Quite a good piece about Hillary’s health here, NYT

Quite thorough, that is. But granting political equivalence to her and Trump’s health report is not on target,

Still, the information Mrs. Clinton has made public is more extensive than the details and assessments that Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, the doctor for Donald J. Trump, 70, the Republican presidential nominee, provided on Thursday, saying that Mr. Trump has had no serious illness and “is in excellent health.”

since Trump has shown no symptoms of health trouble, but Hillary has, in spades.

Pope Says Using Paper & Plastic A Sin — William M. Briggs

If you’re a Christian, what do you suppose is the most pressing problem in the world today? The rapid fading of Christianity in the West? The dramatic increase in, and official approval of, sexual licentiousness and perversity? The wholesale slaughter of the unborn? The martyrdom and suffering of Christians in the Mid-East? That it seems…

via Pope Says Using Paper & Plastic A Sin — William M. Briggs

A coughing catastrophe

The forces of the Dark Side — modern Democrats — are coming unglued (assuming, of course, that they were ever really pasted to anything resembling sanity in the first place.) Their candidate is a coughing catastrophe, her campaign coming apart like a cheap Chinese pantsuit with each sickly wheeze. Their lackeys in the mainstream […]

via Down And Out With (Cough, Cough) HRC — Be Sure You’re RIGHT, Then Go Ahead

There was Kennedy, there was Reagan, there’s Trump . . .

First two cut taxes and promised growth. How did that work out?

Post-Kennedy: “The U.S. economy grew by roughly 5% yearly for nearly eight years.”

Post-Reagan: “The American economy grew mostly between 4% and 5% percent annually for over 25 years.”

Post-Trump?

This past week, Mr. Trump went a long way toward joining [Kennedy and Reagan] ranks. Speaking before the Economic Club of New York, he delivered a positive, optimistic growth message that falls squarely inside the JFK-Reagan model.

Read the rest, from Lawrence Kudlow.

Redistricting the Democrat way: Five state legislators for one town

The town is Franklin Park, whose 18,000 residents are blessed with two state senators, including Oak Park’s Don Harmon, and three representatives, including Oak Park’s Camille Lilly.

It’s in coverage of Harmon’s and Lilly’s town-hall-meeting tour in 2013 in my Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

A man asked [in a Franklin Park meeting on July 30] about legislative redistricting, by which Democrats had generously provided Franklin Park with three representatives and two senators, when one of each would have done nicely. The five, all present this night, represented some 35 towns, villages, and neighborhoods among them.

Such dividing up of communities — a by-product of ensuring Democrat dominance and a trademark of the Mike Madigan Era — neatly defuses any unified effort to pressure a legislator to oppose current policies. Divided as to legislative representation, a town is more easily ignored and has a harder time working up a head of steam to put pressure on lawmakers.

It was just such a head of steam that was to greet Harmon and Lilly in their next town hall meeting, on September 12, in the city’s Galewood neighborhood north of Oak Park, where they were to face an hour of sometimes raucous indignation from aggrieved citizens.

Coming up: The Galewood donnybrook.

Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters— is available in paperbackepub and Amazon Kindle formats.

Social climbers a la Dickens

Here he is, or they are as minor characters in Our Mutual Friend:

  • Mr and Mrs Veneering – a nouveaux-riches husband and wife whose main preoccupation is to advance in the social world. They invite influential people to their dinner parties where their furniture gleams with a sheen that they also put on to make themselves seem more impressive.
  • They “wear” their acquaintances, their possessions, and their wealth like jewellery [sic], in an attempt to impress those around them. Veneering eventually goes bankrupt and they retire to France to live on the jewels he bought for his wife.

Met them — for the first time, alas! — in Wm. H. Pritchard’s Wyndham Lewis, Twayne, 1968, in Pritchard’s discussion of Lewis’s non-moralistic brand of satire, in which he depicts human types while standing apart, as it were, making a larger point about how people act — or so I understand it for now, in confidence that there’s more to it than that.