of West Overthere, Wisconsin whom I met with yesterday ...".

I cringe because I hate using one person as "evidence" that something is good for a huge group or the whole population, or as evidence of anything.

But I do not support the characterization of Trump voters, the one that the media are trying to foist on us to try to make it embarrassing to vote for him.  And if I have to be an example, well, at least I can explain why I actually do plan to vote for him.

First, I am not a bigoted, misogynistic, racist fool who clings to his guns and his religion.  I am indeed a religious man, meaning that I am a strong but very flawed Southern Baptist with the faith that I am forgiven by Him for my flaws.  I may, or I may not have guns; that's no one's business but mine and the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I am neither bigoted nor misogynistic; I take every person I meet at face value, and neither add nor subtract value from that assessment based on their race or gender.  Jerks come in all colors and equipment, and so do great leaders.  Nor do I believe in either prejudging or providing any advantage to anyone based on that race or gender, or particularly rewarding or punishing anyone for what was done 150 years ago.

And I am not a fool.  I don't know what the standard is against which one judges whether someone is or is not a fool, but I am not an uneducated man (I have a degree from M.I.T.), I have had professional careers in both the arts and in technology, have started five companies in my life, and have enough facility in my native language to have written, at this count, 472 columns for this site alone.

I am that guy, and I will be voting for Donald Trump.

I am voting for him because I see both the problems in our nation and the world, and the problems in our nation amongst those who are supposed to address the problems in the nation and the world.  We have radical Islamist terror; we have an ultimate energy problem.  We have what is supposed to be the leading nation in the free world $20 trillion in debt. 

We have not "creeping" government but "overwhelming" government.  And we have the members of that government, Democrat and Republican alike, are entrenched in that system.  They are more benefited by the large government's continuity, than they are committed to shrinking it to what is mandated by the Constitution -- and to what we can actually afford.

Hillary Clinton is not only the classic version of that entrenchment and entitlement, but she has shown herself to be completely corrupt and habitually untruthful, as well as incompetent when handed the reins of power -- an unbelievably poor combination.

Donald Trump is the one person who calls out the entrenchment of the power elite in Washington for who they are and for how they make their decisions.  He, at least, says out loud that their interest is not necessarily the interest of the USA and the American taxpayer.  When push comes to shove, he is the candidate who has said where his interests are, and that those interests are in favor of the taxpayer rather than the continuity of power.

I'm not a bigoted, misogynistic fool, and I'm voting for Mr. Trump because, in this election, he is the candidate more closely aligned with my perception of what needs to be done with and to the American government.

Call me what you like.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Take Care of Yourself, Men

Normally the daily piece here is written the night before so that I can actually wake up, publish it, send it off to the world, and do what I actually get paid for the rest of the day.

This one is a little different, because yesterday was a little different, and leaves me a bit thoughtful this morning.

Monday afternoon late found me in the Surgical Center of a local hospital, undergoing a wonderfully uncomfortable process known as a prostate biopsy. This procedure was necessitated by the fact that my prostate-specific antigen, or "PSA" level, after years of being called "a bit high" at 3-4 or so, had gotten up to a value of over 7.

Now, there are various indicators of when PSA levels should make you concerned about things like prostate cancer, particularly when the number rises fairly quickly (my rise was slow but starting from an elevated point).  Nothing else had suggested a problem, but the doctor thought it best to check a bit more invasively.  A high level can can simply be from inflammation, of course, but better to know.

In a week or two, I will hear the results.  At best, they will have found nothing untoward, and they'll continue to watch my PSA levels for the rest of my life.  At worst, they will find something that necessitates prostate removal, and that is a pretty routine thing that I'm not particularly fearful of, except that since we are relocating in two weeks, it would be performed by a brand-new practice of urologists.

I mention all this not to get all surgical on you, but because we as men don't talk that much about urological things, and there are factors we should take into account.  The reality is that all men, were we to live long enough, would suffer from an enlarged prostate (benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH) and, eventually, prostate cancer.  It is inevitable if you live long enough, and you only don't get it if something else gets you first.

And prostate cancer, fortunately, is a very, very slow-growing disease.  It is fairly easy to detect, fairly easy to contain if it is detected, and fairly easy to cure through removal of the prostate gland with little subsequent problem after recovery.  Surgery in that area is pretty advanced these days and the recovery quite smooth now.

So -- this column is a simple reminder to all of my brother readers, and all my sister readers with men on your life.  I know far, far too many men who do not undergo an annual physical, let alone a PSA test.  Get the physical.  Get your PSA tested.  There is no downside, and if indeed you are discovered to have something that needs addressing, it is a routine procedure anymore.

I don't even know how my results will turn out, but I am quite confident in being readily able to deal with the result, if for no other reason than, by having monitored PSA for years, I know that I have acted properly in accordance with the results. Having been aware of slightly elevated levels for a long-enough period, I also know that if anything further needs to be done, we are doing so in good time.

Do the same.  Do your family the service and be good to your self.  Set up an annual physical and include a PSA test.

This has been a public service announcement by www.UberThoughtsUSA.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

When Does the Comey Volcano Blow?`

First it was Hillary Clinton Herself, making speeches this past week and noting that, in her words, she had been exonerated by the FBI in the email scandal investigation they did.  The networks that actually feel free not to kiss her backside, i.e., Fox, immediately presented things she said in those speeches juxtaposed with the FBI director saying the opposite.

Hillary would say that the FBI said she did not do X, Y and Z, and then you would see a clip of FBI director James Comey saying in his press conference, or in his testimony before Congress that, in fact, she had indeed done X, Y and Z.

Hillary would be shown in the speeches saying that she had told the truth about not doing X, Y and Z, and there would be the clip of Comey's testimony that she had lied to the public, or to Congress or to the FBI and that she had done X, Y and Z.

Friday we had Bill Clinton Himself joining in.  On the question of the emails, Bill called the email flap a "bunch of bull" and said that the FBI had only found "three little markings" in all those emails and that "nothing else was marked classified".  Had a network done the old "what did the Director actually say" thing, it would have noted that over a hundred of the emails contained marked classified content, and that over 2,000 emails contained actual classified information.

At least someone would have noted that the Clintons repeatedly narrow their statements to use the term "marked classified", as if that even matters.  It does not; classified material, as I have written repeatedly, is classified regardless of markings and the Secretaries of State know that.  But you just keep watching; she will repeatedly use the term "marked classified", assuming the lemmings and the media, the toadies and sycophants, won't know the difference.

So here we have the Clintons publicly lying about what the FBI found and what the FBI Director actually said.

James Comey is thought to be a good man and a man of honor.  He has no specific obligation to Hillary or Bill Clinton, and there is no doubt that he is fully aware of the Clinton Cash revelations of the corruption that Hillary practiced while Secretary of State, including selling access,, influence and, finally, uranium, to Russians and others with issues before the State Department.

James Comey now knows that the Clinton Foundation is a steaming pot of corruption, funded by donations given to curry favor with the Clintons, including while Hillary was in office.  He cannot like that too much.

But there is a limit to everyone's patience.

And I truly believe that the next, or the next after that, or soon enough, one of those Clinton declarations of what the FBI Director said that was clearly not what he said, will be the last straw.  And when that comes, it will not be pretty.

James Comey, the theoretically unimpeachable FBI Director will call a press conference and declare that Hillary and Bill Clinton have been repeatedly lying about what the FBI found and what the FBI Director said, and that their lying has violated his integrity and called into question what he and the FBI actually did find.

Comey will say that he refuses to allow them to lie about what he said and what the FBI did, and that from this point he will refute everything they say that is incorrect, and play fact-checker for their comments and answers -- even in the upcoming debates.

He is a man of honor and needs to retain his honor.  I would like to hope that at this point he truly has had it with the Clintons and their lies.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Enjoying the Rookie

It's Friday, and we all need a little break from politics, me especially, if only to remind myself that there are other things to write about, some of which are actually enjoyable.

One of those, of course, is the American Pastime, the participation and spectator sport known as baseball.  Now, I'm no longer a participant (I organized a company team back when I was a 50-year-old VP with a Federal contractor, and played shortstop until I realized that I was, in fact, 50 and, while I could still hit, my hamstrings were 100 years old combined; the rest of the team was all well under 40).  But I sure watch the game, every single day.

I am an unabashed fan of the Boston Red Sox, most remarkable because I grew up far away from New England, and remember being a fan of the team at age three -- despite their not being anywhere near the local team. In fact, I did see the great Ted Williams play in a game as part of a family trip while he was still an active major-league player.

Last week the Red Sox brought up to the majors a just-turned-22-year-old young man from Cincinnati by the name of Andrew Benintendi.  His first week has been one of those experiences that remind us how many different things can happen in baseball, and why they attract us over and over to the sport.

Unlike the NFL and, I suppose, the NBA (if anyone still actually watches professional basketball), baseball players don't get drafted and start playing for the major-league team immediately, or at least at the start of the next season.  There is no minor-league process in those sports.  Baseball players, by contrast, are drafted, then start at the lowest tiers of the minors and have to work their way up.

Perhaps after 3-4 seasons in the minors, the best players rise up to the AA, then the AAA level and then the majors.  It's that hard to learn to hit good pitching (or, conversely, to pitch past good hitting).

Andrew Benintendi was a collegiate outfielder out of the University of Arkansas, who was drafted #7 in the first round by Boston just last summer, and is thus only now in his first full professional season in baseball.

We can note that he was only #7, as opposed to being the top pick, because other teams either feared he would not sign an affordable contract or more likely, they looked at him and passed.  You see, Benintendi really reminds you of the guy who played "Rudy" in the movie of the same name.  Same sort of non-smile smile, same square face, and definitely the same handicap.

This player, whom six teams let go by first, is only 5'10" tall.  And that means only two things.  A lot of those old-time scout types would devalue his capability.  And a lot of people would root like Hades for him.  I'm one of the latter.

Benintendi shot through the minor league levels at a crazy rate.  As I described in this piece, the statistic "OPS" is a good evaluation point for a hitter.  An OPS of .900 is a real hitting All-Star at any level; an .800 OPS is an excellent hitter.  Benintendi's OPSs at each minor-league level were .972, .948, 1.011 (!), .976, and finally .872 in 63 games at AA Portland, Maine.  Essentially, he showed almost immediately, at every level, that he was simply too good of a hitter for that level.

And I think I mentioned he is only 5'10", right?

So finally, the Red Sox, with a need for a left-fielder right there in Boston, simply ignored the AAA level and promoted him directly to the Red Sox, something they had not done with a player in a number of years.

Here is "Rudy", this little guy for whom the uniform is always going to look too big.  After a couple of outs in his first two at-bats, the kid takes a low outside pitch to the opposite field for his first big-league hit.  We refer to an "advanced approach" when we talk about a younger player who really knows the strike zone and how to hit where the ball is pitched.  This hit was an off-the-charts advanced approach for a 22-year-old.

Benintendi had two hits in that game, and in his next three starts he had three hits each in two of those games.  He has had 20 at-bats in the majors now, with nine hits and a .950 OPS, pretty much the same territory as he had hit throughout the minors.

I'm a really little guy.  I wasn't necessarily the one picked last for teams; my brother taught me to hit at a very young age so I could at least play the game.  But as long as I played baseball, I encountered the lowest of expectations because of my size.

I am rooting for a long and productive career for Andrew Benintendi.  That's not because he has encountered any written-about adversity that he has had to overcome that would be itself a story, but because I watch "Rudy" every few years to remind myself that it's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog that matters.

He has learned and practiced hard the science of hitting, and I admire hard work, long study and the diligence to keep at the skill that you know has to be applied, when God didn't give you one of those built-for-baseball statures.

Good for him.  I can't wait for his next at bat.  I hope you will root for him, too.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

OK, Then How DID She Send Classified Data?

Way, way back in 2014, I wrote a piece that included a judge's instruction I got while on a small-town jury in a murder trial thirty years ago.  The instruction, to "look at circumstantial evidence not only in the sense of its consistency with guilt but inconsistency with innocence", has changed the way I look at situations.

It is with that viewpoint that I step far, far above the controversy over Hillary Clinton's contemptible use of a private email server while a Cabinet officer, to avoid access to her communications by FOIA requests.  By "far back", I mean not getting stuck down a rat-hole about this or that email, and looking at the situation.

And when we do that, some questions really rise quickly to the top, and one in particular.

We know that Hillary arranged for the private server to be set up for her emails on the very day her confirmation hearings before Congress began.  She never even established the more-secure "hillary.r.clinton@state.gov" account required of State Department employees, and of all the other civilian Federal agency employees and contractors using official email.

We know that she did that to avoid exposure to FOIA inquiries; we know because she was caught on email explaining that was why she didn't have an @state.gov account, so people couldn't see her personal communications.

We know that, as a result of not having a proper email account, she sent or received over 2,000 emails with classified information on them on a private server, in defiance of Federal law, including at least some with paragraphs marked to indicate the content was classified.

We know that the FBI made an impossibly broad interpretation of the law against doing all the above, which allowed her to skate and avoid indictment despite the mountain of evidence demanding, at the least, a grand jury investigation.

We don't, however, know one particularly valuable piece of information in this whole sorry affair.

The Secretary of State of the United States communicates sensitive information literally dozens of times on a daily basis.  The Secretary sends and receives information about embassies, about the activities of foreign governments, about agreements between nations.

There is intelligence information beyond imagining, regarding our gathering of data around the globe, classified imagery, information about the activities of our agents worldwide, about treaties, about negotiations of a particularly sensitive nature.

This is the lifeblood of the State Department, and when the Secretary is involved, it constantly is classified, and frequently at the highest levels.

Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, did not have a government email account.  She had only a private, unsecured email server that we know of.

So how, then, did she communicate all that sensitive information, dozens of times a day, and still maintain the needed level of security on that communication?
 
No government account.  She claims that she didn't do classified business on her private server (although we already know that to be a lie, thanks to the FBI).  If she didn't do it on her private email server in a bathroom in Chappaqua, then how in heck did she actually communicate with all the different people she needed to send and receive messages from?

This, friends, is a question that the press should be asking, not just of her (since she doesn't take questions from the press) but of the FBI which spent thousands of hours investigating her.  Ask Cheryl Mills.  Ask Huma Abedin.  Heck, ask Chelsea!

And the next time she uses her tenure as Secretary of State to defend her capacity to be president, we ought to ask how she managed to do it when no one could send her a darned message, and she couldn't even contact her own embassies.

Frightening, eh?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

My "Steves" Beat Yours

Hillary Clinton got a laugh out of the sycophants and toadies in the audience the other day when describing the economic advisors to Donald Trump.  Trump, of course, released elements of his economic approach on Monday in a speech, so Hillary had to try to diminish its worth by demeaning those who had advised participated in its creation.

The laugh line was when she was listing the advisors by description (not by name) and included "six guys named Steve."  As far as we knew, there actually are, among others of course, six guys advising Trump whose names are Steve, or something like that. So it was a funny line, at least if you are not named "Steve" and would have felt it offensive to be criticized for the quality and validity of your advice based on what your parents had named you.

I would suppose that, at this point, then, it is relevant to ask who Hillary's "Steves" are, at least who is advising her on economic issues.  So it was a bit off-putting to look at the official listing of her advisors on this site, and discover that the only reference in the site, among the 28 people actually named, to the word "economics" was where a guy named Steve, er, Mike Vlacich, was shown as having a resume including a stint in the "New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development."

That's it.  And for the record, New Hampshire does even not tax work income.

Laugh or no laugh, Hillary's speech was trying to make the point that Trump's plan, including a three-tiered set of income tax rates capped lower than today's rates, constituted "trickle-down economics", the Reagan-era concept that is sure to get a boo from Hillary sycophants and toadies because (A) it is associated with Ronald Reagan, and (B) because it actually worked.

The concept was not particularly arcane.  Tax rates in 1980, when Reagan was elected, were so high that the economy was disastrous, having lost the economic motivation to create jobs.  If that sounds like the eight years under Barack Obama, you're right, only add in a flood of regulations on business now that make it even worse to hire new employees.

Reagan muscled through a three-year tax cut program that lowered rates an aggregate 25% over the three years from 1982-84.  The concept was simply that wage-earners, taxed a lot less, could spend their own money in the economy, and business owners, taxed a lot less, could afford to create the jobs that produced the products and services that those wage-earners could now more readily afford because the government had a smaller hand in our pockets.

It was called "trickle-down" derisively by the Democrats, who predicted doom and gloom for tax revenues, but its results were going to be easy to measure.  If it actually worked, tax revenues would start to expand fairly quickly and fairly substantially.

And work they did.  In 1980, all Federal taxes generated $517 billion in revenues.  By 1990 this had risen to over $1 trillion.  This constituted a 28% increase even in constant dollars.  More importantly, the individual income tax revenues alone rose from $244 billion in 1980 to $467 billion in 1990, a 25% increase in constant dollars.

More curiously, the "top 1%" of wage earners were paying 18% of all income tax revenues when Reagan took office.  By the time he left office in 1989, that figure had risen to 28% of all income tax receipts, meaning that the highest incomes were actually successful enough to be able to shoulder an additional 10% of the overall tax burden.

As I have written for many years, we all are aware that this massive increase in revenues did not prevent the government from going far deeper in debt.  The Congress, run by Democrats, managed to spend well over a dollar for every additional dollar that Reagan's tax cuts produced and, as I wrote Monday, that's going to cause more borrowing.

But it had nothing to do with, and was in no way an outcome of, the tax cuts.  The "trickle-down" cuts did their job -- the economy boomed and tax revenues skyrocketed.

Yet here we are today, and Hillary Clinton, operates with no apparent advisors on her team, named Steve or not, with an economic background to tell her that criticizing tax policy by calling it "rehashed trickle-down economics" is a historical mistake.  Of course, she clearly, with her spending plan, does not think that continued increases in the Federal debt are a problem, which is, of course, a problem.

I keep saying that if you're going to propose something, at least show where it has worked before, and certainly don't be out there proposing ideas that have failed before.

But if you don't have anyone on your team willing to stare you in the face and say that you're dead wrong -- and Hillary's history of ash-tray flinging suggest that isn't happening any time soon -- you're going to listen to no one who knows what he's talking about.

Sounds like Donald Trump's "Steves" are better than Hillary's "Steves."

Maybe she ought to call one of his.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Which Scandal Will Do It?

Yesterday afternoon, we found the next Clinton scandal in a never-ending series.  In this one, it appears that the Brookings Institution, one of those supposedly independent "think tanks" that produce reports and analysis on any number of topics, began dumping lots of anti-Bernie Sanders reports after some healthy fundraising by Clinton confidantes.

I don't suppose I care; I can leave the caring to those who pay attention to reports that actually come out of the Brookings Institution.  It really is not clear whether or not reports from their bowels (sorry about that) influence anyone's votes one way or the other.

But I do care that there simply appears to be no end to the repeated scandals associated with the Clintons, always seeming to involve (A) influence, and (B) money.  There are a few (C)s and (D)s along the way, relating to contracts being steered toward people with connections to the Clintons, especially when the contracts follow (B) money routed to them to (A) influence them, either directly (speeches by Bill or Hillary for way more than the going rate) or indirectly (to the Clinton Foundation, which, you know, pays the two of them).

Today one poll was suggesting that those polled felt, even though by a very slight margin, they thought Hillary better equipped to handle the economy than Donald Trump.

I was a bit astonished, if only at the insanity of the average American pollee.  Hillary Clinton has run exactly nothing in the actual American economy in her entire lifetime.  The only thing she has sold for profit has been influence, and I suppose we have to concede she is extremely good at that.  Scads of US uranium in the hands of the Russians testify to that, along with incompetent and useless construction in Haiti and a whole heck of a lot else you can see in the Clinton Cash movie.

The question is pretty easy.  At what point does the USA voting public either completely write off all that corruption on the part of Hillary, in the name of whatever, or decide that the accumulated effect of all the evidence of her financial wrongdoing has added up to an unfitness for any public office, let alone the presidency?  

There is a corollary.  At what point does the American press finally decide that they, too, are Americans, and that it is no longer possible to be as far in the tank for her as they are, given the level of corruption that has risen to the level of selling out the USA (q.v. the Russian uranium scandal), and still be a shred patriotic?

I don't know that we are at that point, certainly not when it comes to the press.  But the public doesn't owe her anything.  They can go to the polls and vote for the other guy every bit as easily as they can vote for Hillary, and they seriously do not have to make her the president.

Which scandal will, indeed, "do it?"  Which will be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back and derails her candidacy in a puddle of elk dung?

Fortunately we have over two months for the one thing that she has done most egregiously, whatever that may happen to be, to be exposed and finally tip the scales.  I don't if that will come from an email release by Julian Assange, or whether it will be something from the old "opposition research."  Lord knows there is plenty left to expose.

I simply hope the American voting public is flexible enough finally to release that it cannot put the nation at risk by electing someone whose corrupt nature is that innate.

Praying ...

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Memento Debto

Lots and lots of conversations du jour are taking place in the course of the ongoing presidential campaign in regard to, well, all manner of irrelevant things.

Some are more irrelevant than others -- Hillary's atrocious handling of national security information, for example, is relevant in the sense of negating her qualifications to lead the USA, but it doesn't relate to an actual issue facing the country, merely her personal corruption level.

While there are several issues that are, or should be, at the top of the list when we are polled on our home phones, one single issue rises to the top of the list for me and my family.  And for my children and, if it ever happens, grandchildren.  And if not mine, then yours.

Let me put it as clearly as possible: we are in debt up to our socks.

The figure of nearly $20 trillion (our national debt, in case you didn't guess), which will be over $20 trillion before the end of the year, should be a part of every speech and every upcoming debate, although it won't be.  It should be, not just because it means we are a gargantuan debtor, but because its annual increase -- shoot, its every-moment increase -- is, itself, the topic.

That increase means that our government is overspending our revenues by even more than the principal we are paying on that debt, with no end in sight.  We are doing so because the Federal government has made itself ever larger, committed to purchases and payments ever greater, without an apparent shred of regard for how it can be paid.

Let me give you an idea.  In this past year's approximate three and a half trillion dollars that the federal government spent, was $223 billion on what is politely called "debt service."  That figure is only the interest on that debt, mind you; the principal is a totally different payment that we never seem to make (the creditors apparently just let the government roll those notes over).

So 6% of our entire Federal budget, bloated as it is, is simply going to pay the interest on money we had to borrow from friendly places like China -- to pay for the fact that the government spent hundreds of billions a year before the current year above what it took in.

I struggle to use the pronoun "we" when talking about the Federal government; I hope you can sense that.  I feel so terribly disconnected from Washington, as if I'm simply not being heard and not being represented.  I just had to say that so I can continue to use "we" -- fewer keystrokes and I'm lazy.

As a nation, we can only tax the citizenry so much before we depress entrepreneurship, limit transactions and crush the national spirit.  We have passed that, in case you were wondering.  So there is essentially a limit on how much revenue can be seized in taxation without harming the essential economic freedom of Americans.  You can't just fix the debt by deciding to raise taxes and expect to get enough back to pay for the excessive government.

So this is my plea.

Dear Candidates:

Our government is leaving my children a legacy of debt that their taxes cannot possibly pay back.  As a nation, we do not have the wherewithal to pay for the government we have even now.  You must make the reduction of Federal spending to what we take in -- a balanced budget -- an incredible priority of your administration if you are elected.

You must, in fact, make a priority the pay-down of the principal on that debt so that we are not continuing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in annual interest payments, literally, forever.

You must do a complete analysis, agency by agency, of what we are spending and raise your bar as to what is actually affordable.  Remember that the Constitution guides your cleaver; unless that document mandates some service as a Federal obligation -- such as the national defense, the currency, the post office, interstate commerce -- that such agency's very existence needs to be evaluated, and you need the moral courage, leadership and commitment to the well-being of the citizenry to be able to say "we are closing that agency."

If you even say that you want to do that, no really, just say you want to do that, I will consider casting my vote for you.

Remember that we are in God-awful debt.  Memento debto, or something like that.  I couldn't have passed Latin; I think Caesar is a salad.

But you get the idea.  Please, Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton.  Talk about it.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

R.I.P. The Olympic Games, 1892-2016

You may have noticed that the 2016 Olympic Games are about to start somewhere ... oh, yeah, they'll be in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Almost forgot.

When the last Games came around (the Olympics really don't like it when someone who has not paid them a sponsorship ransom uses the word "Olympic", so I'll stop ... probably), I seem to recall that we were very anxious for them to start.  We watched the opening ceremony, enjoyed the popular events like gymnastics, track and field, the marathon (OK, the last five minutes of the marathon), that sort of thing.

Tomorrow, I think but am not sure, the opening ceremonies will start in Rio.  Maybe tonight.

And we couldn't care less.

Once in a while, some popular figure or, in this case, event, crashes to earth and disappears in a blaze of glory -- or a hot mess.  The Games, at least the summer ones, are the latter.  It's one thing to be opposed or criticized; at least that keeps you in the news where you can recover.  It's quite another to lose your relevance.  The Games have lost their relevance.

I don't even think it is that fuzzy as to what happened.  At one time, the Olympics (oops, sorry, IOC) were looked at as a massive competition among the athletes representing their nations.  We hated the Soviets and the East Germans and later, as they got better, the Chinese.  The Soviets became the Russians and we still hated them, though a little less than when they were "stinking commies."

I think it started with the USA's loss to the Soviets in the basketball game 40 years ago, the one where the on-site Games officials had the ending replayed until the Soviets won.  Perhaps we didn't think the Games were corrupt before, but we started to get the impression then.

Articles started to get written about the leadership of the International Olympic Committee, and how the IOC had grown essentially into its own country, with the immense power that comes with awarding the summer and winter contests to different world cities.  We read how payoffs from prospective host cities fattened the wallets of IOC leaders, and we gradually assumed that the same corruption was oozing its way into the administration of the competitions themselves.

And we saw the host cities often lose hundreds of millions of dollars when the results didn't match their hubris.

Then there were the pros.  Some people enjoyed the USA's "Dream Team" competing in basketball after the ban on professional athletes seemed to have melted away.  Most Americans rooted for them; I simply changed the channel.  It was the varsity competing against the middle-school team, and was embarrassing.  I didn't root for the opposition, but I did change the channel.  Dunking in someone's face is pretty bad sportsmanship and I didn't want my country represented that way.

This year?  Well, after the scandals of the past few decades we have the Zika virus scaring many good competitors away from what was, also, a horribly-run city in a horribly-run country that had no business spending resources on two weeks of games.  We have, even at home, breaking scandals about the sins of USA gymnastics coaches and the cover-up of their acts.

NBC has invested its usual ton on the Games, and I confess to being a bit sad because a very good man I have met and know slightly (although not through his work), John Miller, is the NBC executive responsible there.  Everything that goes wrong and depresses viewership reflects on him and I don't like that to happen to a good man.  It is not his fault.

But in a day or so I'm going to look up when the women's gymnastics are, and probably watch some of them (and likely little or nothing else); they're so earnest and amazing.  Otherwise, the Games are too corrupt, too slick, too professional, too many other things that don't represent the concept of amateur competition they once were, or at least supposedly were (that Soviet Army sure had some coincidentally good athletes as recruits).

I miss the Games.  But maybe not that much.  R.I.P.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

It's the Stupid Issues, Stupid!

You can easily say that this has been a difficult week for Donald Trump.

It's not that the Democrats' convention last week was any kind of triumph for Hillary Clinton, but certainly Trump, like all of us an imperfect being, has managed to let his lesser qualities take over.  At a time when we should be hearing the distinction on the issues facing us, from both sides, we are left to concern ourselves with whether or not Trump offended that Muslim immigration lawyer whose son was killed in Iraq twelve years ago.

That was in a war that Hillary voted for and Trump opposed, but in the mind of the father it is more important that his law practice continue to have Muslim immigrant clients pouring over the border.

But I digress.

Donald Trump does a nice speech when he is doing a nice prepared speech.  The off-the-cuff stuff and the tweets have gotten him where he is today, or at least have not prevented him from getting where he is today.  But it is now after the convention, and there is no doubt that the winning strategy for him is to be found in one place.

The issues.

Hillary Clinton cannot possibly run on the issues and win.  If you think she can, at least with a neutral performance by Trump (i.e., absent any more direct shots to his foot), I would heartily disagree.  The issues are not in her favor.

She is, after all, having to navigate the tightrope of presenting herself as a third term of Barack Obama, but with a uterus, yet simultaneously having to sell solutions to problems that Obama clearly left in his wake.  That's not an easy thing to do, considering the fact that:

- ISIS, a purely Obama-caused (by failing to leave troops in Iraq) and Obama-facilitated (by failing to honor his own "red line") phenomenon, has crossed our doorstep and is already killing Americans in America as well as Europeans in Europe.  Obama has no solution, and Hillary has offered only what he is already doing, word for word.

- Obama has been releasing the prisoners at Guantanamo as fast as they can be released, and they are already back to the fight and attacking us.  Hillary has not mentioned any of that.

- Hillary wants to quintuple the number of Syrian refugees coming to America without a word as to how we will pay for them nor, more importantly, why it wouldn't be better to resettle them elsewhere in the region where their culture and language are familiar.

- We are borrowing about a trillion more every year than we, the government, are spending.  Yet Hillary wants to add lots of new programs and more debt (she calls it "investment"; either way, it is the taxpayers on the hook for the principal and interest) and has not once even suggested that we might want to practice fiscal responsibility and try to approach a more balanced budget.

- We have had near-zero economic growth in every year of the Obama presidency.  Zero growth (OK, under 2%) leads to minimal creation of the private-sector, full-time professional jobs that allow people to earn, spend and produce more growth.

- The Obama people have shown to be utterly incompetent in foreign policy, negotiating agreements with countries that hate us (Iran, Cuba) that give us nothing, at the same time letting Russia walk all over us while Obama is ignoring or offending allies like Israel.

- The first black president will leave office with an awful record at race relations, having politicized his Justice Department and jumped in on the wrong side of a number of issues -- Ferguson the worst -- before the facts showed them to have been on the wrong side.  And black Chicagoans and Baltimoreans are dying at record rates at the hands of other black Chicagoans and Baltimoreans, while Obama whistles past the graveyards of these and other Democrat-run cities.

- Hillary has shown, as Secretary of State, before and since, to be the combination of corruption (Clinton Cash-documented favors for pay) and incompetence (dealings with every country on earth have rotted our relations) that become intolerable as (gasp) president.

- And yes, Hillary Clinton is the most God-awful speaker we have heard on the national stage in such a campaign since, well, before they were actually recording these people.  They're having to pay people to listen to her, as was the case in her Pennsylvania bus tour this past week with Tim Kaine.  And at that, they weren't exactly packed crowds.  America can't stand her.

How do I know that these and other issues are losers for Hillary?  Well, the emptyish auditoriums she is speaking in are kind of a hint.  It might be more her abysmal speaking style than disagreement with the issues, but either way, it is an opportunity for Donald Trump and the Republicans.

If he and they choose to take it, that is.

So here is the thing.  "Taking the opportunity" means getting the heck off Twitter, or at least hiring someone to filter his tweets through so we don't get egg-beater added to troubled waters.  I'll be happy to take that job, if he and his campaign are listening.  I don't charge a lot, and I know Trump likes cost-effective solutions.

It means scripting his public appearances, even if he is wont to embellish his script a bit.  I get that, it's who he is.  But much like sugar represents empty calories against one's daily caloric intake budget, those strayings from the script are an empty use of time against the allocation that should be used to hammer where Trump can win -- the issues.

We -- America -- want jobs, and so we need a productive private sector less fettered by Washington, free to provide them.  He can tell us how he will do that.  Regularly.

We -- America -- want the national debt slashed and Washington to live within its means.  Whole, useless parts of government need to be deleted as fast as Hillary's emails.  He can tell us how he will do that.  Every day.

We -- America -- want safety in our homes and protection from Islamist terrorists here and abroad, and from criminals on our streets.  He can tell us how he will do that.  Consistently.

Barack Obama has either caused, exacerbated or ignored these and other problems.  There are entire speeches full of laying out the problems and presenting solutions that are available to Mr. Trump, if only he will listen to those near him telling him that path -- and getting the right writers on his team.

There is an entire campaign to be run, if only he will see it.

And in the end, not only will focusing on the issues make him president, it will make him a better president.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Dear WaPo: I'm Here for You

I live in Virginia, at least until our home is sold and we can move out of the area.  This means that the local paper of any real size is the Washington Post.  Now, print newspapers are pretty much a dinosaur, and I suppose we get delivery of the Post mainly because we're not young and have always gotten a newspaper in the morning.

By the time it gets here and we actually look at it, we've already watched the TV news early in the morning, so the Post content bears no surprise save an occasional celebrity obituary.  That's another reason that we won't be subscribing to a print newspaper after we move, and it's only inertia that keeps us from unsubscribing tomorrow.

I do look at the Opinions portion on the penultimate and ante-penultimate pages of the front section.  For the most part, their opinions obviate the need for the All-Bran that might accompany their reading on some days, but I, of course, already know the editors' extreme left bent.

The other day, though, I sent a letter to the editor.  I have sent some in the past, and they have been published with some regularity (and the rest ignored; they do get many, many letters).  This one, though, was neither published nor ignored; rather, I received a reply from the editor of the Letters section herself.

This was what I wrote to the editor:

"Today’s (Monday) editorial pages had three letters to the editor in regard to the Republican convention last week.  Every one of them was negative toward the candidate, Mr. Trump, or the convention itself – or both.  The previous day, there were four such letters, again, every one written by someone opposing the Republican candidate and/or the convention.  That makes seven letters in two days with not a single supportive letter.  In the same two-day span, every single op-ed regarding the campaign was anti-Trump, anti-GOP convention, or both.

"Are we to assume that the Post has lost virtually all of its Republican readership, or is it simply that none chooses to write letters?  It is already a given to readers of the print edition that there is an editorial bias; however, it is contemptible that you allow that bias to affect the choices in publishing letters from those who actually buy the paper.  If you needed positive response to the convention, you had only to ask."

So -- you can tell that this was written last Monday, and I can tell you that in the intervening nine days there has been, I believe, exactly one letter to the Editor that was uncompromisingly pro-Trump.

On the Op-Ed page, the page where the syndicated guest columnists have their pieces published, and which actually allows non-leftist pieces, there have been exactly zero completely pro-Trump pieces.

One would like to think that the editors of both the Letters and the Op-Ed columnists might have to subscribe to a level of balance as a tenet of their operation.  However, the Op-ed writers of a conservative bent happen to be, for the most part, Michael Gerson, George Will, Kathleen Parker and Charles Krauthammer -- none of whom is supportive of Trump's candidacy.

So the Op-Ed editor can blithely say "Of course we have balance in the section -- we have four regular conservative contributors.  It's not our fault they don't support the Republican candidate.  And we have a contract so we have to print their stuff." 

Well, just a little problem there -- this is an election season and we're less than 100 days from the voting.  "Balance" is not, at least for the next 14 weeks, about conservative vs. liberal articles and principles -- it's about support for Hillary Clinton and support for Donald Trump.  So it would behoove the Post, if they had anything like journalistic ethics (cue laughter), to devote at least some column-inches in the Op-Ed section currently assigned for guest contributors, to reasonable, intelligent writers whose positions are actually pro-Trump. There certainly are many.

I'm sure you're wondering what the reply was that I got from the editor of the Letters section.  Essentially, she generously and very politely wrote back that letters are more typically generated by readers who are angry about something in the paper; they don't actively solicit them and would not be doing so just to achieve balance.  She did not at all address the issue in the Op-Ed section, presumably because they are in a different wing of the paper's building.

So just for the record, I wanted the editors of both the Letters and the Op-Ed sections to know that there is a really easy solution.

I'm here, pen in hand (OK, laptop keyboard under hand).  You need a letter, I'll give you a letter.  You need an Op-Ed, I'll give you an Op-Ed -- five every week if you need them.  I'll even give you some I already wrote; there are 461 and some of them are actually pro-Trump (or anti-Hillary, that would help the balance, too).  I have plenty of those.

I can even do one on the sainted Khans, perhaps noting Mr. Khan's conflict of interest in his regular occupation as an immigration lawyer (his firm has deleted its Web page from the Internet since the speech), which might account for why he would be speaking on behalf of the candidate who supported the war in which his son was killed.

"Balance", of course, is a quality that eludes the Post, even in the sections where journalistic integrity would suggest that they would think balance to be important.  So we can look forward to 99-and-44/100% percent pro-Hillary or anti-Trump letters, and 100% pure unadulterated pro-Hillary or anti-Trump Op-Eds.

But I'm here, guys, and I can help you.  More than you know.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

She Must Make Better Speeches in Private

The conventions are over, including the Democrats' one in Philadelphia.  I assume it's over, because I couldn't actually being myself to watch very much of it.  I had enjoyed my dinners last week and wished to digest them peacefully.  That is typically incompatible with listening to leftists speaking.

Of course, I did tape-delay Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech because eventually I was going to have to write about it.

To no one's surprise, the usual terms like "home run" and "hit it out of the park" were left at home, even by the slavering press, whose general consensus was that it was at best the fifth best of all the longer speeches during the week, including ranked as being behind that of the wife of the president, Michelle Obama.  When you can't speak more effectively than a non-professional non-politician when doing the speech of your life, well, that can be a problem.

Fifth best of the longer speeches.  Yuk.  And that is today's point.

Hillary Clinton is still the darling of Wall Street, at least in the sense that to date she has gotten just short of $50 million in recent campaign contributions from hedge-fund managers alone.  Much, most or all of that has been given since the convention, meaning after Bernie Sanders endorsed her and she could comfortably take those bucks without risking even more convention protests.

Note -- By contrast, hedge-fund managers have given Donald Trump's campaign less than $50,000.  But I digress, I guess.

But even the hedge-fund managers' contributions are not so much the topic as this one -- Hillary Clinton was paid literally hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech while not in office, to make a bunch of speeches to Wall Street banks and financial institutions like Goldman Sachs.  For some, she was paid more than a half-million, each.  [While she was actually in office, Bill was the one making the paid speeches.  Even the terminally corrupt have their limits.]

So I was cogitating about the apparent disconnect last night, and a piece just sort of wrote itself thereafter.  Here we have Wall Street banks willing to pay gargantuan sums to Hillary Clinton for speeches.  I could retire on the fee for just one of them (in case they need a speaker this month).

But she isn't, apparently, very good at it.  Not only was hers far from the best speech of the convention, but based on the picture at right, taken during her oration, she couldn't even make her husband stay awake for it (and her running mate looks a bit numb as well).

This was the one time she needed to be compelling as a speaker, and she was mediocre.  Her words needed to be inspiring and well-presented, and she put part of the world to sleep, and made the ears of the rest bleed with that awful delivery and grating voice.  Clearly this is not her skill set.  We get it.

So please, please tell me this.  If she is indeed not a good speaker, and she obviously is not, then why the Heck were Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers lined up to pay her hundreds of thousands per speech?  It has to be the content, right, that she had great things to say to them?

But if those "great things" were so great, apparently they were not great enough for Hillary to have wanted anyone outside the room ever to know what they were.  Because, as well-reported, her demands for the privilege of being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak for the hedge-fund types included a paid stenographer providing the transcripts only to her, and forbidding anyone in the room from recording the speech.

And even today, she refuses to allow a word of what she said to be released to the public.  So here's what we have:
- Hillary makes the most important speech of her life at the DNC, which goes pffft.
- The world agrees that her speaking is brutal
- Hillary gets paid huge speechifying fees to speak to Wall Street banks and hedge funds.
- Hillary won't let a word of those speeches go public.

So we are left with two choices.  Perhaps she had some amazing insight for the Wall Street types that, even with her poor speaking skills, they were willing to pay megabucks to hear from her.

Yeah, no.

More likely, approaching metaphysical certitude, the fat fees were a quid pro quo, a personal donation disguised as a speaking fee, a direct payment to Clinton, Inc. to ensure that the powers that be in Washington will ensure that the hedgies will continue their favored treatment in the tax code and elsewhere in the regulatory bureaucracy.

It is no wonder that Wall Street is so ready to cough up $50 million in a few days, to try to persuade the nation to choke down the prospect of Hillary Clinton as a president.  If they're ready to sign that much in donation checks, and pay that much to her personally disguised as speaking fees for what cannot possibly be any great, inspiring oration, you have to figure she's worth billions to them in office.

Crooked, crooked, crooked.  The system, the bankers and, the saddest of all, Hillary Clinton.  Personally, I have had it with the corruption and the despicable links between the vested few and the crooked in politics, and it starts with Mrs. Clinton.

Poor speaker, but paid millions to speak.  You connect the dots.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Russia Can't Hack a Shelved Server

You just have to hand it to the Democrats.  Not that they have a monopoly on outlandish, stupid commentary, but they're certainly straining their strong plurality on outlandish stupidity with the whole Russian hacker story.

I was actually listening live when  Donald Trump held a press conference last week outside Miami.  I know it used to be the unwritten rule that presidential candidates laid low during the opponents' convention, but let's face it -- if a candidate of either party was going to hold an open session with reporters during the DNC, it was going to have to be Trump, since Hillary is now eight months removed from her last one, in which she answered all  of seven questions.

Trump answered more than that many in just the time after he said "OK, one more question" the first time.  You'd think the press would at least cut him some slack, at least he answers their questions.

The answer, of course, that got all the fun going was when, after answering an insane number of questions on the equally insane topic of his business dealings with Russia (in light of press assumptions that it was Russians who provided the leaked embarrassing DNC emails), he added this to his reply: 

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.  I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."

You would have thought that he had just made a racist slur.  All through the press and the political left (but I repeat myself), there were cries of outrage.  Claire McCaskill, the senator from Missouri, actually wanted him investigated for violating some law she named, by somehow encouraging foreign governments to hack USA servers.

Now, first I would actually like for the FBI to do just that.  Go ahead, start an investigation.  Of course the "investigation" would go on for about five and a half minutes before the special agent in charge held a press conference to drop the effort and declare that "Even U.S. senators can be stupid.  We're not wasting real FBI time investigating what was a freaking joke."  That would sufficiently embarrass the Hillarists, I think.

Secondly, it was a freaking joke, and a joke about the press!  Has the press, which actually gets to talk to Trump (unlike his opponent), not listened to Donald Trump answering questions long enough to know when he is being serious and when he is making fun of Hillary and of her playing fast and loose with the law and with national security information?  It was a joke.  I laughed when he said it.

But here's the thing, and it relates particularly to morons like Claire McCaskill who are actually trying to make a Federal case out of it, quite literally.

Even if you tried to argue that what Trump said wasn't a joke -- and we know it was -- look at what he actually said in context.  He said, "I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."

The 30,000 emails were -- say it all together -- on Hillary Clinton's email server, the one she set up to avoid exposure to FOIA inquiries in defiance of Federal law.  That's where they were deleted from by her lawyers, remember?

So how in Hades could Donald Trump, or anyone else for that matter, expect the Russians to be able to produce those emails now, given that the server was (A) wiped clean (not "with a cloth"), (B) given over to the FBI after having been wiped, and (C) is now in some evidence room at the FBI, shut off, disconnected from power and the Internet?

No, quite obviously to you, me and anyone else with at least half a brain (which excludes the press and U.S. senators, apparently), Trump's joke on the press was presupposing that her server already had been hacked because it was not secured when she was Secretary of State, and that if the emails existed in hack-land the Russians already had them.  If they didn't already have them, they sure couldn't get them off a disconnected, powered-down server in an FBI evidence room.

It behooves me to point out, of course, that if somehow the Russians were mysteriously able to produce all those 30,000 emails, the only thing they'd know that they did not already know, according to Hillary's sworn testimony, would be the wedding plans of Chelsea Clinton (which are a bit dated, a baby or two later) and Hillary's yoga schedule, which is something you'd rather not see.

I kind of hope this comes up at one of those debates in October.  I hope it's one of those particular lefties in the press that asks Trump a question about it, and he has a nicely prepared answer shredding the questioner with something like "Did you even watch that news conference?  Did it not even occur to you that the server where the emails were hadn't been accessible to a hacker for months before that statement, or are you as uneducated about technology as Hillary Clinton claims to be?"

One can only hope that by November the Democrats would have been embarrassed out of the possibility of retaining the White House.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Just Shut Up and Let 'em Sing

Political passion alert -- this one is a respite from politics.

For a few years this column has occasionally ventured off into the entertainment world.  As much as any subject in the genre I've talked about -- and critiqued -- the NBC series "America's Got Talent."  The AGT show is, in fact, the topic of two of the all-time most widely-read columns on this site, including this one that still gets read even thought it dates back a couple years.

Since I'm pretty sick of politics -- a Democrat convention will do that to you -- and since AGT is in the middle of its season, I thought I'd mention yet another thing that would make it (and similar shows) better.

Dear AGT,
Tell the audience to shut up, please.

I am not sure when it became fashionable to do this, but these days when it is a singer who is on stage competing in a network-televised talent show, whether the not-too-lamented "American Idol" or, in this case, AGT, the audience can be relied upon to applaud, scream and generally be obnoxious during the performance -- particularly when the singer attempts particularly high notes.

That has been a really unpleasant feature of this season's acts, some of which are indeed singers and vocal groups.  It is "unpleasant" because, as you may guess if you don't watch the show, one watches it for the talent.  Keep that thought.

When the "talent" is a singer, particularly an unaccompanied vocal group (but this applies to all singing acts), the audience at home is evaluating the talent, showmanship and vocal skills of the performers.  We out in TV-land aren't just bystanders; we are expected to vote for the act we like the most, and our votes count toward the advancement of the performers to the subsequent round.

One group, for example, is "Linkin Bridge", a vocal act made up of four young men from an inner city singing a capella in the contemporary style, with beat-box vocals and well-executed harmony.  They are very good, we suspect.  When we can, in fact, hear them, their execution is really tight and the harmonies accurate and well-practiced. 

With 25 years of championship-level harmony singing experience myself, I think I can judge that pretty well, even if the style is not the same.

Except we can hear them about half the time.  The rest of the time, the theater audience is screaming and cheering and generally making it difficult to hear the voices and the harmonies and the tuning, which is what you have to judge with an act of that type.

Come to think of it, with any kind of singing, you can only judge it if you can hear it, hear the intonation, hear the styling, hear the vocal skill and nuance, hear the story-telling that is a part of a singer's reason for being there.  That's as true of individual singing acts as it is of groups.

Now, if you want to applaud a magician, or a juggling act, or a comedian, or dancers, or a professional bowling-ball eater, you go right ahead.  You're not making it difficult to assess their performance.

Since this appears to be a contemporary trend, I suppose we will not stop it.  NBC is probably not going to tell its theater audiences to remain quiet until singers are finished, even though in the civilized world we do that.

But this is a TV show, with actual professional sound engineers working in the theater.  Would it be asking too much of NBC to consider adjusting its broadcast sound level balances for singing acts, to diminish the transmission of the audience's response to the TV audience in favor of the enhancement of, you know, the sound of the actual competing performers?

I'd really like to hear what, say, Linkin Bridge actually sounds like on a whole song.  Perhaps NBC might want to consider doing that.

Perhaps we'd have fewer over-trying 12-year-olds winning, if it did.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Oh, Stop wih the Russians Already

The spin in Democrat-land these days is that it was Russian hackers who got into the DNC's email system and obtained internal messages proving that the Committee was in the tank for Hillary Clinton all along, and tried to sabotage the campaign of Democrat Bernie Sanders.

I suppose it is a bit ironic that when I first realized this was the Democrats' approach to trying to make lemonade of some kind out of a big bag of rotten lemons, I thought of a Hillary Clinton phrase -- "What difference, at this point, does it make?".

Didn't that occur to you?  Because the story, in the mind of the reasonable being with a political bent, is that the Democratic Party organization, which ought to have been occupying itself with the conduct of a well-organized primary process fair to all declared candidates, wasn't.  In fact, the entire Party apparatus appears to have been co-opted from the beginning to ensure that Hillary Clinton was the Party's nominee, with the least possible opposition.

It is ugly.  The Sanders supporters are livid, and have made the convention a booing and shouting match.  The now-former DNC chairman, the immortal Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was kicked out of her post as the sacrificial goat, having accomplished her mission (and immediately joined the Hillary campaign, well, duh).

This is such an embarrassment to the Democrats, they can only take one of two tacks -- ignore it and expect the lapdog press will go along and let it fade, or come up with some "excuse" and feed it to the lapdog press to put out there so the narrative will be about that and not about the corruption inside the DNC.

They chose "B".

You have already seen the result.  We have front-page articles in the Washington Post pointing out that perhaps it was "the Russians" who hacked the DNC's email.  Because we are to assume that everything done in Russia is apparently by order of Vladimir Putin, the press made the plot line about how "Putin wants Trump to be president."

And that, friends, is why apparently the corruption of the DNC is now talked of less than whether Putin supports Trump.

Let me make it clear.  I think it is pretty silly to think that Putin would rather deal with Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton.  Hillary is the one who pushed the famous "reset" button that has allowed Putin to stomp on Ukraine, intervene in the Middle East (Syria) and, directly as a result of huge payments to the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation, buy 20% of our own country's uranium resources.  Oh, Putin would be delighted to make her president.  He can walk all over Hillary.

Trump, on the other hand, has no characteristics that would make Putin want him to be president.  Think it through; I don't have to elaborate.  Putin wants Hillary as his punching bag.

But even that doesn't matter.  Whoever exposes corruption, whoever leaks the information that corruption has happened, it is still more important that it be exposed.  It is important to the nation to know that one of its political parties only pretends to run open primaries.  It is important to know that it is willing to sabotage one or more of its own candidates to the favor of another.

We already know that the Russians and, for that matter, the Chinese and others, are hacking wherever they can.  It is the fault of the Democrats in power right now that they are able to do so without repercussions.

The story here is the content.  It is the nature of the corruption.  It is the "power at any price" mentality that allows this type of corruption, and that the Russian rabbit hole is even discussed is a testament to the fact that such corruption has reached the press as well.

Just stop with the Russians and admit what was actually done in the sainted name of Hillary Clinton.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Clinton Cash is Out

I don't get to read much, what with working, writing, selling our home, restoring our destroyed rental property and all.  So I have not had a chance either to acquire or peruse the book "Clinton Cash", the amazing stories compiled by Peter Schweizer detailing the abject corruption by Hillary and Bill Clinton during her time as Secretary of State.

We might have wondered -- well, I didn't, but you might have -- what possessed Hillary Clinton to have decided to begin to set up that private email server on the day her confirmation hearings started.  It's clear that it was done to "keep the personal communications private", and to avoid prying FOIA inquiries.

What becomes more clear now, of course, is what that "personal communication" was, that she was so desperate to protect from public scrutiny.  And the picture is not pretty.

Having not had a chance to read the book, I was appreciative that Breitbart News has provided a free link to the movie that was made of the "Clinton Cash" book, and I provide the link for you here so you can take a valuable hour to watch it.

Maybe I creep out a little too easily, but I expect you will as well, and the depravity in accepting personal payments and cash directed to their "Foundation" paints a portrait of the Clintons that desperately needs to be shared.  I kind of wish the RNC had run the film at 10:00 Eastern time one of of the televised nights of the convention.

The movie goes from one country to another -- Rwanda ... Congo ... Nigeria ... Colombia ... Haiti ... Kazakhstan ... Canada ... Iran ... Russia.  Time after time, bad actors in the nation find a way to get favorable State Department treatment from the Hillary secretariat in return for mighty payments -- overpriced speeches from Bill Clinton, huge donations to the Clinton Foundation -- even when the outcome is detrimental to the USA and to the citizens of the nation in question.

I cringed at the Haiti stories because, as I wrote a year ago, I have so much respect for one fraternity brother who has made the restoration of Haiti, after the Port-au-Prince earthquake, a life's mission.  He has sacrificed so much, and the people of Haiti have suffered so much, yet ... if he only knew (or, one can hope, already knows but soldiers on regardless).

We remember the stories of good old Bill Clinton rushing to Haiti after the earthquake, sometimes with former president George H. W. Bush, and becoming the visible symbol of our nation's leadership on the recovery effort.  If only the truth were as gratifying.

Oh, Bill rushed to Haiti all right.  And he certainly took a leadership role in the subsequent activities.  Except that in doing so, he shut out the Haitians from deciding what needed to be done.  The Haitians wanted repair and restoration of their roads, bridges and other infrastructure.  Bill Clinton wanted the relief funds spent with contractors and with the retail companies of cronies that had just happened to have made big recent donations to the Clinton Foundation.

The result?  A factory got built by a Clinton donor, with a promise of 60,000 jobs to follow.  The 60,000 jobs turned into only 5,000 actual jobs.  Despite what the Haitians asked for and needed, the factory was built in northern Haiti, which had not been hit by the earthquake, so it did nothing for the actual victims.  And, thanks to the State Department under you-know-who (hint: her initials are "Hillary Clinton"), its products could be shipped back to the USA relatively duty-free, a benefit enjoyed primarily by the retailers who had made the donations to the Clinton Foundation, don'tcha know.

One Clinton donor and crony was engaged to evaluate land areas for resettlement of displaced Haitian victims.  They got paid, all right, and paid a lot -- for a report that recommended locations to build resettlement homes that were literally on the steep sides of mountains.  The areas were so unsuitable for construction that one evaluation of the report described it has having been written "as though the guy never even got out of his SUV to look at the sites."

Another of the contractors billed the relief effort twice the promised amount, for fewer than half the number of new homes it had committed to build.  The Clinton Foundation did not seem to make a stink about it; Bill Clinton did not make a stink about it, and to this day Mr. Bill waves around his performance in Haiti as evidence of his sainthood.

Haiti, at least, was "only" a humanitarian disaster, I guess, if you don't care about Haitians.  Time after time, though, country after other country, murderous dictators in places like Rwanda and Kazakhstan were saluted in public by one or both Clintons -- while dictator-connected businessmen in those countries received huge concessions by Hillary's State Department after big-payday speeches by Bill or huge donations to the old Foundation.

It is almost definitionally corrupt when you take money to take action or unduly influence an outcome contrary to your public statements -- and the desires of your supporters.  Remember the old Keystone XL pipeline, the one that Barack Obama stopped but Donald Trump will fast-track in his first days in office?  Do you also remember that it was originally approved by the Hillary Clinton State Department?

I think you probably already know where this is going, since the Clintons claim to believe in those environmental factions that vote for Clintons all the time and get lit up about global warming.  But no, $2 million in Bill Clinton speeches later, the last in May 2011, bang -- a positive environmental impact study.  Those speeches were bought by the TD Bank Investment Group -- one of the largest shareholders in the Keystone XL pipeline -- who neither before nor since have hired Bill Clinton to speak.

More?  How about $750,000 from the Swedish company Ericsson Communication for a single Bill Clinton speech, that resulted in the State Department pulling a proposal to include electronics equipment in a list of embargoed items going to Iran.  Does it get more corrupt than that?

The movie concludes with the saddest segment of all.  Amazingly, with the apparently adequate amount of payment to the Clinton Inc. cartel, Canadian donor and Clinton crony Frank Giustra was able to buy U.S. mines and mining concessions totaling 20% of our nation's entire production of uranium.  This was done through a dummy Giustra company called UraniumOne.  Want to guess who got wind of that purchase?  Yep, Vladimir Putin, your friend and "mine."

Sure enough, Giustra -- who had already gotten State blessing for a deal to deforest part of Colombia's rain forest in yet another pay-for-play deal, ultimately resold to Russia one-fifth of our uranium resources at a 40% overpay.  Putin still owns them.  The payments to the Clinton Foundation to get needed State Department approval of the sale to Russia?  Over $140 million, from Giustra, from different individual owners of UraniumOne and from a dummy Canadian finance company, Salida Capital, owned by Rosatom, the Russian firm that controls Russia's nuclear arsenal and builds reactors in Iran.  The last payment was $500,000 straight to Bill Clinton for a speech in Moscow, paid for by another dummy company associated with the Russian intelligence service.

You just want to cry.  But don't cry.  Please make sure that everyone who has a vote takes the time to see this film.  Make sure that everyone who has even a 1% chance of casting a vote for Hillary Clinton sees this film.  Make sure that they understand why this type of abject corruption must be purged from American politics and certainly from American leadership.

Maybe we can't get her put in prison.  But it's almost as good if we can detach her from the levers of power, here or anywhere else.

Thank you for reading this far.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton