SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

OBAMAN WEAKNESS – FROM FOX:  For the next week, not only will there be no U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in the Middle East, but there will be no American aircraft carriers deployed at sea anywhere else in the world, despite a host of worldwide threats facing the United States.   Think about that, and what it says about the national-defense policy of our outgoing president.  Absolutely pathetic.

LATEST POLITICAL BULLETIN – FROM DAILY CALLER:   A taxpayer-funded political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has concluded that political conditions in North Carolina are comparable to political conditions in totalitarian nations such as Cuba, Venezuela and Iran because Republicans are too politically successful.  The professor, Andrew Reynolds, aired his 936-word grievance last week in The News & Observer, a newspaper out of Raleigh.  North Carolina “can no longer be classified as a full democracy,” Reynolds declares, because the statewide Republican Party has been too successful at winning the state’s winner-take-all elections.  We must remain vigilant against all successful Americans, including Republicans.  If they're successful, they must be criminals, and capitalist warmongers.

THE PRESIDENT'S HOME TOWN, AS HIS TERM ENDS – FROM THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE:  A persistent reality for some of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods, violence unnerved far reaches of the city in 2016 as shootings and homicides soared. Not since the drug-fueled bloodshed of the mid-1990s had the city witnessed such a toll.  Some neighborhoods, already scarred and gutted by years of violence, suffered inordinately. But the danger spread into more neighborhoods, too, and randomness became an all-too-familiar element to many shootings.  Grim milestones added up: The deadliest month in 23 years. The deadliest day in 13 years. 4,300 people shot. As the year wound down, with the promise of a new year coming soon, a violent Christmas Day.  "It's a shame. It's a shame," said Rafi Peterson, a community activist in the Chicago Lawn community on the Southwest Side. "Those lives cannot be replaced."   But those lives don't matter to radical activists, who see human life as trivial, unless it can be used to advance a political objective.  The president of the United States does not seem much bothered.

December 30, 2016