Category: Uncategorized

Business Insider composed this list from various health sources:

And the U.S. Army compiled a list of things to do if you are self-quarantining.

Today’s blog is about a member of my family who died earlier this month. A gathering of a group of his friends is taking place Saturday, when I cannot be there due to sportscasting commitments.

Even though I come from a relatively small family, I had a lot of relatives in my parents’ generation, some of whom are still living. My father was the oldest boy in his family, and my mother was the youngest of three, so I had aunts and uncles older and younger than my parents.

On my father’s side, I have three aunts I could describe as the “cool aunts.” Two are younger than my father, and the one who is older lives in California and New Mexico, which makes her automatically cool. Whatever fashion look I got from middle school Christmas gifts came from them.

Greg was one of the uncles who married into the family. With one exception, all the uncles in my family married into the family. After I started watching movies. I decided that Greg was like having Steve McQueen as your uncle, and the uncle I’m related to was like having Burt Reynolds as your uncle. (He died in 2016.)

Greg went into the Army after high school and then the Special Forces in Vietnam, was injured there and then spent nearly a year at an Army hospital in Okinawa. He almost never talked about his Vietnam experience. He was one of those people you had to work on to get him to open up, but when you did, he could be hilarious.

He talked quite a bit about his experience immediately after Vietnam, which was three years at UW–Madison as an engineering student on the GI Bill in the height of the protests against the war in which he had just fought. Greg had a second-floor apartment on State Street, and would watch the daily antiwar protest start on the Library Mall and then proceed up State Street to the Capitol, with the protestors/mob smashing business windows along the way. He knew Paul Soglin when Soglin was a UW Law School student and a leader of the protesters.

One day, Greg went to a class. This happened to be the day of a student strike protesting the war, which was to close the campus. As he told the story, he found his access to the classroom blocked by a student who announced he couldn’t go in. Greg said he had a class. The student said he couldn’t go in. The student found out that getting in the way of an ex-Green Beret was a poor decision on the student’s part. As Greg told the story, he was the only student who actually went to class that day, which made him easy to find when the police came to arrest him for assault, which was later amended down to disorderly conduct.

My uncle and aunt lived in Auburn, N.Y., for a few years. (That was where, as Greg told the story, their motorcycle broke down.) Then they came back to Wisconsin so Greg could take over his father’s building business. Thereafter he was a stockbroker and then started a machine shop in Appleton, which made him a reader of Marketplace Magazine back in a previous life of mine. He was a fan of my work.

Greg was never a parent, so he probably didn’t really know how to deal with little kids. I do recall that he would take quarters and hold them in his fists, and my brother and I would work to get the quarters out. That was difficult, because he was a strong guy.

One of the purposes of cool uncles is for them to introduce you to activities your parents may not necessarily endorse. That included driving their truck in a field a couple of years before I was legally able to do so. A couple of decades later, in their basement following the Packers’ clinching their second consecutive Super Bowl berth, I sat in their basement and smoked the only tobacco product I have ever smoked in my life — a Cuban cigar.

Before that, he purchased a dark green 1969 Corvette. (Which replaced a Harley–Davidson motorcycle.) I’m not sure which 427 V-8 engine it had, but I do know it had the M-22 “rock crusher” four-speed manual transmission. It did not, however, have power steering or brakes. He took it out with me one day, and we reached, shall we say, extralegal speeds. And then he let me drive it. I had never driven a stick before, nor had I ever driven a car without power steering before. (They’re easier to drive while moving.) He was amazingly patient while I figured out how to take off without killing the engine. Later on he bought another one he was going to rebuild, but I don’t believe he ever finished it.

He was single-minded in his pursuit of his hobbies. The first I remember was photography. He had more lenses and filters than I previously seen in 1970s-vintage photography (before zoom lenses became a thing). He also thought it was fun to take his flash and fire it in people’s faces to temporarily blind them. Sometime later he took up pool, and then after his vision made it hard (in his opinion) to play he dropped that for piano.

They had a succession of dogs. The first I remember was Brandy, a golden retriever that might have been the best-trained dog I have ever seen. If you snapped your finger, she would stick out a front paw for a handshake. She went bird-hunting, even when she was old enough to need painkiller shots before she went out. On the day of the bicentennial Independence Day, Greg, Brandy, my dad, my brother and I all went out on the Madison lakes in a boat he owned, on one of those perfect summer days. Earlier that day our new puppy, Dolly, followed Brandy around so close that she kept getting hit in the face by Brandy’s tail.

Brandy was followed by Kelly, an Irish setter. I went out with them as he was training her, and nearly collapsed laughing when she started barking at a bulldozer blade that was just sitting in the woods. Greg thought that was less funny than I did.

About a decade later, when Mrs. Presteblog and I were living in Appleton, they went to a Caribbean island for a diving vacation. My brother was tasked with caring for Kelly and their other dog (I believe she was Susie the black-and-white setter), but he had to be out of town that weekend, so he asked me to feed them and let them out. I got to their house, and of course the dogs were overjoyed to see humans and seemed quite sad at the prospect of my leaving them alone. And so I brought them back to our house, where we had our two dogs and one cat, for the rest of the weekend.

Nick the male spaniel thought having three girl dogs around was the greatest thing ever. Puzzle the female spaniel did not agree, and decided to follow me around even more than usual out of jealousy we had never seen before from her. The cat, meanwhile, got up on our fish mounted in our loft, a place we never would have guessed she could have reached due to her girth, to stay away from the dogs while monitoring their presence. We have a photo of my feeding four dogs treats, all of them at rapt attention.

They also had, for a while, big birds. I got an introduction to one of them when he let out a macaw (Tigger, I think, was his name) and said macaw flew up onto my back, and then walked up to my shoulder.

I didn’t hunt with Greg, but cars were a common interest, as were the Packers, in their Gory Years and then in the 1990s when they returned to the top of the NFL. So was music.

One day we visited them in Richland Center. They had what appeared to be a state-of-the-then-art sound system with big speakers and a reel-to-reel tape player. For whatever reason he decided to play Chicago’s “Ballet for a Girl from Buchannon,” which included “Make Me Smile.” I had heard the latter, but not the whole thing. And never as loudly as he played it that day.

Did that make an impression? Well, I have seen Chicago four times in concert, most recently in Madison in May, with our trumpet- and trombone-playing sons.

I always looked forward to going to their house. He started presenting us with Bloody Marys you could chew and beer chasers. We watched Super Bowl XXXI there, with my parents and a group of their friends. (Afterward we decided in a snowstorm to drive to Lambeau Field, but that’s another story.)

One Sunday we decided to visit Frank’s Pizza Palace in Appleton. He wasn’t dressed for the day when we got there, and so someone made a comment about that. He didn’t say anything, but went upstairs and returned a half-hour later, wearing a suit, outdressing everyone else in the restaurant.

An even more epic night than that was Dec. 31, 1999, when the family determined the best way to depart 1999 and welcome 2000 was a course-per-hour dinner. We went along with our oldest son, who couldn’t see anything because he was four months in utero. I remember driving home after 2 a.m., listening, for one of the few times in my life, to Art Bell to see if any of the more dire predictions of Y2K were coming true. The next day — actually later that day — we drove back to watch the 2000 Rose Bowl.

These are my experiences with Greg that stand out. I hadn’t seen him for a few years after my uncle and aunt divorced. I now regret not having reached out to him since then. We’ll have to schedule a Bloody Mary you can chew sometime this weekend in his memory.

Louis M. Profeta, M.D.:

“Colleges should do this and colleges should do that, everyone says?” I walked across the front of the auditorium, stopped and faced the two hundred young men who had invited me to their fraternity house to speak. “Really?” I paused some more. “Colleges are supposed to do what … protect you from you?”

It was a simple question, one they perhaps had not thought about in a world where some modern parenting involves hermetically sealing the previous 18–20 years of their lives from anything that could possibly hurt them. In reality, some of their parents—people who love them the most—were setting them up for academic failure, a lifetime of addiction … and even worse … their death.

“It’s the incoming freshmen that cause most of the problems,” the upperclassman told me as he walked me to my car. “They come in, away from mom and dad, and they are out of fucking control. Trying to fit in, I guess, things like that. Most of the upperclassmen, well, I mean are kind of over that. More future-oriented, I imagine,” he said, kind of exasperated.

“I believe it, I absolutely believe it,” I said. I thanked him for his leadership and went on my way, pretty much the same thing I’d had been hearing all over.

It had been about two years since I wrote the viral essay, “A Sunday Talk on Sex, Drugs, Drinking, and Dying with the Frat Boys,” and since then I had been traveling the country speaking on campuses brave enough to have me. I hadn’t held anything back from the students. I warned them beforehand. I was coming from a different place, a place where doctors do rape exams, pump veins full of narcan and epinephrine, look at the clock and pronounce time of death and break horrible news to moms and dads. I had become kind of sick of it (giving out the bad news, I mean). It didn’t seem like much was working to change the tide of opiate abuse, reckless behavior, and other causes of death in young people so I figured I’d start going to the source and begging these students to, well, grow the fuck up.

Most loved the candor, the openness, the willingness of a seasoned ER doctor to answer uncomfortable questions about drugs and alcohol, sexual assault, and hazing, and a whole host of semi-taboo topics. But it was the questions when the “adults” were out of the room that made me say to myself, “Holy shit … so many of these ‘kids’ have absolutely no business being in college.”

“What about whippets, what if I just snorted one xanax, can you really soak a tampon in alcohol and get drunk, is cough syrup OK to mix with vodka, is ecstasy and molly the same thing, can’t you just strap a backpack to them to keep them from rolling over so they don’t choke on their own vomit, what about phenergan, what’s in skittles (not the candy), how many milligrams of THC can you eat and not die, are they starting to add stuff to coke (not the cola) that makes you more hyped, how much does it cost to go to an ER, will you call my parents if I go, how can you tell if your roommate is suicidal, what if you know your roommate is using heroin … should I tell their parents, how do I tell if the ‘bars’ I bought online are not fentanyl, I got raped last year … should I tell someone now, I think my roommate is going to probably kill herself…who do I tell?”

As I’ve traveled the country, these are just some of the questions and emails I have gotten from your college students. I try to approach them with openness and honesty, as a doctor and a father who almost lost a child to cancer, and I tell them that I want them to live a long life and experience the joy of holding their own child in their arms one day. I tell them they can always email me and I’ll find them help if they need it. Occasionally, they do. Most of the time it’s a parent who drops me a note and says something like, “Thank you, my kid called me tonight after your talk and apologized for every stupid thing they ever did.”

Yeah. These are a fraction of the questions your kids are asking me, and I have come to the simple realization: some of these young men and women are simply too emotionally immature and lack the basic self-control and sense of personal responsibility to be in college.

College will still be there. It is not a race to adulthood.

Let that sink in for a second: Some of your kids, in fact many of your kids are not ready for college—and if you think college administrators can or will protect them, you are dead wrong. They’ll act like they have it under control and tout their counseling services, student health, etc., but they don’t. When things go bad, they’ll point the finger at fraternities, or a toxic sports culture, or bullying, or whatever in order to shift the blame rather than admitting that they accept too many students that are simply too immature to be there. If you don’t believe me, think about what college campuses would look like if you could only attend once you turned 20 or 21. Give me one year of age over a hundred extra points on the SAT any day.

I watched a documentary recently on D-Day. I’ve been somewhat of a student of WWII and veteran issues for years. What keeps me fascinated is the realization that many of these soldiers were mere kids by today’s standards—18- or 19-year-olds, fresh out of high school, and I try to imagine them in today’s world and I simply can’t see them snorting xanax, or doing a beer bong, or sharing adderall, or chowing down on a handful of THC-loaded gummy bears. These were 18-year-olds, but in terms of today’s measure of maturity and responsibility, they might as well have been 50. I can pretty well damn near guarantee if social media was around then none of the D-Day mothers would be posting.

“Well, we had to get Kyle moved into to his dorm, register for classes, pick his schedule, tour the campus, find out where his classes are, get him linens and a dorm fridge, meet his roommate, and go to parent orientation.” Post after post making moving into a dorm and registering for classes sound like a Homeric poem. “Well first we had to get Kyle on a ship that would not be crushed on the rocks by the songs of the sirens and then we had to get him a sword and a shield so he could kill a cyclops. I read where this one guy used his shield as a mirror to cut off Medusa’s head, so we’re going to Costco later to see if they carry that one…”

It’s sad and disconcerting because at the very core of this is a parent, consciously or not, treating an adult like a child. As an ER doctor who is now talking to these young men and women, I want to offer a few words of caution. We need to love them like our child but send them off as adults.

Do not send children to college.” College is for men and women. It is a place to expand the minds of these young scholars who, if they did not have the good fortune or desire to get a higher education, would be jumping into the workforce or the military right out of high school. It is a place to explore career options, expose oneself to diversity of thought, hone social and life skills, and to make contacts that might translate into future business opportunities or life partnerships.

It is NOT a defacto summer camp. It is NOT a surrogate parent. It is NOT a place to grow up, and it’s about time we step back and contemplate, “Is my child emotionally and mentally ready for college?” instead of “Does my kid have the aptitude for college?” The former is infinitely more important to consider than the latter.

We need to ask ourselves, “Does my child have the strength of character to say no? How independent are they really? Would I feel comfortable leaving my house for two months right now with them alone, by themselves, fending completely? Could I go a week, two weeks, three weeks without talking to them secure in the knowledge that they are fine? Does that describe my child?”

Give me one year of age over a hundred extra points on the SAT any day.

If the answer to any of those questions is no, perhaps a year waiting tables, doing construction, working in a nursing home, taking a welding class, community and environmental activism, learning about automotive maintenance, being a janitor, or bussing tables would be the best thing for them. Anything but tossing them into an environment full of sedatives, weed, beer bongs, fentanyl, cocaine, sexual promiscuity, peer pressure group-think, and a thousand temptations you never even knew existed.

College will still be there. It is not a race to adulthood. We do not have to disguise putting off college with terms like “gap year” or “intern year” or “leap year” or whatever. There was a time when gap year actually meant you worked at the GAP for a year, and got a ten percent discount on shirts and shorts, too.

Who the hell cares what our friends are doing with their own kids? Who cares where they bought their shield and sword. I, for one, wish I had taken a year or two off between high school and college. In fact, I wish I had served in the armed forces, for that matter. I went from kindergarten to residency. I could have used a couple years to grow up, too.

We need to encourage our kids to slow it down, to take a longer path to college, perhaps. Expose our kids to real education—the kind of education that comes with a W-2, a boss, getting up early and working late and interacting with people who can’t afford a higher education. Make them appreciate the life experiences that come with nailing a 2 x 4, washing dishes, wheeling people to X-ray, picking up garbage, answering telephones. Make them earn their spending money BEFORE college and decide on their own if they’d rather use it on alcohol, weed, a four-block Uber ride, or laundry and food.

Teach them these things and send them off to school as adults.

Or someone else may just teach them how to snort xanax instead.

There’s been quite a debate going on over the past week over a currently-popular gun control proposal, the “red flag” law.

That law is ostensibly supposed to keep guns out of the wrong hands. David Kopel testified before a U.S. Senate committee:

“Red flag” laws or “extreme risk protection orders” have been enacted in several states. While the idea for these laws is reasonable, some statutes are not. They destroy due process of law, endanger law enforcement and the public, and can be handy tools for stalkers and abusers to disarm the innocent victims. Nearly a third of such orders are improperly issued against innocent people. …

Bills that claim to be about “Extreme Risk Protection Orders” are not correct; the bills cover much lower-level risks, or just “a danger.” Likewise, the term “red flag” is dubious because some bills label as dangerous the peaceable exercise of constitutional rights. A more accurate name for these laws is “gun confiscation orders.” Such orders can be legitimate when fair procedures accurately identify dangerous individuals. Such laws include the following features:

• Petitions initiated by law enforcement, not by spurned dating partners or relationships from long ago.
• Ex parte hearings only when there is proof of necessity.
• Proof by clear and convincing evidence, which has been corroborated.
• Guarantees of all due process rights, including cross-examination and right to counsel.
• Court-appointed counsel if the respondent so wishes.
• A civil remedy for victims of false and malicious petitions.
• Safe and orderly procedures for relinquishment of firearms.
• Strict controls on no-knock raids.
• Storage of relinquished firearms by responsible third parties.
• Prompt restoration of concealed carry permits for the falsely accused.
• Prompt return of firearms upon the termination of an order.
• Renewal of orders based on presentation of clear and convincing proof.
• Not allowing time-limited orders to be bootstrapped into lifetime federal prohibition.

Maryland has a red-flag law. And this is how Maryland’s red flag law works, according to the Baltimore Sun:

Two Anne Arundel County police officers serving one of Maryland’s new “red flag” protective orders to remove guns from a house killed a Ferndale man after he refused to give up his gun and a struggle ensued early Monday morning, police said.

The subject of the protective order, Gary J. Willis, 60, answered his door in the 100 block of Linwood Ave. at 5:17 a.m. with a gun in his hand, Anne Arundel County police said. He initially put the gun down next to the door, but “became irate” when officers began to serve him with the order, opened the door and picked up the gun again, police said. …

A spokeswoman for the Maryland Judiciary denied a request to see any and all requests for protection orders made at the residence on Linwood Avenue, citing the law, which states that anything related to an order is confidential unless the court rules otherwise.

Michele Willis said she had grown up in the house and had been there Sunday night to move out her son, who had been helping to care for her grandmother.

Her uncle, Gary Willis, lived in an apartment above the garage; she said other family members, including her grandmother, another uncle, two aunts and Gary Willis’ girlfriend were also at the home Sunday night.

She said her uncle “likes to speak his mind,” but she described him as harmless.

“I’m just dumbfounded right now,” she said. “My uncle wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

David Altschul reports on the Wall Street Journal’s reporting:

Daniel McCarthy asks a good question:

Facebook Friend Michael Smith:

Statistically speaking, voting for a Democrat is more of a danger to public safety than the Second Amendment will ever be.

From their stances on an ever expanding welfare state, open borders and terrorism, Democrat policies pose a statistically significant safety risk to the general public – including political beliefs of all types.

You have to show ID and undergo a background check to buy a gun, you do neither to vote – actually, Democrats think it is discriminatory to require an ID to vote.

I expect now that California is 100% owned and operated by a radically progressive Democrat Party, it will continue down a path to Venezuelation. Not even Venezuela’s rich natural resources saved it and neither will those of California. Illinois is a good predictor of where California is likely to wind up. Illinois is California without the beaches and mountains.

But given the socialist nature of our federal government, California and other Democrat dominated states assume that the other 49 states will bail them out.

Secession has been bandied about by both right and left as a reaction to political changes but I wonder if the trigger for secession (we don’t have a mechanism, to expel a state from the union) might wind up being more financially related than politically related.

I think think the catalyst, the spark that sets the whole shebang aflame and finally pushes this over the edge might be what comes of three things of which I have been thinking:

1. States with lower tax rates are going to draw greater populations and more revenue generating businesses.

2. They are going to object to paying for the spending in the spendthrift states – bailing other states out.

3. Population and business shifts will deplete the tax base of states with entrenched governments, unfunded pension liabilities and powerful public sector unions, thereby exacerbating the problems in states like Illinois, New York and California.

I predict that the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back will be a lawsuit, one filed by a high tax state like California against states that have low or no state income or property tax rates because they are unfairly “pricing” their states – the effect of which is to rob the high tax states of the taxpayers necessary to support their respective state governments. If the burden is increased in one state by out-migration, that will be called “unfair” and I think these states will turn to the courts for a remedy.

There are states now that levy fees that are essentially “exit taxes” that you must pay when you move to another state – but no matter how high those are, they are a one-time shot, not long term, recurring revenue.

There is a possibility that a governor or a state attorney general might try the invoke the Commerce Clause but I think it is more likely they would try to use the Fourteenth Amendment which states, in part:

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Sound ridiculous?

My peeps, we eat ridiculous for breakfast these days. We start there and end the day with absurdity for dinner.

If the courts agree that when one state with lower taxes draws a taxpayer or business away, it is equal to depriving the people of a bankrupt state of the “privileges” in that state associated with being a “citizen of the United States” and that based on the equal protection clause, all states must have “equivalent” tax rates to prevent taxpayers shopping low tax states.

This argument has already been used effectively in the federal takeover of education when it comes to programs offered and levels of funding. The Feds simply institute things like Title IX and you either comply or your funding goes away and you get sued. I think we will see an attempt before the end of Trump’s next term to apply the same technique to taxes. The debasement of the Tenth Amendment has already done damage, potentially irreparable damage, to state sovereignty – so I would not be surprised to see such a gambit attempted.

Mark my words, could be headed for a crisis of constitutional proportions – and it will be started by a lawsuit.

The Associated Press reports a story you will never read again:

A new study finds that Wisconsin’s tax burden has dropped to a nearly 50-year low.

The Wisconsin Policy Forum report released Wednesday examines state and local taxes as a share of personal income. The report says that taxes accounted for 10.5 percent of income, down slightly from 10.6 percent last year.

That marks the seventh straight year of declines. It’s the lowest level going back to 1970, the earliest on record for the nonpartisan group.

The report says that the tax burden dropped primarily because personal income grew more quickly than did taxes. Income was up 3.6 percent while state and local taxes grew by 2.3 percent and federal taxes went up 0.7 percent.

The report says the tax burden is at its nearly 50-year low thanks largely to rising incomes, low unemployment and state-imposed property tax limits and cuts.

Of course, the Axis of Evil made sure we won’t be bothered with lower taxes, low unemployment and growing personal income ever again. Leave Wisconsin while you still can.

Readers may recall that I voted for Evan McMullin, not Donald Trump (don’t even ask if I’d consider voting for Hillary Clinton), in the 2016 presidential election.

McMullin then created the Stand Up Republic group, which instead of touting traditional (as opposed to Trump’s definition of) conservative ideals, has spent nearly two years doing nothing more than attacking Trump.

Yesterday, Stand Up Republic bent over for Wisconsin Democrats:

In a lame-duck session last week, the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature voted in favor of sweeping measures that would significantly curb the power of incoming Democratic Governor Tony Evers and incoming Attorney General Josh Kaul. These measures include broadly restricting Evers’ and Kaul’s ability to roll back or alter policies passed by statewide Republican lawmakers. The move was a nakedly partisan effort to curb the effects of electoral defeats.

Wisconsin’s Republicans aren’t the first people to think of this tactic; Democrats and Republicans have done it before. But these blatant power grabs are anti-democratic, and they should garner bipartisan outcry. Actions like this undermine the power of incoming elected officials with whom the losing party disagrees. The cornerstone of functional democracy is the peaceful transition of power from one political party to the next, and the expectation that both sides will play by the same electoral rules for the same offices because neither side can anticipate who might win the next election. Using the power of an elected office to weaken other offices based on party affiliation is damaging to faith in the institutions themselves. The measures passed last week undermine the power of the American voter by attempting to deny the authority of elected office to incoming officials, based solely on their policy preferences.

Wisconsin Republicans didn’t stop there. Last week they also voted to restrict the early voting period to a maximum of two weeks statewide. Rather than allow counties to make their own decisions on election processes, the GOP took control of the process in order to limit it. Once again, the legislature is instituting broad changes aimed at protecting their own electoral interests rather than respecting the independence and integrity of the state’s institutions.

Unfortunately, what happened in Wisconsin last week is a successful attempt to undermine our democracy by trying to take power out of the hands of duly elected state politicians. This time, it’s Republicans; tomorrow it may be Democrats. Party affiliation simply should not matter in the peaceful transition of power. We as Americans should stand up to any such anti-democratic power grabs, even when – perhaps especially when – they advantage our own political preferences. Ultimately, it’s up to us as voters to hold our representatives accountable for putting the strength of democratic institutions above their own political interests.

You might think that a site that calls itself a “Republic” would know the difference between a republic and democracy, but in this case you’d be wrong. The fact is that Walker is governor and the current Legislature is in office until the new governor and Legislature are sworn into office Jan. 7. To claim that the current governor and Legislature must not do anything legislatively and bend over for the next governor is ridiculous and insulting to everyone who voted Nov. 6.

Moreover, it is appallingly ignorant to believe that the Wisconsin Democratic Party has any intention at all of respecting traditional conservative ideals of any kind, let alone what Walker did over the past eight years. The idea that anything is OK if passed by our duly elected representatives, which is what McMullin is essentially arguing, is a big steaming, asphysicating pile of slurry.

Back when McMullin was running, he listed 10 reasons to vote for him that included:

7. Win or lose, he has the power to carry the conservative principles away from the shark infested waters and to the shore.

Not anymore, it seems. Of course, McMullin then said …

If it’s down to Hillary and Trump, Trump is taking a loss. It would require a miracle for him to win (one that’s not beyond Hillary, I suppose).

… so he must be used to being wrong by now.