Sometimes when trying to come up with a column, you have a lot of topics upon which you want to comment or maybe you just can't flesh out an idea enough to fill up the space. Whatever the reason, this is one of those weeks so I've got a few comments on different ideas or observations.

The University of California - Berkeley conducted a survey of registered Democrats in the great state of California. They determined that 53% of California Democrats wanted President Trump to build the wall along the U.S/Mexico border. AND they wanted the Democrats in Congress to work with him to get that done. Who knew? If you listen to the media and our politicians, you'd believe that 100% of everyone in CA thought the wall was a dumb idea and should be scrapped.

I hear a lot of commercials on the radio, many of which are advertising business opportunities, especially franchises. Almost everyone of them concludes the spot with a disclaimer warning listeners that the advertisement is not an offer to purchase a franchise and franchise offers can only be made by prospectus, yada, yada, yada. Why do the advertisers have to say that? It's because we've dumbed everything down to the lowest common denominator. Some attorney, somewhere, got ahold of a slack jawed, mouth breathing, public school dropout and sued a company saying they thought that the advertisement was offering them a business deal; and they won. Never mind most people know that you have to meet some qualifications, pay fees, and so on. When did we have to stop telling people to quit being stupid and wasting our time?

I was listening to Ted Koppel tell Sean Hannity that conservative news outlets and talk shows have ruined journalism because their followers, readers, viewers only tuned in to follow an ideology and weren't getting facts. Of course, he believes that the liberal outlets are telling their audiences the 'facts' and were not spreading their ideology. But they were biased just as anyone in the media is biased. They decide what news to report, what facts to include or omit, who to interview, and what to edit out of the interview; all of which can be very biased, no matter how hard one tries to remain neutral. What he and others are really mad about is that no one questioned them back in the day but now there are so many sources of information, people have more access to facts and realize that they aren't being given the whole story. Now the dominance that guys like Ted Koppel had on disseminating information is being challenged. They don't like that; they don't like losing power and control over the masses.

When you talk to people about America, you find very few that disagree that America became the greatest country in the world in a relatively short period of time. Just ask Rosie or Whoopi; they promised to leave if Donald Trump was elected, but there's a reason they are still here, there's not a better country in which to live. We became a great country despite our problems, like slavery, not allowing everyone to vote, etc. But we have overcome many of those problems because we wanted to; it wasn't easy but we worked hard and have made progress, a great deal of progress. But now we don't teach that to our kids anymore. And look at our politicians, they tell us doing anything like cutting taxes, is going to be so hard that we may not be able to do it. No, it's not that hard; you might have to work hard but it can be done. Now we have this attitude that if it's hard to do, then we aren't going to do it. Let's go back to the time when, if the going got tough, the tough got going.

Speaking of that, why not go back to our earlier times when being a politician was not a full time job much less a career choice. Let's go back to having citizens go to the capital, work for a few weeks, then go back to their communities and their real jobs, living under the same laws that they enacted upon us. Most of the problems we have today are because government has gotten so big and we have professional politicians who feel like they have to do 'something' but can't do anything that might make someone mad because then the pols might lose their jobs. Make them live out here with us where we have a chance to ask them, "WTF were you thinking?!"

North Korea carried out what was basically a bank robbery last year. They were able to hack into the New York Federal Reserve Bank and take $81 million from Bangladesh. Think about that, they hacked into a federal reserve bank and took millions of dollars. Intelligence experts say the only way Best Korea could have done that is with the help of China and most likely the Chinese National banks. The federal reserve banks are supposed to have one of the most sophisticated firewalls yet they got hacked. President Trump was right about China and when it happened President Obama did absolutely nothing. President Trump needs to take a tough stand with the Chinese Premier next week and let him know that we won't tolerate this kind of action and that there will be real consequences. Knowing that Obama would do nothing only emboldened Best Korea and the Chinese. Knowing that Trump will take action will make them think twice.

I heard that President Obama had a test done and it came back negative. I think they called it an IQ test.