I do not have alot of time to write tonight because the Patriots are battling the Indiana Colts, is it?  I constantly tell anyone who will listen that it is a good week if the Patriots win.  And, so it will be, if we do.  (We won, so it will be a good week).

     I often tell people that there are four sources of good quotes.  They are Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and the Bible.  Not necessarily in that order.  Today I looked up Lincoln quotes, which just proved me right.  My favorite Lincoln quote is “It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.”  I have other Lincoln favorites but none come close to that one in depth and observation.

     Abraham Lincoln, in my estimation, was a Manic Depressive, or in current terms, bipolar.  He had to hide in the second floor of the White House with the curtains drawn to not allow sunlight in, and he stayed in a depressed state periodically for  days.  At other times, he could be absolutely manic, and get things done at a feverish pace.  I just have always believed, that based on the history of his early life, he was Bipolar.

     Mark Twain said, “Repitition is a mighty power in the domain of humor.”

I try to be humorous and fail terribly, but I get up and try it again, and sometimes I get a smile from someone.  Another great stand-up philosopher was Albert Einstein.  He is often quoted.

     I cannot make sense of the world today.  I listened to Donald Trump give a talk the other day and everything he stands for is black and white.  There is no room for color there.  Do you disagree with the 14th. Amendment on the rights of immigrants, then get rid of the 1858 amendment.  Forget that it is a part of our history that allowed our own grandparents the right to settle in the United States.  If you are born here, you are a United States citizen.  That seems reasonable to me but to the Donald it breeds an illegal opportunity to become American.  In his book  on immigration, President Kennedy said that this was the way that our grandfathers and grandmothers became citizens.  I recently went to my daughter-in-law’s ceremony when she became a United States citizen.  It was beautiful.  She was beautiful, both in appearance and demeanor.  Becoming a citizen was a big deal for her.

     Trump basically said that the immigrants in  the United States were all illegal.  He did not make excuses, like the fact that babies are adopted here from China, or Japan, or South America.  My daughter-in-law was from South America.  She was  a member of an American family.  She had been here since she was a little girl.  What would Trump do?  Apparently expedite  a plane ticket to get her back to a land she is not familiar with, and rob her of her right to become an American citizen.

    Kennedy said that denying the right to immigrate to America is tantamount to denying all of us whose parents came over, in my case from Ireland, the right to be citizens.  Kennedy was very open about his heritage.  When word came out that Kennedy was the derivative of a word that was meant to be “helmet head,” he quickly told his staff not to tell anyone that that was his name in Ireland.

     Democrats stand up for legal immigrants.  They applaud those who do well in the United States.  But the 14th. Amendment makes it difficult.  Who is going to take the time to be childless so we can expedite their dismissal?  The problem with the Democratic Party is that it refuses to look back on its history.  We Democrats have a good record.  Who can forget the crash of 2000?  Obama had to spend money we did not have just to keep the economy going.  Keep in mind that the dreaded 14th. Amendment was written by, and passed by, a Republican President and Congress.  The Democrats had little to do with it.

     His task was not pleasant.  We are slaves to Chinese products.  One store up in the Northeast that sells Cape Cod paraphernalia has every product it sells except maple syrup made in China.  You pick up a trinket that says Nantucket on it and look on the back and it was made in China.  We buy these things.   We buy Chinese goods.  We currently have something like a 17 trillion dollar debt.  Our spending is up, but we buy Chinese instead of American.  Ford is building a plant in Mexico, thanks to NAFTA.  We are going to buy Mexican cars unless Ford stockholders get the gumption to threaten Ford with a stock sale unless they change their ways.

     John Maynard Keynes developed an economy based on debt.  He wrote about it in his book, “How We Pay for the War.”  It was published in 1940.  They balanced their budget then.  Now, in order to get the average American to buy: Chinese, Mexican, or American, we have to deal with a large debt.  That was  the fault of the Republican induced stock market crash of the early part of this century.  Obama did what Roosevelt did.  He spent to get the economy back on track.  There was no way to avoid Keynsian economics.  He had to use it.  If he  had not done that, the country would have gone through a greater Depression than the one in the thirties.  Obama and the Democrats avoided that.

     Trump should be scary to the people.  His solutions, like the great wall of Mexico, are simplistic and sophomoric.  Democrats should be ready to debate him, and if he is the nominee, which it looks like he will be, then that debate has to include everything the Republicans did to start this economic disaster.