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DECEMBER 16,  2018

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:54 P.M. ET:

ANY PRESS COVERAGE? – FROM DAILY CALLER:  President Donald Trump made an unannounced visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday to honor America’s fallen as thousands across the country laid wreaths on veterans’ graves.  Trump paid his respects as volunteers for Wreaths Across America waited in long lines to place a Christmas wreath on the tombs of America’s greatest heroes. The event, which is held every December, aims to “remember, honor, and teach” about those who served, and perished, fighting for America’s freedom. In addition to Arlington National Cemetery, Wreaths Across America Day is observed at more than 1,400 cemeteries in all 50 states, as well as at sea and abroad.  Haven't seen any press coverage of this. 

OUTRAGEOUS – FROM DAILYWIRE:  In a comment that's caused a stir online and inspired coverage by numerous outlets — including Mediaite, who predicted it's going to just be more fodder for "aggrieved White Men" prone to "yelling about the horrors of 'identity politics"' — CNN analyst Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight suggested during his "2020 Power Rankings for Potential Dem Contenders" on CNN Thursday that it was probably not the best time for Democrats to nominate a white male candidate.  What have we come to?  Identity politics is all the rage.  Judge candidates by their group, not their character.  Great way to choose the leader of the Free World.

EXPLOITATION OF THE PARROT COMMUNITY – FROM FOX:   A parrot has fallen in love with his owner’s Amazon Alexa — but keeps using it to order shopping.  So far Rocco the African Grey, from Didcot, Oxfordshire, U.K., has demanded treats such as strawberries, watermelon, raisins, broccoli and ice cream.  He has also ordered a kite, light bulbs and even a kettle.  Rocco likes to dance too and tells the voice-activated device to play favorite tunes. Sometimes they are slow numbers, but he generally prefers rock.  Clearly, this parrot is being used as a staff assistant by some cruel owner.  The exploitation of parrots is linked closely with white supremacy.

December 16, 2018        Permalink

GOING...GOING.... – AT 1:20 P.M. ET:  France is still on the edge, with new, although smaller, riots this weekend.  And through it all stands, or stoops, President Macron, whose approval has now sunk to HALF of that enjoyed by President Trump.  From Bloomberg:   

Emmanuel Macron’s popularity continued to slide in December despite concessions announced by the French president in response to weeks of protests by the so-called Yellow Vest movement.

Macron’s approval rating dropped two points from a month earlier, to 23 percent, according to a poll by Ifop for the Journal du Dimanche weekly. Macron’s popularity has fallen by 27 points during the course of 2018, the newspaper reported.

On Saturday, the same day that the polling ended, demonstrations held across France by the Yellow Vest movement drew around half the number of last week’s protesters, suggesting that his offers have dented the campaign’s momentum. Macron on Dec. 10 announced that he’ll raise the minimum wage, abolish taxes on overtime and get rid of a controversial tax on pensions.

"Dialogue must now bring together all those who want to change France," Interior Minister Christophe Castaner wrote late Saturday in a tweet, adding that the day "ended well."

The protests have battered the French economy at a time when Macron is in need of a boost to help deliver his agenda. Sales sacrificed to the protests have already exceed 1 billion euros ($1.13 billion), according to the FCD national retail federation. And the latest Purchasing Managers’ Index showed the country’s private sector contracting in December for the first time during Macron’s presidency.

COMMENT:  Western Europe has become so depressing, really a museum with some modern industry attached.  Asia is building and growing, and becoming increasingly high-tech.  There are economic stirrings in some of the countries of Africa.  Western Europe is almost certain to diminish in importance, except for junior-year-abroad programs.

December 16, 2018       Permalink   

TURLEY ON COHEN – AT 12:29 P.M. ET:  I am not defending the moral character of the president.  We pretty much know what we have in him, good and bad.  But the sudden moral elevation of his sometime lawyer, Michael Cohen, by the anti-Trump press, borders on the hilarious.  Jonathan Turley, of George Washington University Law School, provides some enlightenment.  From Fox: 

In his federal court sentencing hearing Wednesday, President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen cut a tragic figure of his own making as he tried to convince a judge to spare him from prison for a host of crimes ranging from tax fraud to bank fraud to lying to Congress. He claimed he was a trusting soul undone by the ambition and the machinations of an evil man – Donald Trump.

It played out like a modern take on the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire.” All that was missing was that signature line of the character Blanche DuBois: “Whoever you are … I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Blanche was describing her life of woe to a doctor escorting her to a mental hospital. But her line could have been easily added to Cohen’s plea to U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III in New York City.

The former Trump “fixer” and lawyer – who made millions of dollars off his connection to Trump and illegal business dealings – is now a disgraced confessed criminal facing three years in prison (set to begin March 6) and $2 million in fines, forfeitures and restitution. His legal career is over and he easily fits the role of the type of train-wrecked characters that Tennessee Williams loved.

In “A Streetcar Named Desire” Blanche DuBois is a riveting character – imperfect, degraded and ultimately destitute. According to his narrative before Judge Pauley, Cohen has lived much of his professional life like a modern Blanche DuBois.

Cohen’s tragedy was presented as a tale of affairs gone bad and women scorned, with a cast of opportunists and sycophants. Cohen latched onto Trump as a powerful man who was his ticket to fortune and the good life.

COMMENT:  Wonderfully done.  Read the whole thing.  All the sudden redemption.  Testify against Trump, get a blessing from the special counsel.

What a concept.

December 16,  2018    Permalink

DECEMBER 15,  2018

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

DIVIDED NATION – FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:    It is rare that Republicans and Democrats agree on something. But the two battling factions do see eye to eye on one thing: They are troubled by stark political divides among Americans.  A Fox News poll finds that 78 percent of all U.S. voters are now either “extremely or very concerned” about the polarized nation; that includes 75 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of independents and 82 percent of Democrats.  According to the poll data, only health care — which concerns 83 percent of the public — outranks political division on the national roster of worries.  Tied in third place, Americans fret about the opioid addiction crisis and the national economy; both issues concern 74 percent.  Next on the list: natural disasters (70 percent), followed by race relations (69 percent), gun laws, (69 percent) climate change (64 percent), sexual harassment (63 percent), illegal immigration (66 percent) and the Central America “caravan” (59 percent.)  I'm not so sure how useful this new Fox poll is.  It seems from the numbers that Americans are highly concerned about almost everything.  I suspect many numbers are just driven by the degree of coverage in the mainstream media.   Name recognition.

HE GETS IT RIGHT – FROM FOX:  A comedian who was born in the former Soviet Union said that when a British college asked him to sign an agreement stipulating that he could not transgress multiple factions of people with his jokes, he "felt right at home."  Tucker Carlson said Konstantin Kisin's case is another example of "free speech ebbing away on college campuses," adding that people are becoming "unable to take a joke."  A London-based School of African and Oriental Studies asked Kisin to sign a document that would ban him from joking about "racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion or anti-atheism."  "All jokes must be respectful and kind," Carlson said the document stipulated.  Kisin said, however, the situation is "an outlier" and that he is not usually required to curb his humor when performing.  An outlier now, common policy tomorrow.  A darkness is descending on colleges and universities throughout the West.  Britain is a particularly bad example.

ACTUALLY, A GOOD IDEA – FROM CBS LOCAL:   Millennials who feel they lack some basic life skills can now take "adulting" classes, which are expanding across the country. The classes teach life skills like cooking, budgeting and time management, CBS New York reports, and young adults are signing up for lessons in person and online.  Rachel Flehinger co-founded the aptly named Adulting School in Portland, Maine. This month, she is launching online classes geared toward millennials who want to learn how to sew on a button, understand modern art or even deal with love.  The course curriculum on love will include "how to have a relationship, how to talk to someone, conflict resolution — how not to fight," Flehinger said. It will even offer guidance on how to tell someone you love them.  Elena Toumaras, 29, is currently learning an adult skill she was never taught before – cooking. Toumaras is attending a cooking class in Queens to help fill a gap in her life skill knowledge.  "I was so used to -- when living at home -- my mom always cooking," she said. "Doing simple things now that I'm on my own, I'm struggling with it."  Good for them.  Learning basic life skills should be part of every education, and might even turn out to be more useful than attending anti-American rallies.

December 15, 2018       Permalink

AND ANOTHER FORM OF MADNESS – AT 2:30 P.M. ET:  If you want a taste of what's happening on our college campuses, just read this story.  From the Washington Examiner: 

A yoga club at American University has been shuttered due to a single complaint of cultural appropriation.

The campus Bhakti Yoga Club invited a non-Indian group to perform the Indian epic “The Ramayana." This did not sit well with American University student Maya Krishnan, who complained to the President’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion.

Krishnan also wrote an op-ed in the student paper, The Eagle, titled, "Opinion: ‘India Day’ festival and Viva Kultura performance shows that AU’s administration forgets their South Asian students."

“Having my culture represented by an almost entirely white troupe of dancers is incredibly frustrating,” Krishnan wrote.

She continued: “The sponsors of this show and the artists acted as if their actions were acceptable because they have converted to the Hare Krishna sect of Hinduism. The reality of this is that white European dancers will never know my intersectional experience as a Hindu woman, being a brown bodied person and the other aspects of systematic racism that I, as well as other South Asian people, have experienced.”

As a result, the yoga club's adviser, president, and vice president have all resigned.

The higher education watchdog site Campus Reform confirmed the club no longer exists as a direct result of this silly complaint.

COMMENT:  What have our colleges become?   Some have become sandboxes filled with children and cowards.  We are not going to make real progress in this society until our feeder systems – our schools – are reformed, brought up to date, and stiffened against madness.  I see no sign of that.

December 15, 2018       Permalink

A SENSE OF OUTRAGE – AT 12:44 P.M. ET:  Readers might notice that there's not much happening.  It's typical of holiday time.  You've got lots of document dumps, some public statements, and announcements of a guy in Washington getting a new job, or leaving an old one.  And CNN staffers can still give you an opinion on almost anything.

But people are distracted during the holidays, and the sense of size in the news is diminished.  Sometimes, during this period, I have to poke around for a story worth telling. 

There is one that is definitely worth telling, and that is a sense of outrage that I see emerging in the country at the growth of the investigative state.  Not since the so-called McCarthy era have I seen such concern over the power of investigators to paralyze and distort our government.

We elect a president to serve, not to be under constant investigation.  Yet, Mr. Trump, no matter what you may think of him, has been under siege almost since the day he took office.

We have the Mueller probe, which goes on and on.

We are told, with some enthusiasm, by the usual suspects, that the new, Democratic House will open a number of fresh investigations into the president.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is getting into the act with a new probe of Trump.

This week we learned that the New York State attorney general, a leftist hack of hacks, intends to investigate the whole Trump family.  Maybe even the ancestors.  No evidence presented, of course. 

And now we are told that the attorney general's office in New Jersey is starting its own inquiry into Trump business practices in that state.

Many of the announcements of investigations have come just in the last few weeks, right after the election. 

And it's an outrage.  Clearly, this package of probes is intended to bring down the president, to make it impossible for him to govern.  We elected this man, but it doesn't matter to the opposition.  To them, we made a mistake that they, in their greater moral position, must correct.  Democratic officials or supporters are involved in almost all of the investigations.

This is not the way a democracy can work.  If there is real evidence, pursue it.  But the sheer number of probes raises the gravest of questions – do we currently have government by investigation?  The power of the inquisitor is well known throughout modern history.  Sometimes it is used legitimately, other times it is not.

I have a feeling that this is one of those "other" times.  Too much like the early 1950s.  The sad fact today, though, is that the press is on the side of the grand inquisitors, and asks few probing questions of its own.  The inquisitors' power is unchallenged.

December 15,  2018     Permalink