An unemployed Romanian cab driver has shaped American political history. Marcel Lazar Level would guess email passwords of prominent people. He hacked into Sidney Blumenthal and exposed Hillary’s private email server. This became a a major talking point for Republicans, myself included. He also hacked local Romanian officials. For that he went to jail in January 2014. In September of 2016 he was sentenced to 52 months in this country. Yes, the Romanians gave him to us. Yes we had on of the most significant hackers in U.S. politics in custody. We then gave him back?

The story was he was just a front for Guccifer 2.0 the Russian connection. I remain unconvinced. Romanian bureaucrats being bureaucrats forwarded the found information up the ladder, and ultimately to Russia. Who then crafted Guccifer 2.0 to carry on with the hacking initiated by the real and original Guccifer.

Information publicly released was limited and damming. I have wondered what other systems were infiltrated by the professionals.

I would expect that Kim Jong-un will not make it through the year. His murderous actions are becoming more and more bazaar. He has taken his murderous actions outside the country when he killed his half brother. In addition he is threatening other nations, including ours with nuclear annihilation.

It will be over before we even know that it started. An amazingly short and successful war it will be. The duration will be measured in double digit hours. Of course after we break North Korea, we will own it. We will have to feed the starving masses. Then bring them up to a reasonable state of civilization.

The North Koreans will be eternally grateful for the food, the freedom they will find confusing. In gratitude they will erect the largest statue in the world. It will be of our own dear leader. It is what they do. They make big grand statuary. It will be big league beautiful. Everyone will be happy.

My first political memory was the death of JFK. At a tender young age I was actually quite distraught that our country had no leader. I was quite relieved to find out that we had a vice president that could take the place of the president.

LBJ brought us the Vietnam War and anti-war protest. I was unaware at the time of the great society social programs. There also some talk about how J. Edgar Hoover ran the government.

Nixon brought ping pong diplomacy with China, probably the most dramatic presidential action in my lifetime. He also extracted us from Vietnam. Unfortunately Watergate and a sixteen minute gap ended his career.

Gerald Ford, the accidental president came up with the acronym WIN, for whip inflation now. Life was actually not to bad under Ford.

I actually voted for the Nuclear Physicist and Peanut Farmer. What could be better? Inflation increased and I couldn’t find a job. Additionally there were many protests against nuclear power. So I ate lots of peanuts.

I was somewhat dismayed when an actor become president. Surprisingly I got a job and bought a new truck. It was the beginning of the best times in my life.

I shook the hand of President Bush, I thought he was a fine diplomat, and did an amazing job in the first gulf war. Unfortunately after saying read my lips he negotiated with the Democrats and raised taxes. I believe that would be the last time the two political parties would negotiate.

Bill Clinton won with “It’s the economy stupid” wIth the emphasis on stupid. Politics was now a sport of browbeating.

Unsurprisingly the public retreated from the politics of personal destruction and embraced another Bush. In a surprising and most likely last agreement between the two parties, they agreed that Saddam had the bomb. It was a ruse and plan to put another Clinton into the presidency.

Obama successfully played the hope and change card while coopting the Clinton agenda and methods. His unorthodox methods probably destroyed the party.

Now with a choice of another Bush or Clinton, the public played the Trump card.

Those bloody Trumpkins are always causing trouble. They have mucked up a sane and sound political process. Those racist, hateful and even fascist, Trumpkins are just a bunch of deplorables, uninterested in sane political dialog.

He only problem with the above statement is that when I watch the news, is the bloody Trumpkins. It is only the people that support President Trump that are bloodied. Attacked at their own events by unknown assailants. It has become quite routine to see Trump supporters bloodied. The liberal press, and media celebrates the resistance. A resistance that attacks individual liberty of the small segment of the population that supports the president.

Yes it is a revolution, a war of words. Unable to accept any views other than their own, the Democrats have turned to hate, it the first word they use. That hate has turned into bloodshed. I find the most amazing thing is, there is no reciprocation. President Trump himself has said that the Democrats are entitled to their point of view. While the president may not display a Gandhi sense of passive resistance, his supporters do. Finding a bloodied liberal is a very hard thing to do.

The restraint of the Trumpkins is a amazing thing. Proud to be one.

Once upon a time STP would sponsor very fast and innovative Indy race cars. STP stood for “Specially Treated Petroleum” and was basically a long molecular chained oil thickening agent for older and worn out cars. Of course us rural kids at the time thought it stood for “Super Tractor Power”.

Nowadays you cannot find a small tractor that is manufactured in the USA. Rural America was built with tractors designed built and manufactured in the good old USA. Sure the largest corporate tractors are built here, but not everybody is a corporate farmer. They are still many rural homesteads in America. Unable to find a suitable domestically produced tractor, these people voted for Donald Trump.

If the CBO is correct the healthcare premiums for these same rural Americans would go up by $10,000 a year. Obviously this is a no go. Unable to afford any sort of tractor, let alone a USA tractor, we will vote the incumbents out. We may also grab our pitchforks.

We spend more on healthcare than any other country. Hire a couple of Cuban doctors and figure out how to reduce costs. Let the Unions negotiate the costs, then make them responsible for universal care. They are essentially paying for it anyway because the are overcharged to make up the deficit of the uninsured.

Rural America needs more small tractors, not more healthcare costs.

 

I haven’t written much about Wall Street. So I will repeat a few words that I have written before. Wall street makes some of their money by buying low and selling high. Money made this way is taxed at a lesser rate then the income of people that labor for a living. Maybe it is taxed at a lesser rate than because the people that make that money do not work as hard. I believe that is unfair. Because other working people put the worth into the value, their taxes should be reduced to a lesser rate than the capital gains tax that of the people who sit on appreciating assets.

The other way Wall Street makes their money is more underhanded. Market manipulation, legal manipulation enabled by friendly politicians, and downright unethical diversions.

I fully expect President Trump to do something better, he is supposed to know the smart people.

 

Some time ago I read that Donald Trump wanted to build a building in Moscow. He was not able to do so because he was unable to navigate through the labyrinth of Russian cronyism. He had even held a beauty contest to impress the Russians. A building in Moscow would have been a prize to Donald Trump because he was attempting to build a world wide brand. Donald Trump believed Russia is a world player.

With all the attempts to link President Trump to Russia, just remember that there were many more links to Russia with the Clintons. More importantly, any links to Russia by the Clintons were absolutely overshadowed by the links to the Saudis and other Arab nations to the Clintons.

Funny, the black clad resistance fighters of the left remind me of the secretive Russian provocateurs. Who are the Russians really supporting.

Last Sunday President Trump made what may have been his most infamous tweet yet. President Obama had bugged Trump Tower during the campaign. My first reaction was mythbusters like analysis of probable, but impossible to prove because of plausible deniability.

With extraordinary timing a couple of days later there is a massive CIA leak. Not much of really new information in the leak, it was just a reaffirmation that if the government wants surveillance, they have it. I must conclude that if the president wants to see the surveillance, he, or she, can.

Then a thought crossed my mind. For his own security, the president himself must be under continuous surveillance. I wonder if that surveillance would then be available to the next president.

Of course it would be very illegal to release any such surveillance if it were to exist. Back to plausible deniability.

Speaking about the few questions I have been asked about my support for Candidate Trump. After the election I was asked if I was to get a job in the new government. My answer has been Trump only hires winners. Me I am just average. I make other people look good.

That’s the way it should be. Trump should hire the best he can. He said that part of the problem with this country was political hacks mucking things up. He should get the right people and fire the rest. That is my view.

I have spent most of my life in manufacturing. I like tractors cars and planes. I like to promote electric cars and planes. I am happy Donald Trump gets along with Elon Musk. I would like to see a place in this world for small planes. Politics gives me a small platform to say these things. I benchmark my simple writing to other writers that I read, and at best I am average. However in manufacturing, I am very very good.

As I have mentioned before, I am a prime example of the demographic Trump supporter. They are very much underrepresented in the media. My personal thought is there are other supporters that write, but like myself they are censored.

I like to figure out how machines work, and explain them. With this blog I am dabbling in the view that politics is a machine. That and the human emotion of the loss of a dear friend.

Of course I have a job, with health insurance, and it’s not bad. Life is actually pretty good. But deep down, I would like to move around more.

How do you provide increasing government benefits with a shrinking workforce? You tax the people who work twice. Let me explain how this happens during tax time.

Back when I had a good job with good benefits, I put ten percent of my income into a 401k. Figuring that I would be working for a long time I put forty percent of the savings into tax deferred savings, the other sixty percent I paid taxes on.

My logic was to pay the taxes then and get it over with. Now that I am making less, and of age to collect, I took a disbursement. Unfortunately I had to pay taxes on the whole amount. It used to be that a 1099-R would record the the ratio of pretax and post tax savings were dispersed. Two years ago the government removed that record from the 1099-R.

To avoid having to pay taxes twice, I would essentially have to have all the records of my investments and sue the government. Of course I am still working, so I do not have the time, or money, or all the records to use the government.

The is the second time that I am not happy with the IRS. I am involved with a very small non profit, six years ago the IRS made many unnecessary demands for documentation with dire threats of incarceration. A complete waste of my time. I was not impressed.

Taxed twice for working, and trying to plan ahead. Not impressed at all.