Smart things Trump does the media doesn't know

Trump, they say has a very high IQ.  I keep noticing that he does indeed figure things out that the media is stupid about.  When Martha McCallum observed he didn’t get any major legislation done in the first 100 days, he responded that he had signed 28 laws. ( the media can hardly quote any of them.)  Most have to do with changing regulations, something that is huge for businesses, but boring for the commentariat.  Then he said that the R’s (meaning congress) wasn’t ready to govern.  They were used to being loose canons and prima donnas because they were out of power and it didn’t matter what they proposed or how they voted. Obama would veto them.  This is absolutely, positively the truth.  Congressional factions continue to wrangle over Repeal/Replace.  237 egos don’t agree and have to learn to live with half a loaf and play like a team.  That, not the a Caucus, not Paul Ryan, not Trump is to blame—although the pundits seem to love the blame game.  And so we see the tragicomedy of conservative pundits lashing out in anger that nothing is done.  I have news.  Not only are most of the people impatient, so are the Congressmen, the White House and just about everyone in between.  Don’t blame anyone still alive.  The Founders purposely made law-making slow.  Better to have impatience than tyrannies that can run over us in a moment. 

Trump is also playing a game with China.  N. Korea has a dangerous player.   I don’t understand why, if China fears USA bringing in weapons to re-arm S. Korea and Japan, if they fear for free trade and broken commerce with the West, if they fear Kim’s collapse could bring millions of Korean refugees into China, don’t they just go grab that little fat guy by the neck and install a puppet of their choice in his place?  And from behaviors of China after the powwow with Trump, they seem to be jockeying in this direction. If he can get China to defuse Kim, that will be something no other Prez has ever done.  It would also cool down a hot spot and we could attend to Iran or Ukraine or some other problem.  Part of a good war or campaign waged is to deal with one thing at a time and get as far as you can go with diplomacy or threats.

Every Republican likes tax cuts, but if Trump had led his agenda with them, they would show a big negative loss of revenue.  Instead, first pass Obamacare replacement and save $100 B a year.  Then pass a budget with real cuts to discretionary spending and save another $100 B.  Result is that the tax cuts would be somewhat paid for.  And despite Trump’s proposal of tax reform, budget and repeal/replace do seem to be coming first.

Finally the media is hooting that Trump is giving up on his wall.  But ‘wall’ is a euphemism for a secure border which in places is a fence or in an almost impassible area or on some difficult situation involving private land or a tribal reservation, will be a surveillance tower and drones.  But the media thinks they have really caught Trump in a lie about the border.  It is as if Babe Ruth stepped up to the plate and pointed to where he was going to hit a home run.  But then he hit the home run, but to the opposite field.  Fans would be cheering.  The media would be saying cynically that Ruth can’t call it right at all. Guess I'm a fan.   

And entrepreneur looks at sports

Never ask an entrepreneur to truly love sports.  They always see ways to greatly improve the game or change the game.  And why in heck do the people in charge not do this? 

            Baseball has constant battles between umpires who call balls and strikes and the batters and pitchers.  We could easily eliminate this by using electronics to call balls and strikes the way the broadcasters show the strike zone and the ball when it came across the plate.  Wouldn’t this make calls much more indisputable?

            But the sports I really don’t understand are hockey and pro basketball concerning fouls.  Why, in hockey can you come up behind someone and grab both arms and hold him back.  This is called a “check” even though the guy might be say a Pole or a Swede. And it’s legal.  Yes, but totally debilitating for the guy being held. If he were an agile skater, he could  develop a really accurate jackass kick  to the checker’s groin region. “Whoops, sorry.  My foot slipped.” Doing this with a steel skate would really teach the defender never to try this hold-down stuff again.  And maybe he couldn’t have kids ever, just in remembrance.

            Worse yet is the National Butcherball Association’s rules on fouls.  It differs so radically from college, high school, AAU or any other cager venue that it’s almost unrecognizable.  I was watching Rondo get clobbered by the Celtics.  He was just dribbling. A guy jumped on his back, never touched the ball, No foul called but Rondo missed his shot by 4 feet.  The similar strange foul ruling occurred when Westbrook went up for a layup.  The Rocket’s defender tried to block the shot from behind, mostly missed the ball and nearly took Westbrook’s head off.  They showed it again and again on replay, the blithely unconcerned announcers saying it was just a common foul, not a flagrant.  Well, if that’s not a flagrant, what would keep some team from having a couple martial arts experts on the bench for purposes of ruining someone’s career and making it look accidental.  I predict that the dumb-jock NBA will persist in their butcherball, this street ball, until someone really famous gets a career ended.

 This happened in 1920 in major league baseball when Chapman got killed.  Pitchers used to juice balls and rub them with dirt to make the ball hard to see.  In a game at dusk, Chapman couldn’t see the ball in the sun coming at him, got beaned and died the next day of a skull fracture.  Thereafter, baseball suddenly recanted from their love of the rubbed ball used for an entire game.  After that, any slightly dirty ball was discarded, and that is why they use 60 balls per game.  The old balls with fraying seams, called dead balls, suddenly gave way to new, fresh, tightly-wound balls called lively balls. I don’t know what kind of ball you call the skate-kicked hockey guy.