Because those librarians are such jocks.

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Robert Morin, a dedicated librarian, evidently loved his Alma Mater and employer so much that he gave them everything he owned on his death. It all went to fund scholarships and the needs of the library. Right?

Well…….

But let me just reiterate this. A librarian donated $4 million to his alma mater. $100,000 is being given to the library. $1 million is being used to buy A SCOREBOARD.

Source: How The University Of New Hampshire Chose To Waste An Alum’s $4m Gift

I’m sure they will mount this scoreboard so that it can be viewed from the library.

Hat tip to Dan.

This is called “making shit up.”

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Reince Priebus tells Hillary Clinton in a tweet that she needs to smile more. He’s rightfully chastised for the remark but not for the reason he should have been. Evidently telling a woman to smile is misogynistic. No, it was condescending but not misogynistic.

However, condescending doesn’t seem to be bad enough so Noor Al-Sibai makes up some supposedly world known rule to support her claim of misogyny.

When men tell us to smile, they are telling us to soften, to be pleasant, to make ourselves a little less threatening. Basically, they are telling us to give up our power to make them more comfortable —

Source: Telling Hillary Clinton To Smile More Is As Anti-Feminist As It Gets | Bustle

This is bullshit! Women get their power from a scowling facial expression? No! Their power comes from their assertiveness, wisdom and knowledge. Nikki Haley is a powerful woman who smiles. Angela Merkel is a powerful woman who mostly smiles. Power does not come from any expression, it comes from inside. If a woman loses her power by smiling she never really had it to begin with.

Federal, State or Local?

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I’m curious and I’d really like some feed back from you. We often hear people talking about government should do this, or government should not do that. But we have at least three layers of government; federal, state, and local. What I want from you is a list of services that only the federal government should provide, a list of what only state government should supply and a list of what only local government should supply. There are also areas where all three of these layers of government coördinate activities, what should these be?

Driverless Cars Within Five Years?

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There is driving and then there is driving. I’m not a huge fan of driving myself to work or to the store or even the trips back and forth from Lawrenceville to Chattanooga to see family. If I had a driver to take care of those tasks for me I’d be happy as I can be.

However, I do driving when I’m just doing it for the trip. I love nothing better than driving through the mountains or taking a trip down the coast. I like driving when I’m taking country roads through small towns. There is something satisfying to driving when the destination is the least important part of the trip.

So I’m very enthused about the prospect of self driving cars but then this morning I read:

“That means there’s going to be no steering wheel. There’s going to be no gas pedal. There’s going to be no brake pedal,’’ he said. “If someone had told you 10 years ago, or even five years ago, that the C.E.O. of a major automaker American car company is going to be announcing the mass production of fully autonomous vehicles, they would have been called crazy or nuts or both.”

Source: Ford Promises Fleets of Driverless Cars Within Five Years – The New York Times

I read that and then I think of the ’87 Ford Bronco II that is currently my daily driver and it makes me wonder. Are we looking at the end of driving ourselves? For those daily trips I’m all excited about that but will the driverless cars force us to give up our road trips where driving is the main purpose of the trip? Can the two modes of driving co-exist?

Young voters prefer Johnson

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The millennials are close to being as large of a population as the baby boomers and as we baby boomers continue to age and die out they will be the predominate demographic.  They will change the political landscape in the very near future.

Johnson wins 35 percent of young voters, Democrat Clinton comes in second at 30 percent, Green Party candidate Jill Stein gets 14 percent, and Trump only receives 12 percent.

Source: Here’s how much young voters like Gary Johnson more than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – Rare

Now if we could just persuade them to vote in November.

Even The New York Times is taking Gov. Gary Johnson seriously this time.

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Glancing through the news this morning on Google and I noticed this article by The New York Times. While they aren’t giving Johnson any chance of becoming our next president they are giving him attention, mostly as a spoiler but for whom?

Spoiler or not the fact that he got this attention from the NYT speaks volumes for him. People reading the article who don’t know Johnson will likely give him a closer look and with this article pollsters are more likely to include him in their poll questions.

That last point is important. If he isn’t being asked about in the polls he can’t place in the polls. If he doesn’t place at 15% in the polls before the presidential debates he won’t be in them.

Mr. Johnson is at roughly 10 percent in recent polls, well above where he was in 2012. The question, of course, is whether it will have any impact.

Source: Can Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Nominee, Swing the Election? – The New York Times

So the NYT says he is at 10%, which is much better than the 8% that a friend of mine states but not as good as the 13% that Johnson claims after scoring that percentage in a CNN/ORC poll. He needs to move to 15% in several polls before the debates in September.

This is important for exposure and not just any exposure, he needs to be compared to both Trump and Clinton and seen as their peer in order to be taken seriously enough to be significant in the presidential race. Hopefully this article will be the first step to that.

The death of humor.

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Donald Trump makes a joke, a surprisingly good joke, at the expense of the DNC and their nominee, Hillary Clinton. I immediately recognized his comment as humor. The DNC is claiming that Russia hacked their email server to advance Trump and Hillary has 30,000 missing emails which has been in the news lately.

So why does Trump have to explain his joke to the Democrats?

“Of course I’m being sarcastic,” Trump said in a Fox News interview that aired the day after his comments sparked a national furor. “You have 33,000 emails deleted, and the real problem is what was said on the emails from the Democratic National Convention.”

Source: Donald Trump: Russia hacking comments were ‘sarcastic’ – CNNPolitics.com

I don’t care much for Trump. He says a lot of stupid things that he’s serious about so there should be no lack of fodder for the Democrats to criticize so why do they show their lack of a sense of humor by attacking his joke? This only makes the Democrats criticizing him on this look bad.

Clinton is no criminal, just extremely careless.

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FBI Director, James Comey, has declared it, Clinton isn’t a criminal, just extremely careless.

The FBI recommended Tuesday that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should not face criminal charges over her use of private e-mail as secretary of state, even though she and aides were “extremely careless” in handling classified information.

Source: FBI: Clinton faces no charges over e-mail, but acted ‘carelessly’

I’m not sure which is worse for a presidential candidate, being a criminal or being careless.

Happy Birthday!

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Happy Birthday, United States of America. You don’t look bad for being 240 years old. Okay, you are a little crochety but your heart seems to still be in the right place. You are a country founded on the idea that government is there to serve the people and not the other way around.

For the most part you’ve lived up to that idea. Oh, you had the rocky start of not really understanding that the idea of all men are created equal as being ALL men but you worked that out, eventually. You also had trouble understanding that the term “men” when used in an all encompassing manner is gender neutral. You’ve figured that out too.

And while there are still those trying their best to use you to shut out contrary opinions you still are pretty much siding with intellectual freedom, including freedom of religion.

Now if we could just get you to understand that economic freedom needs to be a part of the mixture.

Why This Sanders Supporter is Now Supporting The Libertarian

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Most of you know that I have been a Bernie Sanders supporter. Most of you didn’t know I was also a John Kasich and Gary Johnson supporter. We have been in the primary season where we look at the crop of candidates among all parties and develop our list of who we would like to see run against each other for the presidency.

While we can only vote in one party’s primary that doesn’t prevent us from favoring candidates in the other parties to win that party’s nomination. Some will favor the weakest candidate in the opposing parties. I favor whoever I think would be the best president in each party.

Had Bernie Sanders won the Democratic nomination I was ready to support him all the way to the White House. I would have supported John Kasich had Bernie Sanders lost but he won. Neither happened so I’m supporting Gov. Gary Johnson.

I know it is hard for some of you to understand how I could go from supporting a democratic socialist to supporting a libertarian but aside from economics they are really very similar. Both support civil liberties, both support civil rights, both support reproduction rights, both support gun rights and both support staying out of wars, including deploying our military to places we have no business deploying and the so-called war on drugs. Both also support reasonable and compassionate immigration policies. All of that is important to me.

Economics? We have proof that both democratic socialism and capitalism work and they also work in mixed systems. Sanders wanted to see free college. Johnson wants to see an end to government backed student loans. Both plans will lower the cost of education to the students and drastically reduce student debt on graduation.

Sanders wants to see free medical care paid for by the government. Johnson wants to see less regulation on insurance companies to allow them to offer policies at lower cost with higher coverage which will allow more people to be insured.

This year, 2016, I have racked up around $100,000 in medical care. I’m insured and my out of pocket cost was $4,000. While free health care would have been great so was having insurance. I don’t care which system we use as long as it goes toward reducing money coming out of my pocket.

I love the idea of a lower tax burden on me but if I’m going to pay taxes I want it to be for services to me and others in the middle and lower classes. I don’t want my tax dollars going to bail out huge banks, oil companies or any other large corporation. Both Johnson and Sanders address that concern I have from different but workable directions.

Economics? There are numerous ways to level the economic playing field and I’m not really concerned with how we get to a fairer economic system as long as we get there. I am concerned about civil liberties just as Sanders and Johnson have both shown to be as concerned with as me.

Check out both Gary Johnson and his running mate, Bill Weld. I think if your concerns are with civil liberties you will like what they are saying. They are both incredibly experienced in successfully administering government.

Handing Trump The Election

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I know a lot of people who are scared to death of a Trump presidency and who think Sanders should bow out of the race before the convention. Many wanted him to bow out before the California primaries. I suspect a few of these people just didn’t want the competition for Clinton or think that Sanders is damaging Clinton’s campaign to the point that Trump will win.

To that last point as long as Bernie isn’t lying about Hillary he’s not the one damaging her campaign. She is.

But there is a very good reason for Sanders to stay in the race until the convention. As T.A. Frank points out in this Vanity Fair article:

Every increase in delegates gives Bernie a stronger claim to being heard and appeased when it comes to what happens at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. He has already been granted the privilege of selecting five of the 15 members on the national convention drafting committee (not that it’s mollifying anyone at the moment).

So damaging Clinton or not Sanders needs to stay in until the convention or his “revolution” is still-born. And whether or not Sanders supporters turn their support to Clinton should Sanders lose the nomination isn’t something that is Sanders’ responsibility, it’s Clinton’s. No one is going to support someone they feel is unsupportable and many Sanders supports see Clinton as unsupportable.

Frank continues to point out:

This has created a curious state of play in which more centrist Hillary supporters seem to fear Trump a good deal more than the more leftist Bernie supporters do. Some of them probably feel like Susan Sarandon—that the status quo is so unacceptable that a Trump blowup has its merits. Others just resent having Trump held over the head like a stick, threatening to beat them into pro-Clinton solidarity.

Don’t assume that just because you see Clinton as a far less evil than Trump that Sanders supporters feel the same way. Heck, I don’t feel that way and if those two are the only choice I have no reason to vote because between the two, I don’t care!

Clinton predicted to beat Trump…because of economics

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It’s probably right but I don’t think for the reason they think.

The reason a Democrat will win isn’t about polling or personalities, it’s about economics, says Moody’s. The economy is the top issue in just about every election. When the economy is doing well, the party currently in office usually wins again. When the economy is tanking, Americans vote for change.

Source: Clinton predicted to beat Trump…because of economics | Q13 FOX News

The economy is doing very well but the American middle class isn’t. It doesn’t matter how well our economy is doing in reality when the people can be convinced that it is awful.