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FEBRUARY 22,  2018 

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

KEEP THOSE ROCKETS ON THE GROUND! – FROM COLLEGE FIX:  It’s certainly something you would expect to come out of an “institute for gender research”: The latest leg in the space race — traveling to, and then eventually colonizing, the planet Mars — is the personification of … patriarchy.  So says Marci Bianco, the communications manager of Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, whose article titled “The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement” is featured — ironically — on the NBC News website’s “Think” section.  Bianco derides the efforts of mega-rich Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Richard Branson (Virgin) to get into space, and makes an all-too predictable jab at President Trump in the process (because, again, patriarchy!)  Well, let's give up that dream.  Put the rockets away.  I should have known the flight to Mars was socially offensive.

THIS IS WHAT CHILD PRIME MINISTERS DO – FROM DAILYWIRE.COM:   What is wrong with this guy?  Fresh off lecturing a young woman to say “peoplekind” instead of “mankind,” Canada’s pretty boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped in it again, this time insulting the entire nation of India during his boondoggle of an eight-day family workcation.  Twitter lit into Trudeau, 46, this week, for wearing over-the-top, traditional Indian attire that appeared at once desperate and condescending. Sherwanis; kurta shirts; an awkward outfit straight out of central casting for a Bollywood bridegroom.  “It’s a kind of reverse colonialism to want to mimic the ‘native’. Doing a kurta number as a salute to a culture is one thing, but Justin Trudeau’s display of trousseau like repertoire of multi-coloured kurtas has begun to grate,” wrote Indian political consultant Dilip Cherian.  He's prime minister because his father Pierre was prime minister.  He has no other qualifications.  He enters the eighth grade next year.

WE ARE INVADED! – FROM DAILYWIRE.COM:  Over the weekend the Seattle Times jumped at a news tip: there was a Confederate Flag flying beneath the American flag in the city's Greenwood neighborhood and residents were very concerned.  Only, it turns out, it wasn't the Confederate flag at all. It was the state flag of Norway, and a group of friendly Norwegians were just trying to show their patriotism and support for their Olympic Team when their very concerned neighbors contacted local media.  “Hi. Suddenly there is a Confederate flag flying in front of a house in my Greenwood neighborhood. It is at the north-east corner of 92nd and Palatine, just a block west of 92nd and Greenwood Ave N.," the tipster wrote. "I would love to know what this ‘means’ … but of course don’t want to knock on their door. Maybe others in the area are flying the flag? Maybe it’s a story? Thank you."  I love those patriotic liberals, don't you?  I doubt if they'd call if they saw a hammer and sickle.

February 22, 2018       Permalink

THE BOOMING ECONOMY – AT 12:08 P.M. ET:   Applications for unemployment benefits continue to drop, further proof of a robust, growing economy.  From the Washington Examiner: 

New applications for unemployment benefits dropped 7,000 to 222,000 in the second full week of February, the Department of Labor reported Thursday, the second-lowest mark of the recovery and a good sign for the economy.

Forecasters had expected new jobless claims to remain steady at an ultra-low 230,000. Lower claims are good news because they mean fewer people are getting laid off.

Thursday's mark is the lowest since the early 1970s, setting aside the week of January 13, when claims touched as low as 216,000.

The report should raise expectations for a very strong jobs report for the month of February, since it covered the week in which businesses will be surveyed.

From the low level of claims, it appears that employers are holding onto employees more, rather than laying them off, likely because workers are becoming harder to find.

"In short, claims remain historically low, consistent with the trend in employment growth remaining more than strong enough to keep the unemployment rate trending down," noted Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics.

COMMENT:  Politically, this is Trump's strongest weapon.  I have no doubt that the GOP is already planning to base its fall campaign on the fact that every Democrat in Congress voted against the president's tax cut.  What will the Dems say to Americans in response?  You don't need it?  Illegal immigrants need it more?  You'll just use it to increase global warming?

February 22, 2018       Permalink

A FURTHER OUTRAGE – AT 10:33 A.M. ET:  The mainstream press wants the aftermath of the Florida school-shooting horror to be devoted entirely to gun control, a favorite cause of the left.  And, yes, the subject of guns must be part of the discussion.  No issue there.

However, there are other factors in the Florida shooting that demand attention from those who seriously are looking for answers.   I stress seriously.  I've just disqualified about 90 percent of the voices we are hearing.   From Conservative Treehouse: 

As expected – buried deep inside a Miami Herald article about the Parkland school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and a school board questioning their progressive policies, we find the following:

[…]  Absent Cruz’s school records, it is hard to say precisely when Cruz’s behavior became an acute problem for teachers and administrators. Disciplinary reports obtained by the Herald show that at Westglades Middle School, which he attended in 2013, he’d been cited numerous times for disrupting class, unruly behavior, insulting or profane language, profanity toward staff, disobedience and other rules violations.

Records show the behaviors continued at Marjory Stoneman Douglas [High School], which he attended in 2016 and 2017 before being transferred, with discipline being dispensed for fighting, profanity, and an “assault.” It appears the Jan. 19, 2017 assault resulted in a referral for a “threat assessment.” A few months later, Cruz landed at an Off Campus Learning Center, where he remained for only about five months. 

Well, there it is.

This is what Jack Cashill was writing about yesterday: “Did the Progressive ‘Broward County Solution’ Cost 17 Student Lives?” –

Yes Jack, yes it did.

COMMENT:  Please read the whole piece.  It is devastating.  It turns out that there were, at one time, a large number of minority youth in Broward County being arrested for serious, violent crimes.  This didn't sit well with "progressives" and local ethnic leaders.  So, school policies were changed.  Students who previously would have been arrested were simply reported for school discipline.  Instead of the seriousness of their crimes being addressed, they were shoved under the rug.  Nothing to see, nothing to see.  Just a little mischief.

Of course, the arrest rate for minorities went down.  Things looked better on paper.  Progressivism triumphed. 

One of the victims of the change in policy was Trayvon Martin.  You remember him, I'm sure.  The sweet innocent kid shot to death by a local vigilante.  Turns out, though, that Trayvon was anything but sweet and innocent.  He was a severely troubled stick of dynamite.  But he, too, was handled with kid gloves.  Mustn't let that arrest rate rise again.

Both Trayvon Martin and last week's killer, Nikolas Cruz, were on the radar screen of authorities.  But the authorities weren't allowed to look too closely at the screen.

February 22, 2018       Permalink

OUTRAGEOUS – AT 9:25 A.M. ET:  Readers know that I am no fan of CNN.  It was always somewhat problematical, with a liberal tilt that was obvious to anyone with a beating pulse.  But these days it has become nothing more than the hate-Trump network, and has essentially given up its credibility.  It also seems to be searching for new lows to conquer.  From RealClearPolitics: 

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Colton Haab said CNN approached him to ask a question at Wednesday night's town hall but decided not to after he found out the network gave him a "scripted question." Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC, shielded students while the school was under attack from a shooter, said he was going to ask about using veterans as armed security guards.

"CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted," Haab told WPLG-TV.

CNN aired a town hall on the Florida school shooting with Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) that included NRA's Dana Loesch and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel that was moderated by Jake Tapper. Students and parents asked questions about gun control and school safety.

"I expected to be able to ask my questions and give my opinion on my questions," Haab said.

"Colton Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC who shielded classmates in the midst of terror says he did not get to share his experience," the reporter explained.

"Colton wrote questions about school safety, suggested using veterans as armed school security guards but claims CNN wanted him to ask a scripted question instead so he decided not to go," WPLG-TV reported.

COMMENT:  Nothing like exploiting children.  What an operation!  CNN owes its audience an apology, but it will never come.  It will stand by its story, and blame Donald Trump.

February 22,  2018      Permalink

FEBRUARY 21,  2018

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

BIAS?  YOU MUST BE KIDDING – FROM DAILY CALLER:   None of the 16 publicly-confirmed lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team are registered Republicans, The Daily Caller News Foundation has found.  Voter registration records indicate that 13 of the attorneys are Democrats and three have no party affiliation. This is the first time the political affiliation of all 16 lawyers has been reported.
One of the lawyers, Zainab Ahmad, appears to have registered as a Republican at the age of 18, but has since changed her registration status to unaffiliated.   There is a 17th lawyer on the Russia probe, but this person’s identity and political affiliation remain unknown.  The special counsel’s office has previously disclosed that nine of the 16 lawyers have made a total of $62,000 in donations to Democrats, with one of those nine lawyers having also donated $2,750 to Republican candidates.  Appearances do count, and the appearances here are pretty awful.

OH DEAR, THE CALCULATOR MUST NEED NEW BATTERIES – FROM DAILY MAIL:   Despite a never-ending drumbeat of criticism and suspicion related to a trio of Russia investigations, President Donald Trump's approval rating is in better shape than Barack Obama's was at the same point in his presidency.  Trump's job approval number stood at 48 per cent on Wednesday in a Rasmussen Reports tracking poll. Fifty-one per cent disapprove.  On February 21, 2010, Obama's was 45 per cent, with 54 per cent opposed to his work in the Oval Office.  Trump's current level of support is also above his performance level in the 2016 election, when 46.1 per cent of voters chose him over Hillary Clinton and a handful of minor candidates.  What does this say about the actual influence of the news media?  They're throwing everything they've got at Trump, and much of it is bouncing off.

AIN'T SOCIALISM GRAND? – FROM REUTERS:   CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year and almost 90 percent now live in poverty, according to a new university study on the impact of a devastating economic crisis and food shortages.  The annual survey, published on Wednesday by three universities, is one of the most closely-followed assessments of Venezuelans’ well being amid a government information vacuum and shows a steady rise in poverty and hunger in recent years.  Over 60 percent of Venezuelans surveyed said that during the previous three months they had woken up hungry because they did not have enough money to buy food. About a quarter of the population was eating two or less meals a day, the study showed. Last year, the three universities found that Venezuelans said they had lost an average of 8 kilograms during 2016. The Hollywood "stars" who rushed to Hugo Chavez's side to show solidarity are now strangely silent.

February 21,  2018     Permalink

COMMON SENSE ANSWERS – AT 2:31 P.M. ET:   TV News tells us there's a new student movement devoted to gun control.  And of course, the usual suspects in the press are drooling all over these kids.  We should admire their wish to participate, to help solve a problem, to save lives.  Commendable.  Very much so.  But we must never base public policy on their conclusions or recommendations.  It is common for young people to ask the right questions and come up with answers that are wrong or even catastrophic.  And our responsibility is to potential victims, who we must protect from harm.

One common-sense answer to gun violence is to harden schools, making them as invulnerable as possible to an active shooter.  Many on the left don't like that because it doesn't fit their world view.  But mature adults realize it's a critical first step toward the saving of actual lives.  From Breitbart: 

Butler County, Ohio, Sheriff Richard K. Jones offered free concealed carry training for 50 teachers and 250 teachers responded within 24 hours.

Breitbart News reported that Jones began advertising the free training on Sunday and the immediate response was 50 emails within 20 minutes:

On February 20 Fox 91 reported the response had jumped to 250 teachers who wanted training. Jones reveled in the opportunity to instruct them, saying, “We have 250 and growing fast. We will start training fast, next week.”

He stressed that he wants teachers to understand what they can do with a gun if an armed attacker enters the classroom. And while he cannot delegate the authority for teachers to carry on a given campus–that is a school board decision–Jones said he wants the teachers to be ready if their school board so chooses.

He said, “If the school boards want to give the authority to teachers to be armed…[they] can do that, they have the authority to do it, but I’m going to do my part, and I assume I’m probably the only one in the state of Ohio that’s doing that – but something has to happen.”

COMMENT:  Good!  We can do so much so quickly to harden schools, including the call-up of Military Police companies in the Guard and Reserves.  We can hire veterans and retired police officers.  We can ask for parent and grandparent volunteers to sit at a desk at the front door of a school several hours a week, and alert the school to any danger.

It's improvisation.  It isn't perfection.  But there are many patchwork things we can do immediately to help protect kids.

Or will the ideologists take over and resist any practical measures, pushing instead for "gun control" to satisfy their constituencies?

February 21, 2018       Permalink

JUST THE FACTS, PLEASE – AT 12:45 P.M. ET:  Since the horror of the Florida shootings, a great deal of misinformation has been passed around.  No one wants to diminish the awfulness of what happened.  But false information can do no good.  One falsehood given great prominence is that we lead the world in mass killings, that they don't really occur too often anywhere else.   We don't have a record we can be proud of, but we are far from the top.  From IBD: 

A study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn't lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn't even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million population from mass public shootings.

So who's tops? Surprisingly, Norway is, with an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million (high no doubt because of the rifle assault by political extremist Anders Brevik that claimed 77 lives in 2011). No. 2 is Serbia, at just 0.381, followed by France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206. Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic all follow. Then comes the U.S., at No. 11, with a death rate of 0.089.

That's not all. There were also 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S.

"There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed," the study said. "Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom."

"But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany's and five times the U.K.'s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher."

Yes, the U.S. rate is still high, and nothing to be proud of. But it's not the highest in the developed world. Not by a long shot.

COMMENT:  Let's see if the political class and its allies in the press get that right.  I doubt if they will.  Saying that the U.S,. is the world leader in mass killings is just the kind of thought that the left loves. 

Truth?  Who needs truth?

February 21, 2018       Permalink

OLYMPICS DIVE – AT 9:58 A.M. ET:  Hear many people talking about the Olympics?  Neither have I.  They're a bust.  Not only have Americans not done particularly well, but NBC has botched just about everything.

After days of on-air gaffes, trying to cover the Florida shootings from South Korea, and having on-air talent that, in too many cases, didn't measure up, NBC topped it off last night by cutting off ladies' figure skating, the premier audience sport of the winter Olympics, to go to local news.  If you wanted to continue watching the ladies skate, you had to find an obscure sports channel associated with NBC.  I doubt if all TV systems even have it.  If you stuck with NBC, you could get the ladies, on tape, after the locals told us about what was happening in the neighborhoods. 

Brilliant move by NBC.  Tonight the ladies continue.  Let's see if the network can prevail upon the locals to delay their broadcasts so we can watch an entire event.  From Deadline.com: 

Heading into the final days of competition out of PyeongChang and February 25’s closing ceremony, the ratings for NBC out of these games are pretty clearly not going to be making on to any podium Looking on track to be the lowest rated Olympics ever with a drop of about 8% from the previous last place of Sochi 2014, the coverage last night presented mixed results.

With a 12.6/21 metered market rating, last night’s President’s Day primetime coverage on NBC and NBC Sports Network was down 13% from the early numbers , the first Monday of the 2018 Games. That is not a low for the 2018 Games, the hockey saw NBCSN have its best Monday prime since June 2015 and actually represents an overall bop up of 7% from the results of February 18’s primetime NBC and NBCSN airing.

Still, with that breathlessly said, the combo ratings from the two Comcast-owned outlets also saw a 14% drop from the NBC-only primetime coverage of the Sochi Olympics on the comparable night of February 17, 2014.

Having the well-hyped debut of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon as its lead-out, that Monday Olympics broadcast of over four years ago went on to snare 23.5 million viewers. Facing some actual worthy competition on the other nets, that was the first time that the tape-delayed games out of Russia topped the mainly live 2010 Olympics from Vancouver for the struggling XXII Winter Olympics.

Up against The Bachelor and Big Brother: Celebrity Edition on the holiday Monday of last night, it appears unlikely we’ll see a similar win in the final numbers today.

As it is, when you just go NBC’18 to NBC’14, last night’s metered market ratings fell 22% from Sochi, one of the harshest drops of these games so far.

COMMENT:  All kinds of reasons will be given.  I think, and it's only my own speculation, that a combination of factors conspired to produce this dismal result.  NBC's many mistakes and lack of flair were probably primary.   A suspicion that the Olympics might be politicized, as was pro football this season, was probably in there as well.  And the lack of recognizable star names in American figure skating played a role.

February 21,  2018     Permalink