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NOVEMBER 13,  2016

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

ARE WE SERIOUS HERE? – FROM REUTERS:   ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey warned its citizens about travel to the United States on Saturday in response to what the foreign ministry called increasingly violent protests against President-elect Donald Trump.  "Within the context of risks caused by the incidents and of social tension, our citizens who live in the U.S., or who are considering traveling there, should be cautious," the ministry said in a statement.   Maybe we can all retreat to the calm and safety of Islamic Turkey.

SHE'S BECOMING NUTS – FROM THE HILL:   Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg brought audiences to their feet at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC this weekend.  The 83-year-old justice played as the Duchess of Krakenthorp in the opera "The Daughter of the Regiment."
Ginsburg's lines had been rewritten so that she could play the role with 21st century relevance, reports USA Today.  While Ginsburg didn't sing, she got a warm reception, according to the LA Times.  One of the biggest laughs of the night came, according to the Times, came when Ginsburg appeared to reference the "birther" campaign against President Obama.  In asking whether the title character, Marie, was worthy of marrying her nephew, Ginsburg asked if she could produce a birth certificate.  "We must take precautions against fraudulent pretenders," she said.  Everyone should have a second profession.

REASONABLE – President-elect Trump, in his "Sixty Minutes" interview tonight, seemed to back off from threats to prosecute Hillary Clinton.  That's a wise move.  It would be incredibly unseemly, and thoroughly divisive, for a president to prosecute his recent opponent.  Sounds very third-world to me.  Besides, Clinton has suffered enough.  She's been beaten badly, and humiliated, and must surely know that her reputation for corruption had a great deal to do with it.  We'd be wiser to put the Clintons behind us.  I have no problem with Obama issuing a pardon, or even Trump doing it.  Then we can move on with the nation's business, as we did when Ford pardoned Nixon.  I know others will disagree, but there are many forms of just punishment, and public humiliation is one of them.

November 13, 2016       Permalink

BILL TRIED – AT 12:40 P.M. ET:   Say what you want about Bill Clinton, and we've said plenty here, but he's  great retail politician.  Apparently he did understand the disconnect between the Democratic Party and the people it claimed to represent, but was ignored.  From the Washington Examiner: 

Bill Clinton stood before an audience of blue-collar workers in Lansing, Mich., two days before the presidential election and told them he understood and empathized with the economic frustrations of the working class.

"There's a lot of road rage out there because after the financial crash, it took a long time before incomes started going up again. There are still some families that if you adjust for inflation, their incomes are about what they were the last day I was president more than 15 years ago and their costs are going up. And that's really tough," the former president drawled as he campaigned on behalf of his wife, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

"So when you get up every morning, and you look in the mirror and you don't think you've got the power to make tomorrow better than today, that's a pretty tough load to carry," he told an audience that included union laborers.

Compared to the main themes of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the former president's remarks in Lansing seemed like an off-script moment.

And...

Lansing, it turns out, was not a one-off incident for Bill Clinton. It certainly was not a first for him on the campaign trail.

His comments in Michigan marked the last leg of a lonely, one-man war he launched earlier in the election to appeal to working-class and white rural voters, whom senior Clinton staffers reportedly told him were not worth the time or effort.

COMMENT:  This is a major story.  It is worth one of those CNN documentaries that always seem to follow the leftist party line.  Maybe they could do one that doesn't.  They might call it, "Bill Clinton on Politics," and it would be worth watching.

The people who made Trump's election possible used to be the heart of the Democratic Party, and the party left them.  That is the key story of this election.

November 13, 2016       Permalink

NO, LET'S NOT – AT 11:58 A.M. ET:  Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who politicized the Justice Department, now proposes a change in the Constitution to deal with the Democrats' loss of the presidency.  Get rid of the Electoral College.  From Hot Air:

The electoral college is an affront to a movement that rarely imagines a form of centralized authority that it doesn’t like.

The point of the Electoral College is simple: to restrict the power of the majority. There’s a tendency to forget that majority rule is only half of a free country — the other half is the protection of the rights of the minority, of the dissenters. This is why our federal government has two legislative houses instead of one. The House of Representatives is filled on the majority-rule principle, with greater power given to larger states; the Senate, on the minority-protection principle, with equal power given to each state no matter its size…

Remember: The Constitution intends that most laws be made on a scale much smaller than the federal government, where the individual voter has, proportionally, a much greater say, and where local problems can be dealt with without affecting unconcerned strangers. The federal government is the federation of one level of distinct law-making units — the states — and a direct presidential election would mean that problems unique to sparsely populated parts of the country would be irrelevant to the president.

That’s what the Founding Fathers decided, anyway.

COMMENT:  There is great wisdom in the Electoral College.  It avoids a kind of mob rule.  It emphasizes the very concept of a United States of America.  It forces presidential candidates to give attention even to the smallest states.  If an election were decided only by popular vote, candidates would concentrate in population centers.  The concept of geographic diversity would disappear.

November 13, 2016       Permalink

RIGHT ON – AT 11:24 A.M. ET:  The new administration strikes the right note.  From Fox: 

President-elect Donald Trump's senior adviser Kellyanne Conway on Sunday called on Democratic leaders -- including President Obama and Hillary Clinton -- to publicly call for an end to violent protests over Trump’s election victory, while warning outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to “be very careful” about his personal attacks on Trump.

“I am calling for responsibility and decency. I hope President Obama says, ‘Cut it out,'" Conway said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Everybody is looking for a peaceful transition, and you have the Senate minority leader acting like a garden variety political pundit.”

"I think that the president of the United States, Secretary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, perhaps, others can come forward and ask for calm and ask for a peaceful transition and ask their supporters, which are masquerading as protesters now -- many of them professional and paid by the way, I'm sure -- ask them to give this man a chance so that this country can flourish," she said.

Conway warned Reid, a Nevada Democrat retiring from the Senate in January, to “be very careful about characterizing someone in a legal sense” regarding his attacks on Trump, but said she was not suggesting legal action was pending.

Reid on Friday said Trump has the responsibility for healing a divided, post-election American and that he was “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate.”

COMMENT:  Very well said.  There's some buzz suggesting that Kellyanne will have a high position in the administration.  I hope so.  She participated mightily in Trump's victory, and has a clean, tasteful approach.

November 13,  2016     Permalink

NOVEMBER 12,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:52 P.M. ET:

WHY, OF COURSE – FROM FOX:  Hillary Clinton has offered a couple of private but candid explanations about why she lost her White House bid, telling high-dollar fundraisers Saturday that FBI announcements about a second probe into her emails from her time as secretary of state were too damaging.  Clinton said, "Our analysis is that Comey’s letter raised doubts that were groundless and baseless..." and "stopped our momentum," a DNC fundraising source who was on the call told Fox News.  Clinton made the remark on a roughly 30-minute conference call with Democrats who raised more than $100,000, according to Politico.   Again, the famous Hillary Clinton tin ear.  Why doesn't she just remain silent and lose gracefully?  The old "it's someone else's fault" line doesn't play.  And blaming law enforcement, a left-Democratic tradition, is unbecoming.  The FBI didn't set up that server, or run a foundation that took millions from foreign dictatorships.

COMBAT CORRESPONDENT – FROM AP:  PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof fought with and restrained an intruder he found in his Philadelphia hotel room.  Kristof said in a message on Twitter that there had been "big excitement" when he "interrupted an intruder" in his room early Saturday at the Franklin Hotel near Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.  He said there was a chase and then a fight but restrained the man, who he said was apparently a thief. Kristof said in another message that he had a wrenched thumb from the fight but was "otherwise OK." He said "fortunately, he was a wimpish thief."  Kristof is a true-believing New York Times leftist.  He'll probably be deluged with complaints that he didn't express "understanding" of the thief's pain, whereupon he'll return to Philadelphia, apologize to the thief, and urge the judge to give the thief a four-year education.  It's the least we can do.

EVEN AT MY ALMA MATER – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   Early Wednesday morning approximately 300 University of Chicago students gathered at the Quad to engage in a collective “primal scream” and light aflame Donald Trump campaign paraphernalia.  “Around midnight several students lit a Trump banner on fire at the cheers and encouragement of the crowd..,” The Chicago Maroon reports. “On the fringes a student played a mournful national anthem on his trumpet.” Student Andrew Xue said the scream “was the greatest display of collective effervescence [he’d] ever seen.”  I'm glad it was only 300 students.  The university has thousands.  Maybe the others are a bit more mature.

November 12,  2016     Permalink

TRUMP AND REAGAN – AT 1:24 P.M. ET:   Nobody is comparing the style of Donald Trump to the optimistic, airy style of Ronald Reagan.  But, statistically, Trump may have gone far to rebuild the Reagan majority.  From IBD:

Election 2016: Did Donald Trump reconstitute the old coalition that handed President Ronald Reagan two terms in office? Looking at the data, it sure looks that way.

Yes, Trump won the election, but also did something else no one predicted: His election had coattails. Amid near-unanimous predictions that Republicans would at least lose the Senate and possibly the House, both remain in Republican control and losses were far fewer than expected.

Looking at the numbers from the final IBD/TIPP Presidential Tracking Poll and from exit polls taken right after the election, just as Reagan, Trump won substantial majorities among white voters, male voters, married voters, those with less than a college education, self-described Christian voters. But he also exceeded expectations among minorities and union members.

"These are, historically, the 'Reagan Democrats,' who gave Ronald Reagan a similarly stunning election result in 1980, and a massive landslide re-election in 1984," noted former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

He's right. Trump proved he had crossover appeal. According to exit polls posted by CNN, Trump won 9% of the Democratic vote, while Hillary Clinton won just 7% of Republicans — even though pundits were predicting a mass exodus of GOP "never Trump" voters to Hillary. It didn't happen.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing and save the column.  We really did see a political earthquake on Tuesday night. 

November 12, 2016       Permalink

THE NUTCASE PARTY – AT 11:36 A.M. ET:  The Democrats are doing it again.  They lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon in part because many Dems stayed home, rejecting their own presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, as not ideologically pure enough.

Do you think they learned?  Of course not.  They were Democrats.  Why learn when you can feel?  And after 1968 they doubled down, went even further left, and nominated George McGovern in 1972, in a convention hall filled with the aroma of marijuana.   McGovern lost 49 states.  President Richard Nixon received 520 electoral votes to McGovern's 17.

Still not satisfied, the Dems nominated the pathetic minor leaguer Jimmy Carter in 1976.  Now, Carter squeezed by Gerald Ford, who'd become president following Nixon's resignation.  A narrow win.

Carter went on to be demolished by Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Reagan got 489 electoral votes.  Carter got 49.

Not content with that defeat, the Dems doubled down again, nominating Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, in 1984.  Reagan got 525 electoral votes.  Mondale got 13, nostalgically putting him in McGovern territory.

Moving right along, the Dems learned nothing and nominated Michael Dukakis in 1988 to face Vice President George H.W. Bush.  Bush carried 40 states, Dukakis 10, plus the ever-reliable People's Republic of the District of Columbia.

It wasn't until 1992 that the Dems got Bill Clinton, Slick Willie.  No ornament to morality, Clinton, though, understood that bad candidates and leftist, ideological politics don't win elections.

So now it's 2016.  The Dems just got beaten badly, losing Midwest states they traditionally carry.   And their response?  Double down again, go further left.  The first official act of the post-election Democratic Party is to choose a new national chairman.  Will they pick a competent professional, a sane operator who knows the country?  Are you kidding?  The favorite, the man around whom the delusional left is massing, is...Keith Ellison.

Who is Keith Ellison?  He's the nation's first Muslim congressman, a guy from Minnesota so far left that he makes Barack Obama look like Ronald Reagan.  Of course, Bernie Sanders yearns for him.  Others yearn.  Who cares if he's had past ties with Louis Farrakhan?   From Scott Johnson at Powerline: 

From the time of Ellison’s first published article in the University of Minnesota Daily in 1989 under the name Keith Hakim through the time he first ran for public office ten years later under the name Keith Ellison-Muhammad, unsuccessfully seeking the Democratic endorsement for a state legislative seat, Ellison was a self-avowed advocate of the Nation of Islam. Ellison’s self-identification as a member and leader of the Nation of Islam remained one of the deep secrets of his 2006 campaign. 

COMMENT:  Read Scott's whole piece.  It's a masterpiece of fine reporting.  Then think of Ellison as the chairman of a national party.  The party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy is becoming a joke.

November 12, 2016       Permalink

THE TRUTH – AT 11:21 A.M. ET:  I don't think I've ever quoted Michael Moore, the filmmaker, at Urgent Agenda.  But in recent months he's actually become very helpful in understanding the millions of working-class people who voted for Donald Trump.  As Moore points out, they're not "racists."  Many of them voted for Barack Obama.  From Daily Caller: 

Michael Moore disputed the notion that all the people who voted for President-elect Donald Trump are racist Friday, reiterating the fact that millions of them voted for President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

“They’re not racist,” Moore said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein. That’s the America you live in.”

Moore was pushing back against another panelist who said “deep racial animus” at the heart of the country was behind Trump’s win. “What I’m trying to get at, is at the heart of this country is some deep racial animus that animates the very communities we’re trying to lift up,” Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the African American department at Princeton University told the panel.

“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough replied: “I have to repeat it again because it’s maddening. People who live by data should die by data, and the data according to Nate Cohn of the New York Times says this, and let those who have ears to hear, hear: The very people who helped elect Barack Obama president of the United States twice just elected in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Donald J. Trump. It’s the data.”

COMMENT:  The hypocrisy of the left is overwhelming.  They claim to be interested in the "people," but they actually despise the "people."  Indeed, they call them the "flyover people," not the kind they would talk to or have to dinner.

The left is made up of people, many affluent, who believe the iPhone is made possible by Apple Computer.  No, the device is supplied by Apple Computer.  The iPhone runs on signals provided by the Communications Workers of America.  Many on the left have never met a member, nor would they want to.  Why would one talk to anyone who hasn't majored in art history?

November 12,  2016     Permalink