I’m the first to acknowledge that when I conduct one of my infrequent polls, there is nothing even slightly scientific about it. After all, I’m not seeking a cross-section of voters based on age, race, job or profession, income, religion or any of the other factors that the folks at Gallop and Pew put such store by.

On the other hand, I do have readers all over the country and I suspect that 99% of them are Republicans and that 100% of the 99% actually vote on Election Day. So they shouldn’t be too casually dismissed, even if I’m not licensed to practice.

Having said all that, I was shocked by the results. Donald Trump may be running away with the race, the way all the other polls are suggesting, but if my poll indicates anything it’s that he should contact NBC and find out if he can return to “The Apprentice.”

Because I thump Trump a lot, my wife thinks people assume I hate him. I don’t. It’s just that he appears to be at the head of the pack and I happen to think the GOP can do better. But they can also do worse, as they’ve proven in the past. And certainly if Trump garners the nomination and faces Mrs. Clinton in November, I will vote for him as many times as I can.

There were three components to my poll. First, there were my subscribers. Then, because both WorldNetDaily and the Patriot Post ran the article, I have returns from their readers.

In the first group, Ted Cruz received 71 votes; Donald Trump received 26; and Marco Rubio, 20. Among the others, Christie got 11; Carly Fiorina and Jeb Bush tied with 4; Carson got 3; Rand Paul 2; and Mike Huckabee got just 1.

In other words, of 142 votes cast, Cruz received exactly half of them!

When it came to the Patriot Post, the vote was even more lopsided. Of the 108 votes cast, Cruz received 82; Rubio, 10; Trump, 7; Rand Paul, 4; Carson & Fiorina, 2; Santorum, 1.

With WorldNetDaily, only two candidates collected votes. Cruz got 15 of them, Trump just 6.

When you add them all up, 271 votes were cast, with Cruz receiving 168, Trump 39, Rubio 30, the entire rest of the field, 34.

So if Cruz winds up being our standard bearer, remember, you read it here first.

The former senator and governor of Arkansas, Dale Bumpers just passed away at the age of 90. Being a liberal, he was a political ally of the Clintons. But in his diary, he wrote: “The Clintons are the most manic obsessive people I have ever known, and perhaps even the most insensitive to everybody else’s feelings. Everything centers around them and their ambitions.”

About Bill, he wrote: “I doubt if I’ve ever known anybody as blatantly ambitious for political office, but who simply doesn’t have the judgment or character to deal with it.”

Even when it came to defending Clinton during the impeachment hearings, Bumpers called Clinton’s conduct “indefensible, outrageous, unforgiveable and shameless.” He simply didn’t think any of that rose to the level of an impeachable offense.

I’d hate to think that even my enemies would say such things about me, let alone a friend. And yet, millions of Americans continue to admire Bill Clinton.

It suggests to me that electing Obama to a second term wasn’t a fluke, after all. It appears that so far as millions of Americans are concerned, Martin Luther King’s hope that people would one day be judged by their character and not the color of their skin, or their folksy good old boy image, for that matter, is as unlikely as peace breaking out in the Middle East.

As a line that’s gone viral on the Internet puts it: How is it you need a background check to own a gun, but not to run a country?

In other words, how is it that even after all this time, Barack Obama has been allowed to keep so many personal documents under lock and key? And why is it that none of the trained monkeys who comprise the White House press corps ever put the question to Obama or his personal flunkey, Josh Earnest?

Another question that bears asking is how an executive order differs from a dictator’s edict. If you take a civics class, you are told that there are three equal branches of government: the executive, the judicial and the legislative. But if the executive chooses to tip the balance by going around congress and using his pen and his phone to change legislation dealing with immigration, drug laws or Guantanamo, there is nothing anyone can do about it except wait for someone with what the justices on the Supreme Court consider standing to bring it before them.

So far as I’m concerned, any American citizen who is outraged by a president behaving like a tinhorn despot should qualify.

Speaking of which, the Chief Justice is paid $258,100-a-year, the other eight justices are paid $246,800. (And what’s with those numbers? Wouldn’t you think they’d round it off to the nearest thousand?) In any case, you would assume that for that much money, you could get a decent year’s work out of them. But between the end of June and the beginning of October, they’ve all gone fishing.

And even when they come back, they are unlikely to do anything about a commander-in-chief who holds the Constitution in rather low regard because, in his own words, it failed to deal with the redistribution of wealth.

A while back, a man became intrigued by the notion of beauty and decided to find out if its perception was constant around the world. He conducted interviews in 17 different countries and found that the color blue was favored by people in nearly every country. He also discovered that when it came to paintings, most people liked landscapes. But not just any old landscape, but those that had meadows, a body of water and trees that had low forks in them, indicating they’d be easy to climb. They also liked to see a path that led off the canvas, beckoning the viewer to take a walk.

What he found most fascinating was that this scene was the favorite even for those who lived in arid or mountainous countries where such scenes would be considered strange and even exotic.

He also found that Americans like to see historical people and wild animals in their pictures. He concluded that a painting of the meadow that included a hippopotamus and had George Washington climbing a tree would be very popular.

I may not know art, but I’d sure prefer to see that painting to, say, the Mona Lisa.

I can’t tell you how many times people have sent me translated portions of the Koran. They want to convince me that Islam is a terrible religion. Believe me, I don’t need convincing. Actually, I don’t really care what their holy book says. Ancient texts are always open to interpretation. The important thing is that I know what they believe by their actions and their inactions.

These are people who think a cartoon provides a suitable motive for mass murder. They think that if you disdain Islam in favor of a different religion or even a different form of Islam, you deserve to be butchered or raped or burned alive. They believe women are not wholly human and deserve to be treated like chattel.

Their actions are horrific, but there are also their inactions to be considered. Although you will occasionally see a Muslim on TV calling for a reformation, pretending that after 1,400 years it might be right around the corner, but when have you ever seen the so-called moderates marching in the streets and calling for an end to the madness? I’m not even talking about the streets of Mecca or Medina or Baghdad. I’m talking about Dearborn, Michigan, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

You hear American Muslims whine about being profiled, but you never hear their collective voices raised in condemnation of the atrocities committed in the name of Allah. Aside from those few well-dressed, well-spoken, Muslims that Fox occasionally invites on to convince us that not all Muslims are blood-thirsty perverts, you rarely hear them acknowledging that as Americans, they owe their allegiance to the Constitution, not to Sharia law.

A great many people feel they command the moral high ground when they point out that not every Muslim has sworn to kill the infidels, but the point they’re missing is that every murderous cuckoo who has vowed to kill the infidels is a Muslim. And judging by their deafening silence, I have no reason to think there is division in their ranks.

Novelist E.M. Forster observed “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

Wise words whose message, you may recall, was once encapsulated in a great movie known as “It’s a Wonderful Life.”