Jon Letendre

Trump has created many enterprises. That some will fail is obvious. The way that Little Marco and Ted have avoided commercial bankruptcies was by going to law school and creating nothing new. That's fine, it's not to say they have never done anything productive. But their profession is mostly thwarting enterprise today, instead of fighting for its liberties. (And their profession ALWAYS gets paid their WHOLE tab in bankruptcy payouts. It's just not a winning point against Trump, it reminds his supporters of too many other associations.

Hillary was terrible last night. She failed to blurt out "no" when asked if she lied to Benghazi families. She spoke first of how much sympathy she has for them. She's so disgusting it should be easy, except that it is still 8 months away and the American public has a bad record of succumbing to media droning. Only Trump has proved he can disrupt that. Only Trump has proved he can obtain a pass to use the language required to properly take her apart publicly, week after delicious week, after month after month. Look at Little Rubio this week. "My wife didn't like it." when he got in the gutter with Donald J. Trump, but I am to believe he will do it anyway when an old woman needs telling over and over what she is? Only Trump can confront the enormous forces against turning this country around and away from more and more federal power. Every other candidate will wilt right when it matters, just like "Maybe Trump has secrets in his tax filings" piece-of-shit-mitt.

Now I feel bad about my photoshop/Post-It art with piece-of-shit-mitt and Caitlyn. I used her image as a weapon of insult and should not have. All the insult was intended for mitt the piece of shit. I didn't know Caitlyn was an ideas person. And taking loads of hate for it. http://thefederalist.com/2016/03/07/backlash-over-caitlyn-jenners-cruz-support-proves-leftists-are-the-real-bigots/ “Number 1, if we don’t have a country, we don’t have trans issues,” Jenner said. “We need jobs. We need a vibrant economy. I want every trans person to have a job. With $19 trillion in debt and it keeps going up, we’re spending money we don’t have. Eventually, it’s going to end. And I don’t want to see that. Socialism did not build this country. Capitalism did. Free enterprise. The people built it. And they need to be given the opportunity to build it back up.”

The sequence, I think, is: hit the Quote button, start to reply, then later decide not to reply at all, after all. refresh the page. hit another quote button, see that comment box still contains the unwanted from above and it can't be deleted, and I can't find a way to start over with a fresh, empty, comment box.

How do I clear my comment box? Can't seem to get rid of "mer jet said" box. Sorry. That's the spirit, Michael! Trump is going to kick in the door and piss in the punch bowl. That's why piece-of-shit-mitt is bringing more to this battle than he ever did to Obama. So much more at stake. In this battle their whole thing is at stake, their whole game. Whereas a Dem admin. just means four years of being second in line at the trough. Trump means no more trough.

Rubio will drop out before the 15th to prevent an unforgettable and career-ending demonstration by Trump in Florida of how useless * Liitle Marco really is. * Except in Minnesota and Puerto Rico.

Hi Ellen, Sorry about my post, what a mess. I think I hit too many quote buttons. I only meant to post my final part, in response to turkey... I was not trying to respond to you. Nice to see you again, though. Hi. I do want for Trump to get the nomination. And I also think that a different sequence of events would finish the lock the establishments from both parties have and jointly maintain even faster and more thoroughly than Trump's nomination and election, namely, if the American people were to perceive that Trump (and Bernie) won and had it taken away. So I am also hoping for that outcome.

The benefits have been explained over and over, for generations. Clearly, 'splainin' it well hasn't cut it. Trump doesn't just explain, he shows, with a lifetime of self-initiated action, personal dynamism and vast success. Almost as good as the greatest corporate titans of America, the Fortune 500, as you have so helpfully pointed out. Second rate in the political realm, right. That's what I see in the results, too. As does Jeb, Ben, Little Marco... Explaining the benefits of capitalism is for later, after Trump has thoroughly humiliated the remainder of the little knats still buzzing around him, later when it is him versus Bernie or Hillary. Examine again the Wiki Michael shared above on the Trump organization. And it won't be so much explaining as showing his lifetime of ambitious, dynamic, self-initiated action.

Maybe he wouldn't. But our resilient system doesn't rely upon any Presidential understanding of constitutional limits for the enforcement of constitutional limits, that's funny anyway and would never work. Instead, other branches operate to enforce the limits, by making full use of their respective powers. Granted, both political parties everywhere, and judges, the entire political class, has been slack lately, but soon they will be bright and energetic, and the checks and balances suddenly will be back in operation. Both parties will be focused on defeating him, the way things are going, instead of neither, like the last seven years.

I soooo hope you are right.

I hope you are right, Marc. I hope it is taken away. That will bring all the worthless, crony shits to disaster even faster than his nomination and election would have. Suicide is sad, but this one will be fun to watch. The focus on one man, and the fantasy that their problems are solved once his spell on their people is over, is really quite entertaining.

Mitt Romney will share his thoughts on the nomination this evening. In other news, Jimmy Carter's edgy new book, A Time To Win: How to Manage a Kickass Special Op, is coming out Saturday. And I know we've all breathlessly awaited Kaitlyn Jenner's inspirational HBO special, No More Con Man, coming Sunday, 7pm EST.

Impeccable timing, though, with the normalization of relations with a murderous communist dictatorship immediately following the successful (so far) challenge to the exercise of the first amendment, in America, by another murderous, communist dictatorship. This, and calls by Hillary to have empathy for, say, the Taliban, who recently intentionally targeted many dozens of innocent children for murder, and I think I am justified - to paraphrase the great and dearly-missed Nathaniel Branden - in believing that the whole world has lost its mind.

In Bob's defense, the very first 13 words, the majority of the statement (57% of the words,)... "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00..." Perhaps the rest of the test reliably captures intuitive vs. analytical modes, but this question is sensitive mostly to things like insufficient scepticism (by which I mean non-trusting,) over-confidence, and rushing. Myself, I went to question two at the point quoted above. When I went back to one, I saw the latter part was: "How much does the ball cost?" It is profoundly misleading, so it tests scepticism, not preference for intuition.

Jon, Amen. Not many are saying this out in the mainstream. And of those who do say it, not many are listening. Michael Hi Michael. You're right. Their line is that since we're beholden to these pigs who "enjoy monopoly status," they must be "more robustly regulated, to ensure they serve the public interest." The truth is those are gov't created pigs. And by ending the monopolies, I don't mean ending the Comcasts, just their exclusive status. It just means that thousands of local gov'ts stop threatening people with fines and imprisonment for building things. How could things not start getting better right away? For some twisted reason, the above is actually controversial, usually treated like "some hair-brained, radical free market, right-wing madness."

Throttling vs. fee for fast is so much detail making no difference. The issue is private property and the right to decide the terms of use of property. The cure to the ills of cable monopoly is to end the gov'ts-granted monopolies, not to use their unjust existence to justify more of the same. It's quite ok to change the model. Just because a good or service has long been given commodity treatment doesn't mean anyone has any ongoing right to such treatment. I am used to a flat-rate ski ticket for unlimited resort access, for example, but there is nothing special about this tradition vs. some other -- a resort could charge per lift, or sell a lower-priced ticket that excludes certain premium trails. Either it's their property and therefore their decision based on their best business interests, or it isn't.

"network design paradigm" makes it sound clean. It's a federal ban on fees for fast.

Net neutrality is a grotesque violation of property rights. No one, not one customer on the whole planet, has a right to the movement of a single electron across the infrastructure someone else built at cost of many billions of dollars. We may as well ban higher FedEx rates for air vs truck. Grotesque and retrogressive.

In conversations with people over the years, with people who seemed otherwise in pretty good control of themselves, I've had their spittle land on my face, lips, and even eyeball. That's clinical evidence enough for me.

Sometimes back on the old solo/rebirth, after an especially spirited dialogue between myself and Valliant or his lapdog, Barbara would send an email thanking me for defending her book. Not, "for defending me." It was about the truth to me, and even in a private email, it was about the truth to her, too. She wasn't the only one, of course, but I learned from her to make it count today. She wrote something to effect of, 'make every day count, now, while time is flowing at its normal rate. Because when you get to my age every time you turn around you are eating breakfast again.' Good-bye Barbara. You will be missed.

Cutest about the video is the presentation of the distribution which 92% of Americans regard as "fair." Using the provided figures, 311 million Americans and $54 Trillion of wealth, a flat ("socialist" in the video) distribution gives each American about $180,000. The "fair" distribution, which 92% of Americans support, cuts the wealth of the first two quintiles in half, to about $90,000. Well, 311 million Americans includes every man, woman, and also every infant, toddler, elementary, middle and high schooler. Spending below one's means and investing take time—how much wealth should we expect five year olds to have? Just look at the chart to find 92% of American's feeling on the matter: He should be worth about $90,000. The top thing to keep in mind about these wealth and income stats is that they tell us nothing at all about the standard of living of the individuals. Maintaining zero wealth is really quite easy, and is not made any less easy by high income. All one must do is spend about all of one's income as one goes. Poverty statistics are another one to look out for. "Poverty" and "poor" are precisely defined by sociologists, yet always presented as meaning "shitty life we should wish upon no one." In fact, they mean "getting an income that is half or less than the national median." In 2213 there will be people with only one fusion reactor in their basement, only one star-hopper in their port, only one automatic hair-bun-tying 'bot, all because their income is 49% of the national 2213 median. It's already sad, isn't it?

Hi Michael, I believe you when you say you saw some big money in Brazil "sitting around trying to stay under the radar." I don't know why they hid their wealth instead of openly investing it. Confiscatory, redistributive taxation? Funds came from "illegal" timber? But, I was talking about a free market. Do you believe that in a free market meaningful sums of accumulated capital would stay buried, hidden, idled—rather than gainfully deployed? Why?

The video is about static wealth, not income or living standard. This means there are a lot of people way over on the left, on the "poor" side of the chart, who we're supposed to feel sorry for, who have extremely high income. They are on the left of side of the chart because they spend about or above 100% of their income, so they accumulate little or no wealth. It is perfectly fine that a lot of people are over there. Fairness does not require that this or that quintile have any wealth at all. Likewise, there are people on the right side of the chart who inherited and work a farm and live much more modestly than some of the clowns on the left side of the chart previously mentioned. Today's wealth distribution may well be perfectly fair. Before saying it is spread too much to the right side of the chart, or not enough to the right side, I would first need to know what a fair distribution is. Abstractly, that would be whatever distribution arises in a free market. But we don't have a free market. We do have some crony capitalism, which argues for "too much to the right side." But we also have regulations and taxes, which suggest "not enough to the right side." My guess is that a free market would yield a skewing of wealth to the right side of the chart about comparable to what we see today, probably more so. Capital accumulation is good. When one person has $311 million of assets, he is unable to burn through a significant share, so the vast majority of it stays invested and contributes to the expansion of capital spending with resultant increases in productivity and living standards. If that $311,000,000 were $1 in every American's pocket tomorrow morning, you would see an expansion of 7-Eleven's lottery ticket sales.