President Trump ran for election promising to drain the Swamp that is Washington, D.C.  By “Swamp” he meant that both Parties have so embedded themselves into the the government, gained so much control over  legislation and regulation, and so grown the bureaucracy, that there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans, because neither Party actually represents the voters anymore.  Instead, the Party apparatus and most elected officials serve the entrenched Establishment, and the voters be damned.  Many people, principally those inside the Beltway, the Establishment if you will, discounted the Trump “Swamp” argument.  “Trump’s nuts,” they said, “nothing to see here.”  Right, “Pay no attention to the thousands of men and women behind the curtain, who pull the levers of power for the highest bidders, no matter what Party is in the majority.”  They weren’t worried in 2016 because no uncouth outsider, supported by an army of deplorables, could possibly defeat the Queen of the insiders, Hillary Clinton.  Then, Donald Trump won, and the Swamp had a collective breakdown.  The result was the myriad investigations into “collusion” which continue to this day.  You see, the Establishment Swamp creatures were not about to let a little thing like a national election get in their way.  If they couldn’t defeat Trump at the polls, they would just have to contrive to remove him from office.  And thus, we learned that the Swamp extends far beyond the political Establishment in Washington, and into the Justice Department and the FBI, places that we were led to believe should be above politics.  The Justice Dept. was peopled by Obama appointees, so its partisanship wasn’t surprising.  But the FBI?  I remain convinced that the FBI didn’t simply go rogue in 2016.  Its leadership was ordered to take actions they knew were wrong, and they did them secure in the knowledge that, once Hillary was elected, all would be forgotten.  So Obama and Loretta Lynch ordered FISA warrants based on a phony dossier, and people at Justice, including Rod Rosenstein, signed off on 4 applications, but no one would ever find out, so long as Hillary won.  But she didn’t, and then action was necessary.  What action?  The FBI had to protect its reputation, and those of James Comey and Andrew McCabe.  How to do it?  Attack Trump.  So Comey extends the FBI secret investigation of Trump, which was going since June 2016, by going personally to Trump, in the guise of an FBI Director briefing a President-elect and a President, but actually as an undercover agent, to document any Trump misconduct.  Comey writes Memos, and then leaks them to his lawyer/friend, who makes them public, to cause Rod Rosenstein to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Trump.  Comey gets fired, spends 10 months writing a book, and this week, on his book tour, snipes at Trump for things such as his tan lines. (You can’t make this stuff up).  Then Comey’s Memos are released, the Memos that Comey wrote to get Mueller appointed, and they reveal – NOTHING.  Comey mentions an investigation into Russian collusion, and Trump tells him to proceed.  No collusion, no obstruction, nothing.  The Mueller appointment is a hoax.  Why can’t Trump just put his own people in position at the Justice Dept.?  Well, that’s part of the Swamp action plan.  The Senate won’t vote on the nominees.  The Dems demanded 30 hours of debate on each one, and the Republicans are fine with that because its just one big happy Swamp.  And James Comey is still running from interview to interview, even in the wake of a criminal investigation to look into his own handling of classified documents.  Picture that.  James Comey is a former U.S. Attorney, a former Deputy Attorney General and a former FBI Director.  He fired and prosecuted countless federal employees for mishandling classified materials, yet he did the same thing, admitted it in testimony before Congress, wrote a book about it, and then went on every television program that would have him, and bragged about it.  Comey’s book is entitled, A Higher Loyalty.  The title is an allusion to Donald Trump’s having told him he needed his loyalty.  Comey should have called his book A Higher Lunacy.  How dare an unworthy individual like Donald Trump ask for his loyalty?  After all, Trump was only the duly elected Chief Executive, who was Comey’s boss, and Comey, of course, already had decided that Trump was unfit to be President.  We don’t need no stinkin’ electoral college, we’ve got St. Comey the Righteous (or is it Self-Righteous?) to make that decision.  I’ve always maintained that Democrats are afflicted with delusions of rectitude.  Of course, we were told that Comey is a Republican, even though he wanted Hillary to win, voted for her and his wife and daughter supported Hillary and marched in the Women’s March in January 2017.  Comey’s got other delusions, including delusions of Godhood.  James Comey really believes that he’s the guy that Diogenes found, not only “an” honest man, but perhaps the only honest man.  Comey really expected to be acclaimed when he admitted his duplicitous conduct in his dealings with the President.  He’s deluded, and the reason I know he’s deluded is that he said we’d be better off with Hillary as President, because of Hillary’s (get this) “dedication to the rule of law.” That’s Hillary Clinton he’s talking about, the one who set up a private server that permitted at least 5 foreign actors to read her classified messages, the same Hillary who deleted 30,000 subpoenaed emails, digitally wiped the server clean, destroyed subpoenaed devices, and was complicit in taking hundreds of millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation from foreign sources while Secretary of State.  The same Hillary Clinton that Comey saved from indictment with an exoneration statement he wrote before the FBI interviewed Hillary, gave all of her cohorts immunity and returned subpoenaed devices to her.  That Hillary Clinton, the one who was dedicated to that rule of law.  If this doesn’t make sense to you, there are two possibilities.  One – Comey’s nuts; and Two – you must remember that, as the nation’s only honest man, Comey thinks he is the law, or at least, that he was the law.  On reflection, he’s nuts.

With Earth Day once again at our throats, I thought it would be refreshing to view the climate change debate from the perspective of fact, rather than fiction.  The orthodox view is that the temperature of the Earth is rising and will continue to rise due to man-made increases in CO2.  Unless we take drastic action, which means shutting down fossil fuel industries and empowering government to impose crippling regulations and new taxes on us, we are doomed.  People who subscribe to this view do so with a pseudo religious fervor.  They are fanatics, or perhaps a more climate related label would be, “lunatics.”  The climate lunatics have taken over  government agencies responsible for monitoring global climate.  The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) claims that global temperatures have risen 4.5 degrees in 100 years, oceans are rising, CO2 is at record levels and we won’t survive much longer.  The temperature data is key to this theory.  Only much of the data is false.  The NOAA data comes from, or is supposed to come from 1,218 U. S. Historical Climatology Network stations.  However, many of these stations fail to report temperature data.  When that happens, NOAA substitutes “estimated” temperatures for real readings.  In 1970, about 10% of the data was missing, but that number has increased to almost 50%. This means almost half the current adjusted data is fake.   NOAA uses computer models for the estimates.  These models  are programmed to tell us that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming.  Simply put, the models build in the current bias toward man-made climate change.  The models artificially cool pre-2000 temperatures and insert artificially warmer temperatures for dates after 2000.  The models “created” a nearly 2.5 degree increase in global temperatures since 1895.  Only the actual records don’t support such a conclusion.  Consider this chart

The blue line is from actual temperature records.  The red line, which purports to prove recently rising temperatures, comes from “adjusted” (or fabricated) temperature data.  The real temperature readings from NOAA show that U.S. temperatures were warmest in the 1930’s and have generally cooled as CO2 has increased.  The preceding facts admittedly were derived from the website of an admitted non-scientist and provocateur.  No scientist would subscribe to such heresy, right?  Wrong!  Dan Lubin,  is a research physicist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.  He has written, “There has now been over 18 years with very little atmospheric warming (with the exception of the recent El Nino from natural causes) and in spite of ever increasing amounts of CO2.” “Global temperatures increased for twenty years from the late 1970s to the late 1990s but have either stopped warming or have even begun to cool in the last eighteen years.  The global warming and subsequent cooling were even predictable due to hundreds of years of historical trends and observation of the impact of variations in solar activity and ocean cycles on global temperatures.”  What about that CO2 level?  According to Lubin, CO2 levels are today, among the lowest in the past 600 million years.  There were three ice ages with more CO2 than today, one had fifteen times more.  The Roman and Medieval Periods both were warmer than today.  The world then cooled several degrees from 1450 to 1850.  This was called the Little Ice Age.  Global temperatures the past 10,000 years were also often warmer than today.  These temperature variations were not caused by man.   Dr. Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize-Winner for physics in 1973, declared his dissent on man-made global warming claims at a Nobel forum in 2015.  Dr. Giaever announced, “I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem.”   Although he previously supported Barrack Obama, Giaever said, “Obama said last year that 2014 is hottest year ever.  But it’s not true.  It’s not the hottest.”  The Nobel prize winner questioned the basis for rising carbon dioxide fears.  “When you have a theory and the theory does not agree with the experiment then you have to cut out the theory.  You were wrong with the theory.”  Giaever’s own climate research was eye opening.  “I was horrified by what I found.”  Then Dr. Giaever hit the nail on the head, “Global warming really has become a new religion.  Because you cannot discuss it.  It’s not proper.  It is like the Catholic Church.”  “The facts are that in the last 100 years we have measured the temperatures it has gone up .8 degrees and everything in the world has gotten better.  So how can they say it’s going to get worse when we have the evidence?  It must be politics.”  But Giaever’s a physicist, no climate scientist would say such a thing, right?  Wrong!  Glaciologist Dr. Terry Hughes is a professor emeritus of the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute & School of Earth and Climate Sciences.  Dr. Hughes says a number of his colleagues “have urged me to march in lockstep with Albert Gore, the drum major in the parade denouncing global warming as an unmitigated disaster.”  “It’s human nature for them to pound the panic drum.”  Dr, Hughes isn’t convinced global warming will be as bad as feared.  “In fact, it’s going to be a big plus, in the balance.” — More atmospheric CO2 would greatly increase agricultural production.”  And he warns that the global warming fanaticism may actually be dangerous.  “We know that endgame:  A sheet of ice thousands of feet thick from south of the Great Lakes across the North Pole almost to the Mediterranean Sea, the situation only 18,000 years ago.  Why is that scenario never stated?  Would reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide trigger that calamity?”  Now, we don’t know if Dr’s. Giaever and Hughes are right, and that’s precisely the point.  We disrupt our economies and tamper with our climate at our peril.  Remember the words of that late great philosopher, George Carlin.  “The planet has been through a lot worse than us.  Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages …  The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!”

Bill and Hillary Clinton have been on the political stage for more than 25 years.  Slick Willy appeared from Arkansas obscurity before the 1992 election.  He got the nomination and was elected President.  The trials and travails of the Clintons were beset by scandal and controversy from the moment they arrived on the scene.  The moment Slick Willy became a viable candidate, allegations of his myriad marital infidelities and sexual assaults began to surface.  No matter what was thrown at the Clintons, they stayed on message: Deny, deny, accuse, lie, and have associates swear to it.”  It worked.  The Clintons sailed on.  They lied to make Bill President.  They lied to keep him in office.  When Bill was sued he lied under oath, and lost his law license for 5 years.  No problem, though, because he had no intention of practicing law.  He was busy making millions of dollars from books and speeches.  Hillary claims they were broke when Bill left office, but she got her millions too, then she got to be a Senator, and then she got to be Secretary of State.  Yes, the Clintons always seem to get what they want, but there is a cost – just not to them.  Every step of the way, as the Clintons moved on and slithered away, they have left a trail of human destruction.  A number of women alleged they had affairs with Bill Clinton, and several accused him of sexual assault.  They all were branded “nuts” and “trailer park trash,” they, and not Slick Willy, lost their reputations.  Juanita Broadderick,  Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey all were audited by the IRS.  Monica Lewinsky, the intern who had an affair with Bill in the White House, had her name turned into a dirty joke.  Slick Willey abused Monica, and Monica will never live it down.  Paula Jones sued Bill Clinton and a former Arkansas State Trooper, Danny Ferguson, who she accused of abetting Clinton’s abuse of her.  Ferguson’s wife, Kathy, was a possible corroborating witness for Paula Jones.  She committed suicide five days after the lawsuit was filed.  The Clintons fired White House Travel Office Director Billy Dale right after they got to the White House.  Dale went public, so he not only lost his job, but also got an IRS audit.  The Clintons were investigated for an allegedly crooked Whitewater land deal.  The Clintons were never charged with wrongdoing, but others involved with them didn’t fare so well.  Clinton friend James McDougal was convicted on 18 felony counts, and went to prison, where he died of a heart attack, shortly before he was scheduled to testify against the Clintons.  McDougal’s wife Susan also was convicted of fraud, and did time for contempt of court.  Bill Clinton pardoned her before he left office.  Jim Guy Tucker became Arkansas Governor when Clinton was elected President.  Tucker was an accomplished fellow, he went to Harvard, to Law School, and was a college professor.  He had a good military record and was elected to office.  But Tucker got caught up in the Whitewater investigation, was convicted, and wound up in prison.  Let’s not forget Vince Foster.  Foster was a colleague of Hillary Clinton at Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm, and later was White House counsel.  Hillary was caught up in a Rose Law Firm billing record scandal.  Nothing happened to Hillary.  Foster was found in Fort Marcy Park, dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.  The pattern continued.  It seems no matter what the Clintons do, others pay for it.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton withheld support for our mission in Benghazi, Libya, and four men lost their lives.  Susan Rice went out and lied her ass off.  Hillary promised to investigate and tell us what happened.  She never did, “What difference does it make?”  Then came 2016.  The investigation onto Hillary’s private email server is still claiming victims.  Anthony Wiener sure is a pervert, but you think he’d be in prison now if he didn’t get tangled up in the Hillary scandal web?  Huma Abedin’s life will never be the same.  John Podesta resigned from his own company.  Okay, these people worked for Hillary so they may have gotten what they deserved, but it got worse.  I have no sympathy for the Democrat nuts who have lost their minds and claim their lives have been ruined because Hillary lost the election, but it’s because Hillary royally screwed up her campaign and was such a rotten candidate that these nuts are now even more deranged.  Hillary and company now have managed to corrupt the entire government.  As this is written, Andrew McCabe has just been fired from the FBI for lying about the agency’s handling of the Clinton Foundation investigation.  James Comey was fired for his misconduct in the Hillary email scandal.  Others in the FBI and Justice Department are in legal jeopardy over their parts in the Clinton investigations and the Obama Administration efforts to destroy Trump.  All of these things were done to help the Clintons.  More shattered lives are and will be strewn throughout the landscape in the days and weeks to come.  I’m not excusing what these people did, mind you, but keep in mind that the ends they came to all resulted from their too close connection to or approach to the Clintons.  The Clinton’s truly are a modern plague.

Being the shameless political whores they are, it didn’t take Democrats long to capitalize on the Parkland school shootings to call for another round of “sensible” gun control measures.  They don’t have any idea what constitutes a “sensible” gun control measure, but then they are no more interested in taking sensible measures to protect the public than they are interested in ending the DACA immigration issue.  If this seems a bit cynical, keep in mind that the Democrats aren’t outraged by all school shootings, only the ones that support their agenda.  You’ve heard about Parkland morning noon and night.  However, the media has said nothing about the Great Mills High School shooting in Maryland.  That seems strange, as the People’s Republic of Maryland is a blue a State as there is.  It’s not strange.  The Democrats have nothing to gain from the Great Mills incident because an armed guard shot and killed the attacker.  Democrats don’t want armed security at schools.  If they had their way, the only people who would have guns would be the heavily armed bodyguards who protect their asses.  The Parkland incident understandably left scores of students traumatized.  They were in shock, confused, hurting and angry.  That made them vulnerable, and their vulnerability made them the perfect tools to be used for the purposes of the Left.  They displayed them on television at every opportunity.  It was heartbreaking.  Pitiful children pushed in front of microphones to plead that finally it is time for action.  What action?  They don’t know, but they are sure that it’s a “simple” matter.  A leader emerged from the student ranks, self-professed gun control activist David Hogg.  He has demanded immediate gun control, he has demanded that the most popular rifle in America be federally prohibited, that the NRA be regarded as a haven for “child murderers,” that Americans boycott Amazon, FedEx, and the state of Florida, and that Governor Rick Scott take responsibility for the failures of others.  Hogg has demanded that public officials must listen to him.  President Trump invited Hogg to the White House for a “listening session,” but Hogg hung up the phone and refused to go, instead denouncing the President as a coward.  Hogg is a perfect foil for the Left because he checks every left-wing box.  He criticized the federal response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico, made comments in support of funding for wind and solar power, injected himself into Florida’s senatorial election, and suggested that, as a matter of general policy, cops cannot be expected to protect the citizenry if they believe they might be outgunned.  You really can’t blame poor David Hogg for all this, he’s a product of his environment.  According to him, his father worked for the “lack of candor” FBI and his mother works for fake news CNN.  No wonder Democrats like him.  Hogg played a key role in the so-called March for Our Lives in Washington on March 24th.  This was the march advertised as a grass roots outpouring of the righteous indignation of young people.  In truth less than 10% of the marchers were young.  The rest were the usual suspects, dredged up from the “Pussy Hat” women’s march, the SEIU, other unions, and assorted other lefties.  And grass roots my ass.  Assorted Hollywood phonies ponied up $500,000 apiece to rent buses for the “children.”  George Soros did his part to increase the disharmony – it’s his specialty.  Anyhow, I am the only one who perceives the logical inconsistency that the “March for Our Lives” was organized by Panned Parenthood?  David Hogg continues to make demands, and the media continues to sell the false narrative that children, not old enough to vote, should dictate what the law must be to our elected legislators.  Hogg became a media darling, his every utterance splashed across the news.  He called the president a coward, Florida Governor Rick Scott Harry Potter villain Voldemort, and Marco Rubio a murderer.  He sees it as his duty to fix the gun problem himself because, “Our old ass parents don’t know how to use a fucking democracy, so we have to.”  A lovely sentiment, no?  But Mr. Hogg has proven to have a condition which afflicts most bloviating liberals.  He can dish it out, but he can’t take it.  Hogg complained in a tweet that he was not accepted by several colleges.  Fox host Laura Ingraham dared to tweet back, suggesting that Hogg was whining about his college rejections. (which he was)  That’s all she said.  Hogg immediately called for a boycott of Ingraham’s advertisers, and she was roundly denounced for “cyber-bullying.”  Even worse, some advertisers left her show.  Two things.  First, if you consider a simple disagreement or criticism “cyber-bullying,” then Hogg and those like him should either stay out of the public debate or seek help.  Secondly, and more importantly, David Hogg is riding for a big fall if he doesn’t understand that his 15 minutes of fame are about the gun violence issue, and not about him.  So here’s some advice David – political activism is all well and good, and if you want to mobilize like-minded people to your cause, have at it; but understand some things.  First of all, America isn’t a “democracy,” it’s a constitutional republic.  The loudest voices don’t get to dictate policy.  Moreover, you might learn a thing or two from the “old ass parents” you’ve disparaged.  Gun violence is a serious problem that deserves serious attention.  But me and the “old ass” individuals who came before me, understood and understand that America was able to retain its republic through all those years before David Hogg arrived precisely because we didn’t tear up the Constitution and permit the government to destroy individual liberty whenever something bad happened.  Perhaps that’s the difference between children and adults.  And by the way, David, your right to insult those you disagree with comes from the same supreme law of the land that you would tear up in pursuit of “gun control.”  A government that can cancel the Second Amendment can just as easily cancel the First.

Hollywood used to be called Tinsel Town.  I think it should be renamed Ripoff Town.  Hollywood has changed, you see.  It once was the place where dreams were born.  It was a collection of the world’s finest creative talents.  People with expertise in every task necessary for the production of motion pictures were brought in by the movie studios to make movie magic.  The finest actors from the Broadway stage and from  Europe, directors and cinematographers arrived from all over the world.  Musicians were hired to build studio orchestras.  Warner Brothers had an orchestra made up of classically trained musicians, talented enough to play for any big city symphony orchestra.  The Warner Brothers symphony recorded the soundtracks for Warner’s feature pictures, and even for cartoons.  I knew that the Bugs Bunny and other Looneytunes  cartoons contained pieces of famous classical music.  Until recently, I never knew that the full Warner Brothers’ orchestra specially recorded every musical clip featured in every cartoon.  The object was to make every release the very best it could be.  And the writers, oh the writers.  In the golden age of Hollywood, hundreds of pictures were produced.  Far more movies were debuted each year than nowadays.  They had to be.  Most theaters showed double features for one admission.  Creative writers could take a simple idea and come up with a screenplay in sort order.  Many of these pictures were forgettable, but some were masterpieces.  Take 1939 as an example.  These are just a few of the movie releases in that one year:  Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights, The Women, Gunga Din, Young Mr. Lincoln, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Dark Victory, Of Mice and Men, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Roaring Twenties, Dodge City, Union Pacific, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Hound of the Baskervilles, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, The Man in the Iron Mask, Beau Geste, Another Thin Man, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Three Musketeers.  Today we just seem to get remakes and endless sequels.  There seems to be an alarming lack of imagination in a town which currently is dominated by the Disney Company, which made its fortune by employing creative geniuses, whom they named “Imagineers.”  Clearly, the same people who were able to build an audio-animatronic  robot, and make it climb stairs, are unable to find people who have an original idea for a new movie.  I’m not complaining about adaptations of popular books.  Some of them are great.  Gone With the Wind, and The Godfather come to mind.  The Godfather even made the only sequel that was perhaps better than the first.  The trick was that it wasn’t just a ripoff of Godfather I.  It was part of the story from the book that wasn’t covered in the original.  What I’m complaining about are the mindless sequels.  Rocky VI?  Superman whatever?  This, that and the other Batman, until you can’t stand it anymore.  Once Stan Lee is gone, and they’ve ripped off every superhero he created, where will they turn?  Remakes are even worse.  The Dudley Moore movie Arthur is one of the funniest movies ever made.  Why remake it, and who in Hell is Russell Brand?  The In Laws with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin is an absolute masterpiece, and uproarously funny.  “Serpentine!”  It simply could not be any better, so why did Michael Douglas remake it.  His remake wouldn’t be that bad if it stood alone, but compared to the original, what’s the point? Gary Cooper as Mr. Dodds was perfection.  Adam Sandler as Mr. Dodds? Please.  The only reason I can think of for the obsessive repetition in Hollywood is that the denizens of that particular swamp simply lack the ability to come up with a new story.  In point of fact, it seems to me that an original thought and a drink of cold water actually might kill them.  It could be a function of our educational system.  Screenwriters of the golden age were steeped in Western culture.  Today’s screenwriters know only diversity, victimization and the Kardshians.  Too harsh an assessment? Maybe, but when we reward a movie, shouldn’t it be rewarded for being something exciting and new?  Apparently not.  This year’s winner for Best Picture is a case in point.  The Shape of Water was given the Academy Award for Best Picture this year.  It’s a picture about a monster who falls in love with a woman.  It’s been done.  Remember King Kong, feeling up Fay Wray?  The non-human character in The Shape of Water is being held in a water tank.  Ever seen Splash?  Then, and this is the best part, the monster itself also is nothing new.  This is the creature from The Shape of Water –  

Now here’s the 1950’s Creature From the Black Lagoon –

Notice a resemblance?  I rest my case.