The Patriot Post® · Thank Heavens for Baseball
If I didn’t have baseball for six months of the year, I don’t know how I’d survive. Although that happens to be the way I feel every year, it’s especially true every fourth year when people I probably wouldn’t invite into my home vie to take up residency in the White House.
As you all know by now, I do not like or admire Donald Trump. But I would walk barefoot across burning coals if it would keep Mrs. Clinton out of the Oval Office. We have had crooks, racists, socialists, incompetents and sexual predators, serve as our commander-in-chief. Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, FDR, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have all besmirched the office once held by George Washington. But Hillary Clinton is very likely the greediest, most corrupt, most odious, individual who has ever sought the office, and, heaven help us, will very likely be elected.
What is worse, the people who will vote for her are well-aware of her ethical improprieties. The media has done its best to play down her felonious activities, while highlighting Trump’s failings, still most people are aware that she allowed four Americans to be massacred in Benghazi and then lied about it in order to help Obama get reelected. Most Americans are aware of the dirty tricks that she and her stooges played this campaign season, including paying creeps to initiate violence at Trump’s events. They also know, and apparently don’t care, that she used a private server to conceal multi-million dollar bribes from foreign powers to the Clinton Foundation, even though it meant jeopardizing America’s security secrets.
If I could give Mrs. Clinton the White House but swap our electorate for, say, Israel’s, I’d make the deal in a second.
Speaking of the Clinton Foundation, one of my readers, Dr. Richard Stiso of New Jersey, decided to check out Mrs. Clinton’s claim at the Vegas debate that the Foundation distributes 90% of the funds it takes in to worthwhile charities.
After checking out the Foundation’s Form 990, required by the IRS of all charities, he discovered that in 2013, they had total revenue of $148,889,439 (Line 12) and total grants to charities of $8,865,052 (Line 13). That works out to 5.95%, 84.05% shy of the figure she tossed out. The form also disclosed that the Foundation paid out $29,914,108 in salaries (Line 15) and a whopping $45,719,364 in “other expenses.” Even in a country where a great many charities vie with the Mafia when it comes to corrupt practices, the Clinton Foundation needn’t take a back seat to any of those sanctimonious thieves, up to and including the Humane Society of America.
It does help suggest why the likes of Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Lannie Davis and John Podesta, are so willing, even eager, to defend Mrs. Clinton with their last greedy, lying, breath. Their collective slogan might well be “It Beats Working.”
But it’s not just the inner circle of Clinton stooges who have swapped their souls for a bowl of pottage. Consider Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They have lined up behind Mrs. Clinton despite the fact Sanders knows that she, in cahoots with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the DNC, deep-sixed his primary campaign; and Sen. Warren by now is well-aware that Hillary is so deep into the pocket of Wall Street that the company might as well be known as Goldman Sachs & Clinton. One can only assume that some healthy portion of that $45,719,364 in “other expenses” wound up in the campaign war chests of the Senate’s two most vocal socialists.
I suppose it’s because I never turn on the TV before four or five in the afternoon that until I found out about the part he played in the Trump hot mic scandal, I had never even heard of Billy Bush. Someone could probably be on a morning talk show for 50 years and I might never know about it.
I did hear, of course, that he was fired by NBC. As a rule, I’m opposed to corporate hypocrites — especially those involved in the media — sacrificing those who are no worse than most of their colleagues, in a pathetic attempt to pretend that the network honchos are the least bit concerned with character and ethics. However, I must confess I really didn’t care in this case. In fact, I always feel a little bit better whenever someone named Bush hits a bump in the road. Even better when a bump in the road hits someone named Bush.
Apparently, scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction that can turn carbon dioxide (you know, that stuff formerly known as the gas which makes life on earth possible, until loony Al Gore convinced the world’s pinheads that it is a toxic pollutant) into ethanol, and do it cheaply and efficiently.
If it pans out, Al Gore will have to go back to his basement and come up with another money-making hoax. Don’t be surprised if the mad non-scientist announces that water is a toxic pollutant and that we all need to start guzzling a brand of vitamin-enriched cat urine he plans to begin marketing.
After I recently listed my all-time favorite comedies, I heard from a lot of people. Some couldn’t imagine how I could possibly leave off all of Mel Brooks’ efforts and most of Woody Allen’s. As I wrote at the time, the one thing most people, even the best of friends, can’t agree on is movies. Least of all, comedies.
Some people, apparently those who agreed with my comedy selections, asked if I would post a list of my favorite dramas. I’m happy to. As poet Adam Gordon once wrote: “Life is mostly froth and bubble/Two things stand like stone/Kindness in another’s trouble/Courage in your own.”
So, tossing caution to the wind, here they are in alphabetical order. My rule, as it was with the comedies, is to only list those I have seen more than once, assuring myself that they could stand up to more than a single viewing.
“All About Eve,” “Best Years of Our Lives,” “Die Hard,” “Falling Down,” “Farmer’s Daughter,” “Field of Dreams,” “Force of Evil,” “Fugitive,” “Godfather,” “Hoosiers,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “King’s Speech,” “L.A. Confidential,” “Maltese Falcon,” “Midnight Run,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Nobody’s Fool,” “On the Waterfront,” “Pumpkin Eater,” “Quigley Down Under,” “Remains of the Day,” “Sense & Sensibility,” “Shane,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Sweet Smell of Success,” “Taken,” “Time After Time,” “Untouchables,” “Wild River” and “Witness.”
To save you the trouble, only four people starred in as many as two of the 31 films: Anthony Hopkins, Kevin Costner, Emma Thompson and Marlon Brando. Which is a bit of a surprise to me because my favorite dramatic actors are Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy, Edward G. Robinson, Gene Hackman, Alec Guinness, Jimmy Stewart, Charles Laughton, Michael Caine, Jean Arthur, Colin Firth and Alan Ladd.