Well, peeps, some of us on the East Coast are sighing and going into our well-established hurricane prep routine. We ALL hope that Matthew somehow tracks offshore and well offshore for the duration and lands a direct hit nowhere. Most of us can probably confess that our second hope is that if it doesn't stay offshore and hits somewhere, we hope that the effects are minimal and that the hit is not in our own backyard.

I'm not really sure how this is going to trend out in the long run, as a negative for Trump or a negative for Democrats and probably does depend on one's own tax situation and experience and underlying knowlege of our tax structure.

There are a couple of givens I think, one being that no one, or very few people at most, enjoy paying taxes and the other that it is the sworn goal of most companies, both large and small, to limit their taxable profits.

Okay sports fans, the exhibition match between The Powers That Be vs The Great Unwashed in The Secretary's Server game is winding down. The score at the bottom of the ninth inning with three minutes left to play is TPTB 112, TGU 1.

We had some real powerhouse participants and plays that we'll just go ahead and recap and then we will open the voting for Most Valuable Player.

The Nominees for Most Valuable Player on the side of TPTB are:

This article is what I was treated to today on what to me is usually Recipe Wednesday, when I scour newspapers mostly for their Wednesday Food Sections. Today I found a most disconcerting Recipe For Disaster which has left me clammy and slack jawed for several hours. How is it possible for something like this to occur for over eleven years without detection by someone somewhere?

This is a mindblower.

Every morning I peruse the headlines to see which wing of the fortress of Democracy has crumbled further. Lately one particular section, and a central section at that, has featured massive dry rot, bricks falling off the edifice, and doors dropping off their hinges. Due to eight years of deferred maintenance, the Halls of Justice are close to collapse. All of the walls are bearing walls, so the entire structure is now at risk.

Is the government of the United States "theirs" or "ours" ?

That's it. Pretty simple really. If the government is to truly be "of" the people, "for" the people, and "by" the people, i.e OUR government, run on our behalf and with our consent, then some safeguards have to be put in place to ensure that outcome. Principle among those safeguards are two major guidelines - Transparency and Accountability.

Or the Washington Post that I remember.

This essay will offer no earth shattering insights, simply a wry shake of the head at how invincibly stupid, smug, and elitist the Clinton campaign is. The field is tightening and at this exact moment, HRC decides to repeat the strategy that made numbers of Bernie Sanders supporters recoil permanently from her candidacy; instead of disparaging and disagreeing with the opponant and his stances, she makes personal attacks against the character of his supporters.

Yes, yes, it all looks bad, the whole HRC selling State Department access to Clinton Foundation donors thing. But that's how the game is played, you poor pathetic fool! What kind of a naif thinks this isn't the dynamics of interactions between politicians and their funders and which has been such since time immemorial? (SPOILER: the Smoking QPQ starts at Paragraph 9)