Bill Owens

So, where are we on the campaign promises? I’ll comment on a few of them. Raids have gone forward in Chicago, Atlanta and New Jersey, but they are small and merely create a façade to satisfy his supporters.

President Eisenhower, on leaving office, commented about the military industrial complex. Mr. Biden has followed suit, with commentary about the tech industrial complex. We paid little attention to Mr. Eisenhower, and likely will pay little attention to Mr. Biden. These are, however, important ideas that need to be controlled.

It has been reported that US deportations are at their highest level since 2014. An ICE report shows having deported 271,484 people were deported to 200 countries in the last fiscal year according to the agency’s annual report. It will be interesting to see if Mr. Trump does better in his first year. I suspect not.

Popular Mechanics has published an article indicating that a 400-year-old clue buried in a map of the new world discloses what may have happened to the Roanoke colony. It appears that it moved about 100 miles north of its original location and then disappeared. But, it does at least leave a trail to this mystery which has befuddled archeologists and historians for years.

Canada has a new plan for US trade talks; blame it on Mexico. The Canadian government seems to think that the new Trump administration could be problematic when it comes to trade issues and I think there is some basis for that concern and they have a plan, which is to make Mexico the bad guy in this process. Of course, with the border issues, that is probably fairly easy to do with the Trump administration.

It appears Mr. Trump is picking at least three members of the Republican Congressional Delegation to serve in his administration, and potentially a fourth and a fifth, which means for at least 30 to 120 days the Republicans will be down several votes, and depending on the final count that could mean that they would only have two or three votes to spare during this period. Given the proclivities of the Republican Freedom Caucus, that could create tremendous issues for the passage of bills desired by Mr. Trump. It seems like a peculiar strategy and one that could do significant damage to the first 100 days. We’ve seen this show before.

The entity charged with calling the election day results is, in general, the press, but in particular it is the AP. I was not aware that the AP had been doing this for 175 years, which in and of itself is a staggering piece of information.

There is speculation that the race for Mayor in Plattsburgh between the Democrat Wendell Hughes and Republican Donald Kasprzak is tight. Due to the fact that there is no polling, it is very difficult to determine what the status of the race is. I do think two factors need to be addressed.

Home sales slowed again in September, having the weakest level of sales in 14 years with prices up 49% over a 5-year period versus income growth of approximately 25%. This disparity continues to climb. It appears that Vice President Harris has a good idea to build 3 million homes. Whether it’s practical or not, we’ll have to wait and see.

Mr. Trump continues to tout his massive deportation program but for those of us in Northern New York who are surrounded by dairy farmers, most of whom have illegal immigrants working on their farms, this could be an economic disaster. It is interesting that you hear very little out of the dairy industry complaining about Mr. Trump’s proposal.