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I appeared on Silvio Canto Jr's talk show from Dallas yesterday.  It's here.

FEBRUARY 2,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:56 P.M. ET:

GOOD FOR HER! – From mlive.com:  "LAPEER COUNTY, MI -- An 11-year-old girl used the shotgun she normally keeps to go hunting with her father to scare off a robber in her home, police said.  The girl was alone at her North Branch Township home on Five Lakes Road about 3:45 p.m. on Jan. 30 when police said she surprised burglars who had broken into the house.  The girl hid in a bathroom closet, where she grabbed her shotgun that police said she stores in a gun safe.  When one of the burglars opened the closet door, police said the girl -- whose parents were due home from work a short time later -- pointed the shotgun at him and he ran off.  'The 12-gauge shotgun is her weapon,' said Lapeer County Sheriff Detective Sgt. Jason Parks."  I don't normally recommend giving guns to 12-year-olds, but in this case the kid clearly was responsible and could handle it.  Salutes to her!

OH, THIS IDENTITY POLITICS STUFF – From Fox:  "The Democratic Party is facing mounting pressure from Latino activists and political insiders to back a Hispanic candidate for the first vacant U.S. senate seat in California in nearly 25 years.  If they don't, experts say, they risk alienating Latino voters nationwide.  Latino activists in the Golden State have grown concerned because they feel that Washington, D.C., Democratic leaders have appeared to anoint California Attorney General Kamala Harris to succeed retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2016, and as a result Harris's candidacy has gotten early support and momentum.  Some insiders are concerned that Democrats may miss out on an important opportunity. More than one out of four U.S. Hispanics live in California, and they make up nearly 40 percent of the state’s population – nevertheless there has never been a Latino U.S. Senator from the state."  I really dislike this group politics approach.  How about choosing the best senator?  Hispanic voters are intelligent and influential, and can make sure that the best candidate, whether a member of their group or not, reflects their concerns.  Regarding Kamala Harris, she strikes me as standard liberal equipment.

THE NEW YORK WAY – In a fit of unusual self-righteousness, the New York State Assembly has been cleansed of one Sheldon Silver, the speaker, after allegations surfaced of huge corruption and upsetting practices on Silvers's part.  Silver was one of the most powerful men of New York, and the political world was shocked, shocked, that he would sully himself for mere dollars.  Now is the age of reform in New York, as the state moves forward with...this guy.  From The New York Times:  "ALBANY — History within reach, Assemblyman Carl E. Heastie of the Bronx had seemingly secured the speakership of the New York State Assembly on Monday, as a final challenger bowed out and reports that his campaign spending was once under scrutiny did little to buffet his ascent.  Mr. Heastie, 47, who would be the chamber’s first African-American speaker, has mounted a blistering campaign to succeed Sheldon Silver, the longtime speaker who agreed to step aside last week in the wake of federal charges of accepting millions of dollars in payoffs...
Mr. Heastie’s rise to the speaker’s post suffered an unforeseen bump in the last several days when a number of news stories called attention to his campaign spending and the amount of money he has taken from the government to cover work-related travel and expenses. But initial indications were that the reports had had little impact on his popularity among the Assembly’s rank and file."  I mean, what's a little corruption compared with Silver's greater corruption.  After all, you can't get totally clean overnight, can you?  It's New York.

February 2, 2015       Permalink

TIME TO LEAVE – AT 10:40 A.M. ET:   Some politicians just don't know when to get off the stage.  They need help, or a visit from a psychiatrist.

Martin O'Malley just left the governor's office in Maryland.  A Democrat in one of the most Democratic states in the Union, O'Malley couldn't even help elect a Dem successor.  Maryland now has a Republican governor, Larry Hogan.  O'Malley has been mentioned by the Great Mentioner for the presidency.  Even though he fumbled his succession, it's clear that he still has presidential thoughts.    From The Hill: 

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D), a possible candidate for president in 2016, on Monday called the White House's decision to allow drilling along parts of the East Coast "a big mistake."

"The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster should remind us that the benefits of drilling do not outweigh the threat to local economies, public health and the environment when an inevitable spill occurs," he wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times.

O'Mally argued that placing oil rigs off the East Coast would result in accidents with broad consequences — noting recent, strong storms like Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

"If a single hurricane has the power to damage or destroy more than 650,000 homes in its path, we should consider what might become of an oil rig," he wrote.

"Expanding offshore drilling is irreconcilable with the realities of climate science and irrelevant, at best, to taking advantage of the vast economic opportunities clean energy presents," he added later in the piece.

This is nonsense, of course.  Environmental setbacks are rare, and are fixable.  The benefits to our economy from increased drilling are substantial, bringing thousands of jobs and feeding thousands of families.

It's clear that O'Malley is positioning himself well to the left of Hillary Clinton.  But I don't think he has any chance at all if she runs.  If she doesn't run, and Elizabeth Warren stumbles, he might try to enter the race as a darling of the left.  The odds are way against him.  I mean, who actually has heard of him?

The Obama administration said last week that it would allow drilling off one part of the Atlantic seaboard and open up more portions of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling. The plan would also ban drilling in parts of Alaska.

In addition to the obvious proximity of O'Malley's home state to the coastal area in question, the former governor may be trying to stake out territory to the left of Obama as he mulls a presidential campaign.

COMMENT:  Everything depends on Hillary's announcement, due, we're told, in July.

February 2, 2015       Permalink

DISGRACEFUL – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:46 A.M. ET:  An excellent story about censorship in Vietnam, published in the Washington Post, begins this way, our quote of the day: 

Five years ago I began an experiment — not of my own devising — to study censorship in Vietnam. In 2009, I signed a contract to publish one of my books in Hanoi. Called “The Spy Who Loved Us,” the book tells the story of Pham Xuan An, Vietnam’s most celebrated journalist during the Vietnam War. (He ended his career as bureau chief for Time magazine in Saigon.) Only after the war did we learn that An had received a dozen military medals as a communist spy and served as North Vietnam’s deadliest secret weapon.

COMMENT:  Did you know about that?  I didn't.  But it tells us something – that the history of the Vietnam War is far from complete.  The idea that TIME's bureau chief in Saigon was a Red agent should sicken the profession of journalism, but probably won't.  Journalism, to use the imperative of the 60s generation, wants to "move on."

We won every major battle in Vietnam, but we lost the war.  The enemy's own official history, largely ignored in the United States, admits that they agreed to negotiations because their military situation had grown so precarious by the late 1960s.  But we lost the war.

For more than a generation the Vietnam War has been an open wound in this society.  We are given the conventional wisdom by the political class, that the war was a mistake and that we were defeated by a popular revolution.  Nonsense.  The troops that flooded into Saigon in 1975, as Americans fled in helicopters, were regular infantry and armor units of the army of North Vietnam.  There wasn't a "revolutionary" in sight.

Will we ever be given the full story?  Not likely.  The media is quick to admit little mistakes.  If it gets the spelling of a name wrong, it's corrected.  The big mistakes are buried as journalists proudly "stand by our story."  History is the loser.  So are veterans.

February 2, 2015       Permalink

GROWN-UPS – AT 8:53 A.M. ET:   There actually are grown-ups in the Democratic Party.  Yes, I know, they've been put on the endangered species list, and are not even welcome in the party.  But they do exist.  And, increasingly, they are wondering about the foreign policy being pursued by the Democrat in the White House.  From the Washington Post: 

For more than two years, a breach has been opening between President Obama and the foreign policy establishment of the Democratic Party. Last week, as Russia pressed a new offensive in Ukraine and the Senate debated sanctions on Iran, it cracked open a little wider.

First came the introduction in the Senate, and lopsided passage by the Banking Committee, of a bill that would place new sanctions on Iran if no agreement limits its nuclear program by June. Though fiercely opposed by Obama, the measure, co-sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, had won the express support of 13 other Democratic senators by the end of the week. A letter signed by Menendez plus nine of them pledged to delay a final floor vote until March 24, the deadline set by the administration for finalizing the framework of a bargain.

While that postponement avoided an immediate confrontation with Obama, the larger message of the senators was clear: They are “deeply skeptical,” said the letter, that Obama will obtain adequate concessions from Tehran — despite what has been an increasingly single-minded diplomatic push.

At week’s end came another de facto vote of no confidence: a report by eight foreign policy luminaries, due to be formally released Monday, saying the president should “immediately change” his policy of refusing to supply Ukraine with weapons to defend its besieged eastern provinces. “Washington,” it said bluntly, has “not devoted sufficient attention to the threat posed by Russia and its implications for Western security. This must change.”

COMMENT:  It probably won't change.  Maybe people in his own party are finally realizing who Barack Obama really is.  He is a leftist, with sympathy for the third world and for socialism.  He is our first truly leftist (as opposed to liberal) president.  He intends to leave a leftist legacy.

Remember that, just before the 2012 election, Obama was caught on an open mike assuring the Russian foreign minister that he'd have more flexibility after the election.  It was an admission that he was lying to the American people about his foreign-policy views, and would shift his positions when he was no longer politically vulnerable.  A comment like that should have cost Obama the election.  It did not.  It was covered up by the press and quickly forgotten.  And we are paying the price.

Read the whole piece.  It's very revealing.

February 2, 2015       Permalink

ARROGANCE – AT 8:41 A.M. ET:  In an interview with the Administration-friendly Today Show, President Obama showed the remarkable arrogance that has become almost a trademark.  He will not admit that anything is wrong.  From The Hill:

President Obama defended his campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in an interview airing Monday, saying the U.S. was “doing exactly what we should be doing” to fight the terror network.

Obama said critics of his strategy would have the U.S. redeploy tens of thousands of U.S. troops, but that ultimately such an effort would prove ineffective without local support. Presently, the U.S. and coalition partners’ military efforts against ISIS have been largely limited to airstrikes in support of Iraqi and Kurdish security forces, as well as Syrian rebel groups.

“It is entirely possible for us to deploy 200 or 300,000 U.S. troops,” Obama said in the interview with NBC’s “Today” show. “If we don’t have inside of Iraq or inside of Syria or inside of Afghanistan both he capacity and will of people to fight for themselves, then any gains that are made eventually dissipate. So this takes longer, but it’s the right way to do things.”

He added that “those who want us to shoot first and aim later” were typically the ones to “get this country into really bad situations,” and that his administration was doing everything it could short of that.

“Anything that we could be doing, we are doing,” he said.

COMMENT:  The very idea that we have exhausted all possibilities is the height of arrogance.  So is the terminology, like "those who want us to shoot first and aim later..."  The Obamans continue to think that they're smarter than everyone else, despite an abysmal foreign-policy record and the fact that, under Obama, the Mideast has burst into flames.

One reason for Obama's narrowness is that he comes from a political class that will not use terms like "victory" or "win."  These are "imperialist" terms. 

But the bottom line is that, internationally, no one takes Obama very seriously any longer.  No one really trusts him.  The world loves a winner and hates a loser.  We are today seen as a nation in retrenchment, in withdrawal.  Notice how many friends that has made.

February 2,  2015     Permalink

FEBRUARY 1,  2015

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

GREAT GAME – Wasn't the Super Bowl game great?  That ending was right out of Hollywood.  Both teams, the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, were excellent, but I'm kinda glad that the Patriots won.  Seattle won last year, but I don't know whether there was a celebration in Seattle, one of the most left-wing cities in America.  Were they ashamed to celebrate?  Did they think victory meant they'd become imperialist warmongers?  Or maybe they celebrated by throwing tofu parties and planting organic marijuana.  We have many readers in Seattle.  Please fill me in.

PANIC, INC. – Do you have the feeling that we get many wildly exaggerated weather stories?  Well, you're right.  From droyspencer.com:  "The numbers are in at the National Climate Data Center, and out of the top 55 snowstorms impacting the major population centers of the Northeast U.S., the January 2015 blizzard that blasted Boston ranked #41, or a weak 'Category 2.'   It’s not clear that more snowstorms in recent decades aren’t just from a slight shift in the storm track bringing Northwest Atlantic winter storms (of which there are many…Greenland routinely gets clobbered) closer to New England."  It's snowing right now where we are, with predictions of 4-9 inches.  We'll see if it happens.   There hasn't been any plowing yet, and there usually is.  I think the cities, having been the victim of a number of exaggerated forecasts, are trying to save some money by waiting to see how serious the snowfall actually becomes.

AGGRESSIVE RUSSIANS – From London's Express:  "A RUSSIAN bomber intercepted over the Channel last week was carrying a nuclear missile designed to destroy Trident submarines, it emerged last night.  RAF Typhoon fighter jets were scrambled on Wednesday after two long-range TU-95 'Bear' bombers were detected flying over the English Channel.  The incident was last night described as 'yet another in a series of deliberately provocative' measures by President Vladimir Putin which confirmed that Nato’s status had moved firmly from 'rival to adversary'.  Sources within the Ministry of Defence last night revealed that one of the two long-range bombers was carrying at least one air-dropped 'seek and find' nuclear warhead-carrying missile, designed to seek and destroy a Vanguard submarine."  Guess the reset with Moscow didn't exactly work.  Obama will blame Bush.

February 1,  2015     Permalink

JORDANIAN ANGUISH – AT 8:56 A.M. ET:  With the exception of Israel, Jordan has probably been our closest and most reliable ally in the Arab world.  And it has taken a moderate line on the Arab-Israeli conflict, to the extent that it has an embassy in Israel. 

But Jordan is now going through a severe crisis.  One of its pilots, assigned to the war against ISIS, was shot down and is now an ISIS prisoner.  There are fears he will be beheaded.  He comes from a prominent tribe in Jordan that is demanding that the Jordanian government get him back.  Should he be executed, the Jordanian population could turn severely against its government for failing.  From Fox:   

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Sunday he is "infuriated" by the purported beheading of journalist Kenji Goto by the Islamic State group and vowed to hold the terror group responsible.

"I feel indignation over this immoral and heinous act of terrorism," Abe told reporters after convening an emergency Cabinet meeting.

"When I think of the grief of his family, I am left speechless," he said. "We are filled with deep regret."

Japan ordered heightened security precautions Sunday and said it would persist with its non-military support for fighting terrorism.

Threats from ISIS prompted an order for tighter security at airports and at Japanese facilities overseas, such as embassies and schools, government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said.

He said it would be "inappropriate" to comment on the status of the Jordanian pilot.

The failure to save Goto raised fears for the life of the pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, also held by the militant group that controls about a third of both Syria and Iraq. Unlike some earlier messages delivered in the crisis, the video that circulated online late Saturday purporting to show a militant beheading Goto did not mention the pilot.

Jordan renewed an offer Sunday to swap an Al Qaeda prisoner for al-Kaseasbeh, who was seized after his F-16 crashed near ISIS' de facto capital, Raqqa, Syria, in December.

Government spokesman Mohammed al-Momani told The Associated Press that "we are still ready to hand over" Sajida al-Rishawi, who faces death by hanging for her role in triple hotel bombings in Jordan in 2005.

COMMENT:  Countries like Jordan have two possible paths in a situation like this – defiance or appeasement.  We want Jordan to defy ISIS, but we are led by a weak, vacillating president who has lost the respect of world leaders.  Jordanians may well reason that they can no longer depend on the United States.  They may also sense that Barack Hussein Obama Jr. is more interested in an accommodation with Iran than in backing America's traditional allies.

We await news on the Jordanian pilot.  His fate may have implications far beyond the life of one man.

February 1, 2015       Permalink

OH REALLY? – AT 8:46 A.M. ET:   No prejudice meant, but I'm a bit wary of a new plot by the Obama administration to increase the clout of American Muslims.  Seems to be a priority for the Obaman crowd.  From AP:

DETROIT (AP) - The federal government is considering allowing those of Middle Eastern and North African descent to identify as such on the next 10-year census, which could give Arab-Americans and other affected groups greater political clout and access to public funding, among other things.

The U.S. Census Bureau will test the new Middle East-North Africa (MENA) classification for possible inclusion on the 2020 census if it gets enough positive feedback about the proposed change by Sunday, when the public comment period ends.

Arab-Americans, who make up the majority of those who would be covered by the MENA classification, have previously been classified by default as white on the census, which helps determine congressional district boundaries and how billions of dollars in federal funding are allocated, among other things.

Those pushing for the MENA classification say it would more fully and accurately count them, thus increasing their visibility and influence among policymakers.

The Census Bureau plans to test it later this year by holding focus group discussions with people who would be affected by the proposed change. Congress would still have to sign off on the proposal before the change could be added to the 2020 census.

"We know the challenges," says Hassan Jaber, who runs a Detroit-area social services group and serves on a census advisory board formed to evaluate Americans' changing racial and ethnic identities. "It really does take rethinking ... who we are as a population and what our needs are, (but) there are specific needs for Arab-Americans that are not being recognized and not being met."

COMMENT:  Is this being done for anyone else?  Just askin'.

February 1, 2015       Permalink

HILLARY IN TROUBLE? – AT 8:33 A.M. ET:  It's hard to come to any other conclusion when you look at a series of polls that, yes, shows her leading in potential matchups with GOP presidential candidates, but not leading by any convincing amount.  From Hot Air:

Mitt Romney’s not running for President again, telling supporters that it’s time for the Republican Party to look to other leaders for its future. Democrats may wonder whether they have to tell Hillary Clinton the same thing. In a PPP poll taken this week, Hillary Clinton can’t get to 50% against any Republican challenger paired against her, even Romney:

The automated poll of nearly 900 registered voters, conducted last week by Public Policy Polling, found that 48 percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of Clinton, compared to 43 percent who viewed the former secretary of State favorably.

While Clinton — the prospective favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination should she enter the race — holds leads over every major GOP candidate tested in the poll, she doesn’t break 50 percent against any, and some are well within striking distance. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker comes closest, with Clinton leading him by a margin of 45 percent to 42 percent (with 14 percent not sure who they’d vote for) – within the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percent.

COMMENT:  And Hillary Clinton is far better known than any of the potential Republican presidential candidates.  We tend to forget that she never was all that popular, and lost the 2008 nomination to a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

We can only imagine the numbers once a Scott Walker really starts to campaign.

And if Hillary should decline to run, the prospects for the Democrats are weaker still.

February 1,  2015     Permalink