Category: America

Donald Trump came through with a surprise win in last night’s election to become the 45th President of the United States. Here are my takeaways from the biggest surprise in a Presidential elections since Truman beat Dewey:

1. The enthusiasm gap was real. Donald Trump got about 1 million fewer votes than Mitt Romney received in 2012 and he still won. The reason is because Hillary Clinton received 7 million fewer votes than Obama did in 2012. She just did not inspire enough voters to turn out for her – especially the minority vote she pandered to.
2. The racism/sexism cards failed for the Democrats. The accusations of racism and sexism about Trump and his voters on social media are even more hysterical today than they were before the election, but it doesn’t matter now. The left has called “wolf” too many times. They made the same accusation against Romney. They have used it so many times, it has finally lost its effectiveness. The left has to realize that disagreement does not make your opponent a racist or sexist.
3. The Republican party is divided. The Democrats are going to fracture. The Bernie Democrats have a right to feel betrayed by a party that repeatedly acted unethically against their candidate and all for nothing. The DNC colluded against Sanders and it was all for nothing with Hillary’s loss to Trump. The DNC has an “end justifies the means” mentality. But they did not achieve their end.
4. This election proves that the Democrat’s demonizing the Citizens United Supreme Court decision is just hot air. Hillary Clinton spent more than twice as much money as Donald Trump and lost. One calculation I saw was that Clinton spent $11 per vote and Trump $5 per vote. Special interest money is not the boogeyman the Democrats claim. That will take the wind out of their sales in a move to rewrite the 1st Amendment.
5. The mainstream media is the biggest loser – especially CNN. Wikileaks email releases proved that CNN actively coordinated with the Hillary Clinton campaign to support her and work against Trump. Other major media figures attended events organized by her campaign. The MSM willingly sacrificed all pretense of objectivity in a failed attempt to elect their candidate. Their credibility is now beyond repair.
6. Finally, remember when the left said it was a threat to democracy not to accept the results of the election? Now they are protesting Trump’s win in Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and other cities across the country. Once again proving that it is the left that is guilty of everything they accuse the right of being.

Taco Bell is coming out with a new breakfast drink, Mountain Dew A.M., made up of Mountain Dew and orange juice.

My favorite drink was Mountain Dew until I reached my late 20s when I had to stop drinking caffeine. Even animals like it. When I was a teenager, I had a cat that liked Mountain Dew. She would drink it out of my glass if I didn’t keep an eye on her.

The only problems with the Dew, as the Consumerist points out, is that it doesn’t make for a good mixer (much like Kool-Aid, which I found out during unfortunate night of running out of Coke with some Johnny Walker Red left in the bottle. Bad, bad night. Even worse following day).

On the other hand, Mountain Dew fans are hard core. They’ll give anything with Mountain Dew a try. Maybe it works, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

I was sent this in an email today:

Why do conservatives hate Americans?: Given the Right’s recent lurch toward Ayn Rand-style Objectivism, it seems that an intelligent journalist would put the following facts together:

1. 80% of Americans own only 7% of America’s wealth.

2. The new mainstream in conservatism maintains that the poor are only poor because of laziness and lack of initiative.

It’s not exactly a leap in logic to point out that mainstream conservatism now maintains that 80% of Americans are simply ungrateful, lazy bastards who need tough love to do better.

In that context, trying to get rid of Social Security and Medicare makes sense for them. But shouldn’t someone start asking, then, why conservatives have such contempt for the vast majority of Americans, and their work ethic? It’s not a hard question to ask. The politics of it may be controversial, but the logic isn’t.
(source)

The problem with the leap of logic is that both premises are flawed.

1. The statistic that 80% of Americans only control 7% of the wealth is based on studies that exclude much of the wealth of the “80%” including their cars and household items. Even more striking, these studies do not include “non-home wealth” (i.e. home equity) like a UCSC study did.

No wonder the figures looks so out of balance. They exclude the majority of wealth of the middle class, while including a majority of the wealth of the “rich”. The comparisons are apples and oranges, but that is what you do when you want to incite class warfare.

2. Conservatism does not claim that being poor only derives from laziness and lack of initiative. It does suggest that taking initiative and hard work are solutions to poverty, but that is not to say the inverse of those traits are the causes.

No, poverty in America is generally the result of poor personal choices such as dropping out of school, single parenthood, or drug/alcohol abuse. The best ways not to be poor are to avoid those decisions. Most of all get married; there are very few children in poverty who live with both biological parents and married men tend to have higher employment and higher income. Children from intact families are more likely to graduate high school, and less likely to have a teen pregnancy or abuse drugs or alcohol, and not continue a cycle of poverty.

Basically, our economic problems have more societal causes (the decrease of marriage and increase of out-of-wedlock birth) than they do economic causes.