US Civil Servants don't deserve a pay raise.

They don't do much, they cannot be trusted, they cannot be fired, no matter what, and they are overpaid.  Trump wants to cancel their pay raise.  Good for him. 

Yahoo admits to snooping all emails going thru its site

Email is forever.  If it embarrassing, revealing, and anything you would mind posting on the bulletin board at the local supermarket, DON'T put it in email.  Yahoo has just admitted to snooping email on their site, and it would not surprise me that others are doing it too.
   If it is a company email, and your company gets sued, they will demand to see all the emails from every one.  So don't bad mouth customers (or anyone else) never discuss pricing, never discuss technical shortcomings, never discuss anything that might make your company liable.  Sensitive topics should be handled face-to-face, away from phones.  
   Next job interview, figure they can see all your email, going way way back, all your facebook postings, everything you every put on the net.  Sexting can be really really embarrassing.  If its a good hot pic, a lotta guys will pass it on to their buddies.  It never goes away. 
   For that matter they can see all your medical records now that Obama forced the doctors to keep patient medical records on computer. 

Federal Money given to secure NH electoral system.

Well, I'll take the money, money is nice, I can always find something to spend it on.  But we can secure our election system with two simple steps, no money required. 
1.  Use paper ballots, everywhere, every time.  They cannot hack a paper ballot over the Internet. 
2.  Secure the voter registration lists.  That list upon which the poll workers check off your name as you vote.  If the list is destroyed, or altered, bad things happen.  Legitimate voters will be denied ballots,  illegitimate voters will be given ballots.

In this PC age, every thing is kept on computer.  There was a time when the voter registration list was kept by town clerks, using pen and paper.  We could go back to that, but all the poll workers would scream and cry and threaten to hold their breath.  Since we seem to be stuck with computers, we can at least take some obvious security measures.  The computer[s] upon which the voter registration list is kept shall NOT be connected to the public internet (or the telephone network).  The computer[s] shall be kept in a locked room, with the keys restricted to a very few people.  All floppy disc drives shall be removed and all USB connectors snipped off.
   A paper listing shall be made periodically and stored off site.  An electronic backup (CD-ROM) shall be made periodically and stored off site.  Each time a new backup is made, it shall be compared with the previous backup to see if any changes are reasonable. 

Spectre, a Daniel Craig Bond Movie 2015

It's been out a few years, I have seen it before, but I Netflixed it just for old times sake.  It's a perfectly watchable Bond movie.  Daniel Craig plays as good a Bond as any of them, tough, humorless, relentless, and a lady killer.  The special effects are good, for openers Bond shoots a couple of bad guys thru an upper floor window.  By the time every one's gun runs out of ammunition, the entire multi story Mexico City building collapses.  Not bad for some small arms fire.  And Bond manages to shoot Blofeld's helicopter out of the air using just a hand gun.  Bond's handgun is bigger than the puny Walther PPK that shows up in most of the earlier Bond movies.  Looks to be a Smith and Wesson or Sig Saur 9mm automatic. 
   The script writers have some continuity problems.  We have Bond in London, getting chewed out for exceeding his authority in Mexico City by blowing up a couple of bad guys without proper paperwork.  Next thing we know, Bond, with a brand new Aston Martin DB10,  much sleeker and lower than the DB-6 he drove in back in Goldfinger, is in Rome.  How he and the car get from London to Rome is not even hinted at.  Did he drive the Chunnel? Or put the car on a Channel ferry? Just a short clip showing Bond and the Aston Martin  doing either would have been helpful to us viewers.  Apparently Bond does intercontinental travel instantaneously, like magic.  He and the Bond Girl get from Rome to North Africa, and then back to London from North Africa all instantaneously,  Never a clip of him boarding an airliner. The Bond Girl is cute, as all Bond Girls are.  I never picked up on her name watching the movie.  I had to look it up on IMDB.
   Filming in 2015, three years ago, the annoying "Shake the Camera" style of camera work was gone, but the "Film it in the Dark" style is fully there.  Lots of night action, with the lights out, where I could not tell Bond from Blofeld. Not as bad as Game of Thrones, but annoying.  The sound man was only fair, I missed some of the more breathy dialog. 

Farewell John McCain

TV just reported his death this evening.  We will miss him.  I was in South East Asia with the Air Force the year McCain got shot down over North Viet Nam.  That year my unit, 343 Tactical Fighter Wing, lost a plane a day, for the first 90 days I was in the wing.  It took enormous courage to climb into the cockpit and fly into North Viet Nam, and our pilots did it every day.  So did John McCain.
   Years later, John McCain, campaigning for president, came to an event at the Littleton VFW.  I and my brother were there.  It was winter, the place was full of shaggy people, all wearing parkas and snow boots.  When John McCain entered the room, every one stood up for him as a mark of respect.
   Over the years I have been to a lot of campaign events, for a lot of presidential candidates, and I have never seen another man get that mark of respect that we gave John McCain just automatically. 

Why Communism/Socialism/Democratic Socialism is a disaster

Historically, all this started with Karl Marx, a writer back in the mid 19th century, say 1850 or so.  In those days, and on continental Europe especially, there was a serious discrepancy in wealth.  The workers got little, the owners, capitalists, got a whole bunch more than the workers.  Marx felt this was unfair.  His solution was to share the wealth equally.  The state would own all the means of production, from steel mills, railroads and farmland, down to corner bodegas and restaurants.  The state would set equal wages for all.  Marx wrote all these ideas in his book "Das Kapital" which was widely read. 
   The messy part of Marx's plan is how the state obtains owner ship of nearly everything.  The owners resisted this idea strongly.  In Russia it took a massive social revolution in 1917 to bring this about.  Owners, kulaks the Russians called them, were liquidated.   Massive propaganda efforts and a powerful secret police were used to overcome resistance of kulaks.  Kulaks, entrepeneurs, who escaped liquidation fled the country.  Taking their ideas and initiative with them.
   Production sinks under socialism because the highly motivated entrepreneurs are gone.  Since every one gets paid the same, nobody is motivated to work hard, since there is no reward for hard work.  Starting a new business is forbidden by law.  You can see this in Soviet Russia, even today, 30 years after the fall of communism.  You can see it today in Venezuela.  "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" was a cliche from Soviet times. 
   The only real difference between Communism and Socialism back in the day, was how the party would obtain power.  Communists believe they should obtain power by revolution and force of arms.  Socialist believe they should obtain power thru political action and the ballot box.  Once in power there is little difference between them.
  Modern "Democratic Socialism" is mostly undefined, especially by its advocates, say Bernie Saunders, Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren and their followers.  The followers are looking to a regime of more free stuff, and the leaders are looking for political power.  Elizabeth Warren was talking about the federal government taking over all of big business, which sounds pretty Marxian to me. 

Things I don't understand about Manafort and Cohen Cases

I understand Manafort made substantial money (like $millions) overseas, advising or fixing or something for the Ukrainians.  He put the money in an overseas bank.  The government claims this is tax evasion.  Just what law requires US citizens to report income from overseas sources, left overseas, to the IRS? And how soon must the report be made?   None of the TV newsies addressed this issue.
   And, just what were those 10 counts the Manafort jury deadlocked on?  Was the prosecution railroading Manafort with a bunch of trumped up charges?  Ham sandwich nation?   As Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) said, "Under current US law I could indict a ham sandwich."
    On the Cohen case, I don't understand how paying hush money to bimbos is a campaign finance violation. Campaign finance laws concern money given to politicians as campaign contributions.  Giving money to bimbos to keep them quiet is not the same thing.  It's distasteful, and reflects badly upon the payer, but I cannot see how it is a campaign finance violation.
   What is clear, is that if the Democrats take control of the House in November, they will proceed to impeach the President, starting in January 2019.  Which will make all the newsies turn pink and glow in the dark from pure happiness.  And figure impeachment will go on and on and on, at least a year, probably two.  The newsies will report on nothing else.  And the Congress will be unable to pass anything for a year or two.  In short, it impeachment will stall the federal government for the next couple of years, like Watergate did. 
   Voters who want to keep the feds moving need to vote Republican, in large numbers.  Trump has got the country moving and moving in a good direction.  Like lower unemployment, more GNP growth, lower taxes, rising stock market, less red tape.  Taking a two year timeout for impeachment will bring all that movement to a screeching halt.