SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 7:26 P.M. ET:

IDIOTS – From Fox:  "Environmentalists and other opponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline are ramping up their opposition to the project following the release Friday of a largely favorable State Department report -- vowing to hold vigils, jump into the November elections and even perform acts of civil disobedience."  The nuts don't surprise me.  They're basically totalitarians.  If they don't get a ruling they don't like, they just go into physical blocking mode.  Sadly, though, Obama is already making noises about further delays.  That is completely crazy.

GROVEL, BARACK, GROVEL – From The Hill:  "President Obama is planning a trip to Saudi Arabia to repair badly frayed ties with one of America's key allies in the Middle East, The Wall Street Journal reports.  Obama will visit the kingdom in March for a meeting with King Abdullah, the Journal reports, citing Arab officials. The White House declined to comment."  I have no love for the Saudis, and especially for their past and possibly current support for terrorism.  But the need for a presidential visit simply demonstrates how incompetent our foreign policy has been.  I mean, if you've lost the oil guys...

AND ANOTHER CLOWN HEARD FROM – "Sen. Tom Harkin, the Democratic chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, returned from a weeklong tour of Cuba with a somewhat shocking assessment: The poverty-stricken nation does much better in protecting children from dying than America.  '[Cuba‘s] a poor country, but they have a lower child mortality rate than ours' he told reporters Wednesday, the National Journal reported. 'Their life expectancy is now greater than ours. It’s interesting — their public health system is quite remarkable.'"  Yeah, right.  Comrade Fidel has done it again.  Harkin, who is retiring, has always been a little weird.  Things like child mortality and life expectancy are affected by many factors, including social custom and responsibility...and the propensity of some sub-groups within the Democratic coalition to murder each other.  When well-to-do Canadians seek better health care, they slip right across the border to the U.S.  They don't fly to the worker's paradise.  If Cuba were free, the health system would be much better.

February 1, 2014