Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

I've helped pass and signed 38 Legislative Bills, mostly with no Democratic support, and gotten rid of massive amounts of regulations. Nice!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 23, 2017

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See here for the story. The distance in miles is 2.199.

We don't want your stinkin' people!

This is what passes for journalism at the Washington Post. According to the "reporter," President Trump:

• makes "dubious claims"
• makes "assertions of dubious origin and with no evidence to back them up"
• made an "unsubstantiated claim"
• made an "unfounded claim"
• "claimed . . . with no proof"
• made an "implausible assertion"
• uses "dubious rhetoric"
• "insisted without evidence"

All in one article! Thank God for thesauri! Where was this "reporter" when Barack Obama was lying to the American people about health care and many other subjects? He was not merely making unsupported claims; he was uttering falsehoods with intent to deceive! The Washington Post is a joke and its "reporters" are self-important thugs.

Addendum: Note that the "reporter" isn't claiming that President Trump's assertions are false. She's claiming that he hasn't given grounds, reasons, or evidence for their truth. Two points. First, many of his claims are on Twitter, which, as I understand it, limits tweets to 140 characters. This is barely enough to make an assertion, much less to provide grounds for it. What is he supposed to do? Second, why is it President Trump's job to provide grounds for his assertions? If he asserts that the sky is blue, must he provide grounds? Some assertions are self-evidently true and therefore need no support. Some (most, in fact) are rooted in common knowledge or common sense. I don't recall Barack Obama being challenged to provide grounds for any of his assertions. The double standard is obvious. The journalistic imperative these days is "Get Trump!" There is no longer even a pretense of impartiality, objectivity, balance, or fairness. The American people see what's happening. It's why Trump is far more popular than any reporter.

Paranoid (1970). I watched an hour-long documentary about this album yesterday evening on AXS TV. I loved every second of it.

Here is Conrad Black's latest column.

Here is Scott Adams's blog post about the politics of health care. Adams is correct that the number of people who have health-care coverage is the important consideration. If even one person who now has coverage (under ObamaCare) loses that coverage (under TrumpCare), Republicans (including President Trump) will pay a heavy political price, one that may include electoral defeat in 2018 and beyond. CNN and other networks will find such people and put them on air nightly. They will cry and tell their sad stories. Viewers will conclude that Republicans took their health-care coverage away in order to increase profits for hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and doctors. It will be an ugly spectacle.

You may not like it that this is where we are, but it's where we are. ObamaCare has made the existing situation the default position. Anyone who wishes to alter it has the burden of proving that nobody is worse off. In economic terms, any change must be Pareto superior, meaning that at least one person is better of and no person is worse off.

Here.

Here.

As a bleeding-heart liberal, I am grieved (once again) to see a Republican squeak out a victory over a Democrat. (June 21, 12A, “GOP narrowly hangs on to House seat in Georgia election”)

When it comes to politics in this country, it seems the big-money Republicans are always winning recently. I am beginning to despair and reassess my belief that way more people think like I do than like conservatives do. If it were so, why don’t more liberals win?

There are two possible explanations, in my opinion: Either there actually are more right-leaning voters out there or liberals just don’t make the effort to vote.

I don’t want to give up my belief that there are more liberals than conservatives, but time after time, recently, liberals lose, if only by a couple of points. I’m also beginning to fear that my fellow liberals are stupid, overconfident or just don’t care.

With the majority of African-Americans and Latinos leaning liberal, why can’t we win? Do you vote?

As a cynical optimist, I am befuddled. We must figure out a way to get out the vote.

Timothy Earl Osburn

Parkville

Note from KBJ: Does Timothy Earl Osburn not realize that "bleeding heart" means "a dangerously or foolishly soft-hearted person" (The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide, 1999)? Maybe his people lose elections because they're foolish.