According to the mainstream media, the president is evidently not supposed to send out funny tweets. I guess President Donald John Trump didn’t get the memo because the tweet he sent out of Trump pounding a person with a CNN logo for a head is funny.

The mainstream media didn’t see it as humorous and claim that it promotes violence – like the network shows where people get beat-up and killed every few minutes don’t promote violence.

But if the tweet promotes violence against people who have CNN logos for heads, I think that’s OK because there aren’t many of them.

People who didn’t like the way former President Barack Obama ran the country often brought up the fact that he had been a community organizer. Americans should also consider that Trump is a dealmaker. Trump is always negotiating, even when the rest of the country and world might not realize it.

*****

Here’s another thought on Trump’s tweets. Opponents say that tweeting is not “presidential.” Trump is the president, therefore by definition whatever he does is presidential. People can say they don’t like it. And they can say it isn’t presidential if they want, but they are wrong.

*****

I have a very different opinion of Trump from most people. I don’t like or agree with everything he does, but overall I agree with his actions and I like the way he speaks his mind.

I also like the way that he works. He treats being president like the job that it is. He’s trying hard to get things done and finding that getting things done in government is 20 times, maybe 50 times, maybe 1,000 times harder than it is in the private sector, but Trump seems to be adjusting.

One of the reasons that I think my attitude about Trump is different is that I watch him at press conferences, I listen to his speeches and I read reports on what he has done and is doing.

What I don’t do is watch the network news. I do read the articles in liberal papers about what he is doing because there are so few conservative news outlets. But whatever I read I try to keep in mind that the writer and the editors all hate Trump with an unhealthy passion. If there is a way to spin a statement to make Trump look bad, it is done without questioning whether it is accurate.

It’s like during the Republican primaries when I decided to support Trump. People thought I was crazy, and I usually asked if they had ever sat down and watched an entire speech by Trump or had they only watched the excerpts they showed on the national news. Most had seen clips but had never watched an entire speech.

The clips made Trump look like a raving lunatic. But when you could see him and hear him in context, what he was saying and doing made sense. He did a great job of responding to people in the audience. You can’t do that if you go out to read a speech written by a team of writers, but if you’re going out to the podium to talk to people, which is what Trump was doing, then it works, or it works if you happen to be really good at it, and Trump is.

*****

The only thing the Republicans have going for them at this point is that they are better than the Democrats.

The Republicans have control of the House, the Senate and the White House, and what have they done since January? Has any significant legislation been passed?

I don’t know of any. Both the Senate and the House have allowed themselves to be distracted by investigations of their own Republican president. It’s incredible. It’s like no one told them that there is a Republican in the White House. They are playing right into the hands of the Democrats, fighting amongst themselves and showing a complete lack of leadership. It’s a shame

*****

When Obama was elected president in 2008, I was not surprised but I was disappointed. I thought that Obama was a far-left liberal in moderate’s clothing and I think that turned out to be true.

However, he was my president and I hoped that he would do well. I tried to focus on the potential benefits of his presidency. I thought one was that he could go a long way toward healing the racial divisiveness in this country. He was also pretty much an outsider and I like the idea of electing someone who is not part of the Washington establishment. Finally, he was young and I hoped he would bring some new ideas and initiatives to the government. I hoped that he would be a great president.

When Obama won in 2012, I had no such illusions but I hoped that with the knowledge that he didn’t have to ever worry about running for office again he might decide to work with both parties, to find areas of common ground and do something about the dismal mess he had helped create in the Middle East. Because Obama’s father and stepfather were both Muslims and he was the leader of the country on which Israel depends for support, I thought he had a real opportunity to help bring some kind of resolution in the Middle East.

Just about all of my hopes for Obama remained that – just hopes. And as he proved that he wasn’t going to do much that I could support, I was not shy about attacking his policies and Obama himself.

But I never once said or wrote that he wasn’t my president, because he was.

Usually a president has a honeymoon period where his opponents and the press back off and allows the new president time to breath, learn his way around the White House, establish a White House staff and get to work.

Trump has received no such honeymoon period. The attacks on his presidency started on Nov. 9 and continue to get more and more ferocious day by day.

*****

Former President Bill Clinton and former President Richard Nixon faced similar situations during their presidencies. Both were looking at near certain impeachment.

Nixon, for the good of the country, resigned rather than be impeached. Nixon certainly believed the votes were there to impeach him and perhaps remove him from office, but impeachment was fairly certain, so rather than put the country through that process – where Washington shuts down because everyone is concentrating on the impeachment proceedings – he resigned.

Clinton looked out and saw the same scenario, certain impeachment and the possibility of being removed from office. Clinton decided to put the nation through that trauma, something that had only happened once before in the nation’s history.

Clinton’s impeachment did bring turmoil to the country. Washington for all practical purposes did shut down until the impeachment and the trial in the Senate was over. Clinton was impeached, but the votes were not there to remove Clinton from office. However, 50 senators did vote to remove Clinton from office – far short of the 60 needed, but it is a telling statistic that 50 senators believed that Clinton should be the first president ever removed from office.

Nixon made the decision that was based on what was best for the country, not best for him personally. Clinton made the opposite decision doing what he thought was best for him, not for the country.

Yet today, Nixon is still considered a political pariah and the mainstream media rarely mention that Clinton was the only elected president in the history of the US to be impeached.

*****

Trump is under a lot of criticism because he still owns his corporations. He doesn’t have anything to do with running them, but he still owns them and the mainstream media keep attacking him for not giving billions of dollars away to be president.

Did George Washington give away his farm when he became president? Did Thomas Jefferson hand Monticello off to someone else so he could be president?

It’s easy for someone in office not to have any business entanglements if the people elect a professional politician like Bill Clinton – who didn’t even own a home when he was elected.

Obama did own a home, but his first full time job out of law school was when he was elected to the US Senate. He depended on his wife and the government for his income. It’s not hard to stay away from business entanglements when you don’t have any business.

Trump is an incredibly successful businessman who spent his adult life building the Trump empire. I would think that the country would want successful men to get into politics. The idea when the country was founded was not to have a bunch of leeches elected to Washington to see how much money they could siphon off for themselves, their friends and supporters, but for leaders in the community to make the sacrifice to leave their businesses and serve in Washington for as long as they were needed.

I like that plan better than what we have now.

*****

This is really too funny for words. It’s a shame that so many cities have elected mayors who didn’t pay a little more attention in science class. The US Conference of Mayors is committed to running their cities totally on renewable energy.

It’s possible that a couple of them have large hydroelectric power plants nearby, in which case it should be kind of, sort of possible to make the claim, unless the city buys the hydroelectric plant and cuts itself off from the electrical grid. Otherwise it won’t make any difference. If the city is on the grid, however, it has to accept the same mix of nuclear, coal, natural gas, oil and renewables as everyone else. But if these mayors don’t have access to enough electricity to run their cities on hydropower, then they are in real trouble on cloudy days and low or high wind nights.

Solar panels don’t produce any electricity at night, which may seem obvious to you but evidently not to the nation’s mayors. Windmills don’t produce any power when there is little wind or when there is too much wind. Windmills produce maximum power in a small band of wind, usually around 20 mph, and if the wind is much over 20 mph they don’t produce any electricity at all.

So if these cities are going to rely on renewable energy, what are they going to do for electrical needs on windless nights?

Either they are dumb as rocks, or they are not dumb and don’t give a hoot about the truth, or both – which is most likely.

Many people, including evidently a lot of mayors, don’t realize that electricity is not stored. The country uses what is produced at any given moment and the rest is dissipated into the ground.

People seem to think that there are huge batteries somewhere or some other method of storing electricity, but there isn’t. There is still no efficient way to store the massive amounts of electricity needed to, say, run a city.

The backup systems for hospitals and other facilities that cannot survive a lack of electricity are generators; most run on natural gas, gasoline or diesel fuel and crank up automatically when the normal supply of electricity shuts down.

One way to think of electricity is that it is like a river. In this analogy, the streams and creeks feeding into the river are the various power plants producing electricity. If you are downstream on the Cape Fear River and you want to only drink water from the Haw River, it can’t be done because all the water is mixed together.

So when Google claims it is using only the energy from a wind farm in North Carolina at its facility in Virginia, Google is counting on the average American not knowing anything about how electricity works.

When you turn on a light there is no way to only use the electricity from one particular power source, just like you can’t get a cup of Haw River water out of the Cape Fear River.

It’s silly, but with the state of education in the nation currently, these claims can be made by huge corporations like Google and by mayors and reported as if the statements are meaningful.

*****

I suppose our ever-worsening public education system also has to take the blame for the recent impeachment rallies.

You can’t impeach a president because you don’t like his policies, you don’t like his tweets or the fact that his son-in-law works for him.

You can’t impeach a president because someone on his staff talked to the Russian ambassador. The purpose of Russia having an ambassador in Washington is to talk to the US government, and the head of the US government is the president. It would be weird if no one on Trump’s staff had talked to any Russians.

This stuff is pretty basic. But I suppose it needs to be said. There is no law against the president, a presidential candidate or the president-elect from talking to any ambassador or world leader they please. A person doesn’t give up their freedom of speech because they are elected to office.

People who are now clamoring for Trump to be impeached should have worked harder during the presidential election. It’s why we have elections, because people disagree on politics and in our country we have a system of elections to determine who runs the country. The people of the United States picked Republicans to run the House, the Senate and the White House.

The Democrats lost everything, but they continue to act like they didn’t. It doesn’t appear that Hillary Clinton has admitted to herself that she lost. It never occurred to her that she would lose, even after she had lost, Obama had to call her up and tell her that she had lost and it was time to concede.

But it’s even worse than that. The Republicans also won control of 32 state legislatures. Because the state legislatures control redistricting, the Democrats – who are as guilty of gerrymandering districts as Republicans – are now challenging the legal right of Republican legislatures to draw districts that benefit Republicans.

Who knows, the Supreme Court may find some hidden-until-now provision in the Constitution that says Republicans can’t draw districts to favor Republicans. It doesn’t seem likely with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, but then it didn’t seem likely that Obamacare – which forces people to buy a product they don’t want – would be constitutional either.

As Dorothy said, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

*****

People keep talking about Trump attacking journalists when he attacked Morning Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. What about them makes them journalists? If they are journalists then so was Johnny Carson and so is Jimmy Fallon. They have people on their shows and ask them questions, which is what Scarborough does. What Scarborough doesn’t do is anything that has to do with being a journalist, like writing new articles or writing news shows.

Everybody on television talking about politics is not a journalist.

*****

The idea that somehow making controversial statements is not presidential once again shows a lack of knowledge of history.

When he was leaving office, President Andrew Jackson said he only had two regrets, that “I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”

President Teddy Roosevelt said, “The human body has two ends on it: One to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.”

President Harry Truman said, “I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.”

If they had been able to tweet, it’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t have.

*****

The press has given Trump absolute freedom. If Trump made the announcement that he had cured cancer with a simple formula and the only known side effect was that it turned your hair into straw and youf face orange, the press would be all over him saying things like, it isn’t presidential to cure cancer. How long has he known about this cure? Why are we just finding out now?

So let’s say Trump then sends Sean Spicer out to do a press conference on his cure for cancer and Spicer answers every single question succinctly and precisely. There is no, “I’ll get back to you on that.”

“Sean, how long has the president known about this cure?”

“Precisely 17 hours, 3 minutes and 30, no 40, no 50 seconds.”

“Follow-up. Why weren’t the American people told about this earlier?”

“Sean, is it true that the president colluded with the Russian president on this cure.”

Spicer: “No, that is not true.”

“Follow-up. He met with the Russian ambassador a few hours ago. Did he tell the Russian ambassador before he told the American people?”

Spicer: “That’s all I have time for today.”

*****

During the presidential campaign I suggested that perhaps Trump was not crazy, but everything he was doing was part of his plan to get elected. His plan worked and immediately after marveling at the fact that he won, the pundits went back to the assumption that Trump had no plan, he is crazy and nothing he does makes any sense.

I think Trump doesn’t do anything, including send out tweets that everyone says are a bad idea, that is not part of his plan. Trump is, as he was during the campaign, working at a different level. He’s not a politician. He doesn’t act like a politician and doesn’t do things like a politician. He’s not concerned about being politically correct or having everyone love him. Trump as president is using tweets as an effective way to communicate with his base. He can’t use the news media, as Obama did, because the news media is doing everything in its power to undermine him.

The tweet of the video of Trump pounding CNN may seem crazy to the mainstream media, but did anyone note the crowd at that event. It was 51,000 cheering, screaming people. My guess would be that the vast majority of that 51,000 voted for Trump. People that go to championship wrestling don’t vote for Hillary Clinton. So his tweet wasn’t sent out for the holier than thou media but sent out to his base, many of whom are championship wrestling fans and who no doubt enjoyed the tweet.

A future tweet might be expected to have Trump driving in a NASCAR race.

Trump was not elected by the effete pseudo intellectual snobs of the Northeast, by the entertainment industry or by journalists, and he knows it.

*****

Republicans complained they couldn’t do anything back when the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. Then Republicans won control of the House but said they couldn’t do anything because the Democrats had the Senate and the White House. Then the Republicans won the Senate and the Republicans said they couldn’t do anything because the Democrats controlled the White House.

Then, in 2016, the Republicans won control of the House, the Senate and the White House. Now they say they can’t do anything because, well, just because.

There is one surefire way not to make any mistakes and that is not to do anything. It seems the Republicans have taken this to heart.

*****

The best thing that could happen to the Republicans in the 2018 congressional elections is if Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stays in that position so that she will be the majority leader in waiting.

Not only is Pelosi way far left of most of the country, she seems to be losing her mind. I suppose you’re not supposed to make fun of elderly people who start having memory issues, but Pelosi is one of the top political leaders in the country and she doesn’t appear to know where she is about half the time. By the time she gets to the end of a sentence, she can’t seem to remember what the beginning of the sentence was about.

If Pelosi were a Republican, the mainstream media would be all over the fact that she can’t string enough words together for a coherent sentence, much less speech, but she is a Democrat, and a leftwing Democrat at that, so the mainstream media cover up for her as much as possible. But it’s getting a little tough even for a loving mainstream media to ignore reality.

*****

The Democrats contend that there is not enough voter fraud to worry about, or even to look for, as Trump’s voter fraud committee is attempting to do. But a review of Rhode Island’s voter registration roles show that nearly 20 percent of the registered voters in Rhode Island don’t live in Rhode Island, which would seem to indicate to most people that there may be a problem.

It doesn’t mean that 20 percent of the voters in Rhode Island voted illegally, but it does indicate a possibility that a large number of votes could have been fraudulent. Either the voter who doesn’t live in Rhode Island could have voted twice, or someone could have voted for the registered voter in Rhode Island while that voter voted wherever they live.

The problem is pretty simple and with current technology could be eradicated if all the states would agree to cooperate. One problem is that when a person moves and registers to vote in another state, there is no standard procedure for removing that voter from the voting roles of the state they left. A national database of registered voters could solve the problem.

But the voter fraud problem isn’t going to be solved until voters are required to produce some kind of identification.

If there really is little voter fraud in this country, as the Democrats claim, doesn’t it seem like the Democrats would support a study to prove that they are right? It seems far more likely that the Democrats are as aware of voter fraud as the Republicans, but they think that it works in favor of the Democrats. Wouldn’t it be funny if the committee found that there was widespread voter fraud and it mainly benefitted Republicans?

The biggest problem with voter fraud is that no one has been looking for it. To say that it doesn’t exist because it hasn’t been found when under the present laws it generally discovered by accident, is silly.

*****

I know that those advocating for stricter gun control as the solution to mass shootings will disagree, but the shooting at the Republican congressional baseball practice is proof that the solution to mass shootings is more guns carried by responsible citizens.

Take a look at any other mass shooting: Orlando, Florida; Newtown, Connecticut; Blacksburg, Virginia; or any other one you choose. In all of those, more than 20 people were shot and many shot multiple times and killed. In all of them the only armed person was the shooter, so he (and they were all men) was allowed to shoot unarmed people until he decided to stop.

The shooter at the congressional baseball practice intended to kill as many Republicans as possible. He didn’t kill any and only seriously wounded one, House Minority Leader Steve Scalise. He was stopped because Scalise, as minority leader, had an armed Capital Police officer escort who started returning fire.

Remove that armed escort and there is no reason to think that James Hodgkinson, the shooter, would not have gone ahead with his plan, gone into the dugout where the players had gathered to get out of the line of fire, and shot everyone present. He likely would have continued shooting until he ran out of ammunition or until the police arrived to shoot him.

More than a dozen Republican congressmen were present. Not only would having 10 to 15 congressmen killed be a disaster for their families, it would have caused turmoil in Congress.

What saved the Republican congressmen and the country was not the fact that none of the congressmen were armed but that they had an armed police officer present. Most of us do not have armed guards to follow us everywhere we go; we should be able to defend ourselves.

There are over 300 million guns in this country. It is crazy to think that putting more controls on who can buy and own guns is going to make any difference in the number of guns that are used illegally. We have to deal with the situation as it exists, not how some people would like for it to be.

*****

The New York Times had to run another retraction last week. It turns out not all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 US elections. It was only three US intelligence agencies. The idea that all 17 had agreed was absurd on its face. Why would the Coast Guard intelligence agency want to get involved in that fight?

But “17 agencies” was often repeated during the campaign. Even Hillary Clinton said “17 intelligence agencies” in her attack on Trump.

Now that the election is long over and The New York Times lost, it is still an embarrassing correction to have to make.

*****

The federal courts after eight years (except for the Supreme Court), largely run by appointees of Obama, have decided that they run the county, not the Republican Congress or the Republican president.

The federal appeals court for Washington, DC, recently decided that the Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot delay the implementation of emission standards rules made by the Obama EPA. So, according to the federal courts, the rules – not laws but rules – of the Obama EPA are written in stone and cannot be altered or even delayed by the Trump EPA.

No doubt they found some legal basis for this. EPA rulemaking is so complex and convoluted that if someone is looking they can find some box that wasn’t checked or some public hearing that might not have been advertised properly.

This is simply another attempt by the Democrats to overrule the will of the American people who went to the polls last November and elected Republicans to lead the nation.

If the Republicans in Congress wanted to do something useful (which seems doubtful) they could abolish all the federal courts except for the Supreme Court, which is established in the Constitution, and start over.

There is actually good reason to make major changes to the federal courts that have nothing to do with politics. There are 12 judicial districts but the 9th Judicial District includes nearly 20 percent of the nation’s population while the 1st Judicial District has less than 5 percent.

If the federal judges are going to continue to attempt to run the country, they need to be stopped. The country is supposed to be run by elected leaders, not lawyers appointed for life to cushy federal jobs.

Abolishing the federal court system would cause a great hue and cry from the Democrats, but then everything the current elected government does results in the Democrats predicting the end of the world.

The Republicans in Congress should bite the bullet and at the very least revise the federal court system, creating a whole slew of appointments for Trump, so that judges who believe in the US Constitution, the power of Congress and the president can be appointed.