I’m happy that yesterday’s silliness with DNC servers was not central to the debate. Hillary trounced her opponents on every issue.

Old age begins when you can no longer learn and adopt new ideas. Unfortunately, Bernie is at that stage in life. He never says anything new. He knows he’s weak on foreign policy but is he trying to learn? Not at all. He keeps repeating the exact same statements he made in the previous debates. A president with no intellectual agility is simply incompetent.

Bernie even ended with some sexist rant about his wife in the spirit of “women and children.” O’Malley’s response about his wife showed an enormous generational chasm between the two men on gender issues. And this is yet another instance where Bernie just can’t learn. He isn’t trying to understand why you can’t talk about women in a way that was OK in the 1950s.

Overall, this was a good, important debate that clarified many crucial things. Hillary rules! And the way she closed is just fucking priceless.

. . . And the channel that will transmit the debate is stupid. And nobody is offering any pre-debate analysis or trying to hype up the event. Even MSNBC is doing something entirely unrelated. I feel cruelly put upon and discriminated against in my political beliefs.

In any case, let’s make the best of the debate anyway. Leave comments and show your support!

19:32 – Hillary’s outfit is a little too grandmotherly. It’s the first unsuccessful outfit of her campaign.

19:35 – God, O’Malley is boring. I fall asleep whenever I hear him.

19:38 – Bernie’s passion never fails and never diminishes. It’s admirable. But “Muslim troops on the ground”? Like in a religious war? That’s a very unfortunate turn of phrase.

19:45 – OK, I kind of hate O’Malley. He sounds shrill and unbalanced.

19:48 – Bernie keeps beating the dead horse of his opposition to the war in Iraq.

19:56 – gun control again, how boring. But wait, Bernie puts down O’Malley. That’s so cool! Go for it, Bernie!

20:00 – Hillary is passionate and strong. This is great.

20:03 – O’Malley winks at the moderator and looks creepy. He thinks that freedom of worship and freedom of religion are two different things.

20:08 – OK, it’s time for the debaters to start disagreeing in something. It’s not a debate if everyone agrees. Thing’s starting to get creepy.

20:12 – Bernie: a coalition including Russia? Has he gone daft in his dotage?

20:17 – unlike Bernie, Hillary knows the specifics of the region and gives a detailed plan of action. Bernie can only come up with platitudes that are always the same and show no familiarity with the specifics.

20:20 – Hillary says it won’t come to having to shoot down a Russian plane. I’m laughing uproariously. She’s either lying or delusional when she says there’s a hope Russians will go after ISIS instead of supporting Assad.

20:23 – Bernie decided to channel stupid Rand Paul. How sad.

20:24 – Hillary is absolutely right that staying out of Lybia would have made matters worse. Bernie is being very superficial on the issue. He simply doesn’t know the region. He repeats the same things, in the same tone of voice.

20:26 – O’Malley just suggested that Sanders is old. Very classy.

20:28 – Hillary is SO MUCH BETTER and more knowledgeable on foreign policy than her opponents. It’s like me talking to two kindergartners about Spanish literature.

20:39 – Is O’Malley seriously touting Maryland’s post-recession economy? That’s the joke of the day.

20:43 – Hillary is so damn good today! I’m loving her.

20:50 – Bernie is so repetitive. I keep thinking of old dogs and new tricks. “Wall Street is a threat to the economy”? Is his intended audience the least educated among voters?

Spain is preparing for its long-awaited election. This was a very contentious electoral cycle, with candidates for the position of the President of the country’s government insulting each other, puffing and huffing in displays of macho, and not saying anything of great value. Things got so crazy that the current President Mariano Rajoy got hit in the face by a young voter who belongs to the group of population where 1 out of 2 people are unemployed.

The candidates are all men who look the same, speak the same, mumble a lot, and have bored everybody with their desire for self-aggrandizement.

40% of Spaniards have still not decided who to vote for (because the candidates are so interchangeable) but the leader of the ruling party of austerity Mariano Rajoy leads. He is older than his 3 opponents, so at least he stands out in that way. I detest Rajoy (because he is a dumbo) but the rest of the candidates are not hugely inspiring either. I’m glad I don’t have to vote in Spain.

I’m starting to think that the whole “Bernie stole Hillary’s data” insanity was a ploy aimed at generating at least some interest in today’s poorly scheduled debate. The Democrats are failing to get any press in this election to the extent that I’m afraid soon the only way of making a splash will be to disinter Monica Lewinsky. 

I will watch the debate tonight out of loyalty but once again we will see reasonable people come onstage, calmly say reasonable things, and calmly leave. And viewers will not flock to their TVs for that.

The smug squealing over the “stupid” Republican voters who confused Raqqa and Agrabah makes me want to vomit. Yes, confusing two unfamiliar names is such a massive faux pas but squealing like a stupid monkey about “a CIA-sponsored coup in Ukraine” – a pastime in which Democratic voters engaged for months and for which not a single one of them apologized – is perfectly fine.

Pathetic hypocrites.

I have no idea if the story is true or was invented for the benefit of sad, unloved kids everywhere but here it is.

A little boy came home from school one day, and his mother told him she’d received a letter from his school’s principal. She read the letter aloud for the boy, and this is what it said,

“Ma’am, your son is absolutely brilliant. We have no resources at this school to teach somebody who is obviously a genius. We believe you should take him out of school and educate him in a way that will suit his talent.”

The boy grew up to become Thomas Edison, the great inventor who created the light bulb,  the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a plethora of other great inventions. After his mother died, Edison was going through her papers and found that old letter from the principal. This is what it really said:

“Ma’am, your son is retarded. We can’t educate him because he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to learn. Please take him out of school and take care of him at home.”

P.S. Be careful when you share this story with others, though. I already made two adult men cry with it, and now one of them is avoiding me.

Two Ukrainian women tried to enter the Crimea with 1,100 lbs of sausage among their personal belongings. They are suspected of smuggling but for two Ukrainian women, that’s a modest lunch for a week.