2016 August 5^th

First some curious housekeeping business: If you have been following this blog you are surely aware that it is not all that popular; on a good day it will get a dozen hits but more often it is about half of that. I do not expect a Pulitzer Prize.

 About ten days ago a curious thing happened, I had thirty some hits according to the free analytics that comes with this site. There is more, the next day there were sixty some hits and then the day after that there were over 130 hits. That is a geometric increase and I wasn’t raffling off Jaguars.

The analytics supplied could provide a geographic analysis of the blog’s hits. Was I suddenly discovered by the DNC; was some syndicate after me to do a regular column; no and no. These increased  hits were all coming from…Russia, with a few from China. And then things returned to normal. What happened? I have no idea.

Trump’s poll numbers show him in trouble in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia, Florida and in most any other toss-up state you can name; At least these were once toss-up states. Where was Trump putting his efforts yesterday? It was in Maine of course, wouldn’t that be expected…hey, he could have decided to spend a few days in Rhode Island...or maybe Delaware. Maybe Maine gives him some relief from global warming to which he plans to add by putting all the coal miners back to work. Can we say pander?

Tonight he is off to Wisconsin to treat his fans to heavens knows what bits of his imagination, but Speaker Ryan won’t be there, neither will Governor Walker, neither will Congressman Mike Gallagher, neither will Senator Ron Johnson. I doubt that Trump will want Palin to return to introduce him because she did that last April when he lost Wisconsin to Senator Cruz.

Trump is haranguing a crowd in Iowa. He is supposed to be a great “counterpuncher” so it is no surprise that he has taken some of the recent questions about his own sanity and his temperamental fitness to control our nuclear weapons an turned those concerns right back at Hillary Clinton. In the sixth grade this would be the “So’s your old man” response. It isn’t very original but it is probably the best the Trump team can produce. On the stage in Iowa he referred to Hillary Clinton as “unhinged;” sound familiar? Trump is quite simply accusing Clinton of the problem many people are convinced he has himself. He has done the same thing with the nuclear codes suggesting that Clinton is unfit to be trusted with them. Now his response is to send it back about Clinton. Given all the available ammunition against Clinton why use that? It must be, “I’ll hit you right where you hit me” even if there are better openings.

The sixth grader is never very far away.