Bernie Bashing and More Really Bad Ideas

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The top of my latest really bad ideas roundup goes to Democrats looking for a scapegoat. I've had it with the constant carping that Senator Sanders cost Hillary Clinton the election. The brain-dead Democratic Establishment has managed to brainwash loyalists into treating Sanders like he was a sexist third-party spoiler. What nonsense! He ran against Clinton as a Democrat in the primaries and supported her in the general election.  I wonder why Clintonians think we have primaries in the first place. The nomination wasn't Clinton's by birthright, for heaven's sake. Odd that those Clinton loyalists didn't accuse her of racism for contesting the 2004 primaries won by Barack Obama.

Enough with Democratic alternative facts!  Here are some real ones based on polling data:

·      8% of Democratic voters switched to Trump

·      8% of Republican voters went for Clinton

·      Just 1.1% voted for Jill Stein and the Green Party

·      3.3% voted Libertarian, most of whom were likely disaffected Republicans

·      43% of Democratic voters thought Clinton to be "untrustworthy"

·      35% of registered Democrats stayed home, but so did 32% of those registered with the GOP and 33% of independents

·      Independents now make up 43% of the electorate and vastly outnumber those registered as Democrats (29%) or Republican (26%)

·      Clinton lost the independent vote by a devastating 11%

·      Clinton won the overall women's vote, but 52% of women never attending college went for Trump

·      Clinton won the college-educated vote by 9% but…

·      Just one-third of Americans have a college degree

The data is clear: As Forbes observed, non-voters decided the election. In the critical state of Wisconsin, for example, Trump polled no more votes than Romney four years earlier, but Clinton polled 230,000 fewer votes than Obama. Add to this the fact that Democrats have indeed become a party of elites; they poll very badly with independents, non-professionals, and those with lower educational attainment.

Clinton lost. She was a poor candidate. Turn the page. All the carping, whining, and scapegoating serves only to make Democrats look like the party of acrimony, delusion, atrophy, and the past. Unless that perception changes, Democrats are doomed to be the Federalists of the 21^st century—a regional party confined to the Northeast and West Coast. 

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It really irks me when high-tech complicates simple things. The Chinese firm Shoulian Zhineng has taken this to hitherto unknown lows. It seems that some businesses are plagued by restroom-users stealing toilet paper. The solution? Dispensers using facial recognition software. Inconvenience meets creepiness. A machine reads faces and then dispenses a single two-foot-long stream of toilet tissue. Don't even try for more. Not surprisingly, some of these $700 machines have been sabotaged—and rightly so. Yes, you read that right–$700 to prevent people from lifting a 70-cent roll of toilet paper. As bad ideas go, this one stinks to high heaven. If toilet paper theft  has really reached  epidemic proportions in China, isn't the real solution to improve economic conditions so that people don't have to debase themselves this way?

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Flying simply isn't much fun these days. Name a beloved American airline. Yeah—I give up as well. That said, it's a really, really bad idea to fly on either Frontier or Spirit. Normally I don't get excited about Internet customer reviews; they are the forums of either the disgruntled or shills, and a larger sample size is needed for them to be remotely scientific. Still, it's hard to ignore reviews when no one has anything good to say about these two carriers. Each reinterprets the word "discount" as "you don't count." No-frills doesn't even begin to get it. Water will cost you $4 a pop on Frontier, which also offers you a whopping 24 inches of seat space with a 4 inch clearance from the passenger in front of you—assuming that patron doesn't recline. Check a bag and it's more than $60. Want to arrive on time? Hah, hah—that's a good one! A Boston Globe reporter wanted to try Frontier to see if it was as bad as billed. His verdict was that it was worse! Moreover, he "saved" just $60 after paying for several "frills." I recall an old slogan about the Yugo, considered by many to be the worst car ever sold: "If you can only afford a Yugo, you can't afford to drive." You see where I'm going with this?

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Pizza Hut hired an Israeli ad agency and posted its handiwork: an imprisoned Palestinian hunger striker secretly snacking on—you guessed it!—a slice of P-Hut 'za. Wow! That is soooo funny. Are you freaking kidding me? Pizza Hut apologized. Oh swell. That's what idiots do these days when their idiocy goes public. Who thought this was amusing? Fire them. Fire also the head of the ad agency that either green-lighted the ad or was asleep at the wheel. Now let's turn to Pizza Hut. It boggles the mind that anyone associated with the company could have allowed this to go forward—even in an age in which it seems to be okay to insult the weak. Sounds like the Democratic Party isn't the only entity that needs a top-to-bottom makeover. How about a new ad: "Pizza Hut: Awful food for Awful People."