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DECEMBER 1,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:23 P.M. ET:  

TRUMP PICKS MATTIS – FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:   WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday he had chosen James N. Mattis, a hard-charging retired general who led a Marine division to Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to serve as his secretary of defense.  Mr. Trump made the announcement at a rally in Cincinnati, calling General Mattis “the closest thing we have to Gen. George Patton.”  General Mattis, 66, led the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, from 2010 to 2013. His tour there was cut short by the Obama administration, which believed he was too hawkish on Iran.  If they thought he was too hawkish on Iran, then he's fine with me.

EGADS – SUCH BOTHER – FROM THE HILL:   Former Gen. David Petraeus is reportedly one of President-elect Donald Trump's finalists to be secretary of State.  If he's chosen, he'll have three days to notify his probation officer.  Petraeus was sentenced to two years of probation on April 23, 2015, for giving his mistress classified information.  "The defendant shall not leave the Western District of North Carolina without the permission of the Court or probation officer. Travel allowed for work as approved by U.S. probation office," says a court judgment, reported first by Brad Heath of USA Today.  "The defendant shall notify the probation officer within 72 hours of any change in residence or employment," the document adds.  Pretty humiliating, but I think it can be overcome. Petraeus is paying his debt to society, but seeks redemption through further service.  The Dems will have a field day, but coddling criminals is their specialty, so I don't think they'll make much of an impact. 

GREAT MOMENTS IN CLOGGED ARTERIES – FROM BRITAIN'S SUN:   The inventor of the Big Mac has died at the age of 98.  Michael “Jim” Delligatti came up with the iconic McDonald’s burger nearly 50 years ago.  The franchise-owner from Uniontown Pennsylvania put the stacked treat on sale at one of his restaurants in 1968.  McDonald’s initially did not approve of deviating from its strict formula of simple hamburgers, cheeseburgers and milkshakes.  But the creation of a two-patty burger with lettuce, cheese, gherkins, onions and “special sauce” proved an instant hit, and was rolled out to his other 47 outlets across the US.   McDonald’s spokeswoman Kerry Ford confirmed that Delligatti died at his home in Fox Chapel, Pittsburgh, surrounded by his family on Monday night.  He opened his first McDonald’s restaurant in 1957 and went on to spread the brand across Pennsylvania and beyond.  His son revealed that Delligatti ate at least one 540 calorie Big Mac every week, according to CBS.  He ate one Big Mac a week, and lived to 98?  Do you still believe in nutritionists?

December 1,  2016    Permalink

WAR WARNING – AT 10:21 A.M. ET:  Let's not forget there's a rest of the world.  And it's very dangerous.  From London's Express:

VLADIMIR Putin's warships have been dispatched to Crimea's western coastline in response to the start of Ukrainian missile tests nearby, as tensions in the region reach fever pitch.

Vessels from Russia's Black Sea Fleet have taken up position near the disputed Crimean peninsula - which was illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014 - to help strengthen the air defences.

The aggressive land grab plunged Ukraine-Russia and east-west relations to their lowest point in years and threatened a new Cold War.

Kiev began two days of missile tests today, angering Russia, which has put its air defence forces on high alert.

The drills come more than two years after a Malaysia Airlines jet was downed over Ukraine during fighting with Russian-backed separatist rebels.

A military source in Crimea told the Reuters news agency: “Warships of the Black Sea Fleet have taken up positions near Crimea's western coast for the duration of Ukraine's planned missile tests from December 1-2.

“The ships' air defence units have been put on a higher state of alert.

“Their equipment is designed in the first instance to shoot down heavy anti-ship missiles and cruise missiles.

"Together with land-based air defence units on the peninsula, the ships have thrown up a practically impenetrable shield against the enemy's rockets.”

COMMENT:  This may be Trump's first major foreign-policy challenge.  If he has as good a relationship with Putin as he claims, he might be able to separate the two sides in that dispute.  Of course, he won't get the same Nobel Peace Prize that Obama got in his first week in office, but he'll get history's gratitude.

December 1, 2016       Permalink

TRUMP – WINNING ALREADY – AT 9:35 A.M. ET:  And the mainstream media is going nuts.  I mean, who is this guy to actually accomplish something...even before he takes office?  From the great Michael Goodwin at the New York Post: 

Donald Trump has come a long way from the “disarray” and “chaos” the media claimed to spy before his transition even got started. Such a long way that it’s fair to say that Trump is having just about the best 24 hours a president-elect could have.

Two A-plus moves — the deal with Carrier to keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to Mexico, and getting crime-busting US Attorney Preet Bharara to stay on — keep faith with the populist themes of Trump’s campaign.

He pledged to stand up for workers and stop manufacturing jobs from leaving America. And he pledged to drain the government swamp, which is Bharara’s specialty.

For Trump to deliver two huge down payments in one day is remarkable. Imagine what he can do when he is actually president.

COMMENT:  Absolutely right.  And notice how the mainstreamers are trying to play down the Carrier deal that will preserve American jobs.  Nothing to see, nothing to see.  What's the big deal?

The big deal, mainstreamers, is that this is something Barack Obama never dreamed of doing.  I mean, who are those peasants out there who don't have art history degrees?  Must we talk to them?

Yeah, you must.

December 1, 2016       Permalink

THIS COULD BE A YUGE CHANGE – AT 9:18 A.M. ET:  For a Republican president, the idea is to speak over the heads of the mainstream media and directly to the American people.  This new technological capability that Trump will have will make that possible to a dramatic degree.  From CNET: 

President-elect Donald Trump will have access to a system that can send unblockable texts to every phone in the US once he takes the oath of office.

Wireless Emergency Alerts are a program created by a 2006 act of Congress. The so-called "WEAs" can be targeted messages sent to all mobile phones in a particular area, like Amber alerts, or to all phones nationally, like an alert issued by the president, according to a report by New York Magazine's Select/All blog.

Trump is known for off-the-cuff messages on social media, especially Twitter. Tweets and other social missives lent Trump a direct mouthpiece to his supporters, bolstering his campaign and circumventing traditional media that he sometimes claimed was treating him unfairly. But tweets have landed Trump in hot water, too. Critics claim his informal tweeting is unpresidential, pointing to such behavior as an early-morning rant lashing out at a former beauty-pangeant winner, retweets with media linked to white supremecists and messages that promote unsubstantiated news, among others.

The WEAs are limited to 90 characters, though! Trump will need to recalibrate from the 140-character Twitter standard if he wants to shoot all Americans an unblockable text.

Trump's office didn't immediately return a request seeking comment.

COMMENT:  Think of the president able to send an immediate few sentences to tens of millions of people, with no reporters in between.  I kind of like that.

December 1,  2016     Permalink

NOVEMBER 30,  2016

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

AGAIN – FROM FOX:   A Tacoma, Wash. police officer died late Wednesday after being shot several times while responding to a domestic violence call, officials said.  The male officer, who has not been identified, was shot by a suspect believed to be barricaded inside a home on Tacoma's east side with a gun. The officer was pronounced dead at 9:13 p.m. local time after undergoing emergency surgery at Tacoma General Hospital.  "We've suffered a great loss and I think the community has suffered a great loss," police spokesman Loretta Cool said. "I don't know how to put that into words."  Let's see if the mainstream media takes any interest.

WHAA..? – FROM GATEWAY PUNDIT:   CNN is just losing its mind at this point.  In a recent segment, CNN brought on a Muslim woman to talk about how she doesn’t “feel safe” wearing a hijab in public anymore because President-Elect Trump.  “Maybe there will be a movement where people wear the head scarf in solidarity. You know, even if you’re not Muslim,” suggested CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota on CNN’s “New Day,” WND reports.  “Maybe it’s the way people shave their heads, you know, sometimes in solidarity with somebody who is going through something,” she said.  So non-Muslim women should start wearing the hijab to help Muslims feel safe? Sounds like Sharia Law.  So to show “solidarity,” CNN’s Alisyn Camerota says American women should all wear the hijab to show “solidarity” with Muslim Americans.   CNN is giving up all its credibility.  It is now just a trendy, left-wing network, speaking to a declining viewership.  And they don't seem to care.

DEATH OF A GIANT – FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:   Grant Tinker, who produced “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and other television hits in the 1970s and transformed NBC from a perennial ratings loser to a powerhouse of literate, sophisticated network programming that helped change America’s viewing habits in the ’80s, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90.  NBC confirmed the death on Wednesday.  To a generation whose tastes were shaped by the tube, Mr. Tinker was the unseen hand behind many of the most stylish, critically acclaimed sitcoms and dramas on television. He did it by giving his writers space to thrive, shielding them from those foolish studio and network executives who said they liked the story, all right, but wanted to change the boy to a dog — and usually got their way.  One of the great executives in television history.  He had taste and class, and raised the level of his industry. 

November 30, 2016       Permalink

A THREAT TO TAKE SERIOUSLY – AT 10:16 A.M. ET:  As we go through a political transition, our enemies are getting stronger.  From the great defense reporter Bill Gertz at the Washington Free Beacon:   

The United States is vulnerable to future attack by hypersonic missiles from China and Russia and is falling behind in the technology race to develop both defensive and offensive high-speed maneuvering arms, according to a new Air Force study.

“The People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation are already flight-testing high-speed maneuvering weapons (HSMWs) that may endanger both forward deployed U.S. forces and even the continental United States itself,” an executive summary of the report says.

“These weapons appear to operate in regimes of speed and altitude, with maneuverability that could frustrate existing missile defense constructs and weapon capabilities.”

Hypersonic missiles are ultra-high speed weapons that travel along the edge of the earth’s atmosphere at speeds above Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. The missiles also can maneuver to avoid current missile defenses—all of which were developed to hit ballistic missiles with predictable flight paths.

The unclassified summary of the report, “A Threat to America’s Global Vigilance, Reach, and Power: High-Speed, Maneuvering Weapons,” was produced by a blue-ribbon panel of experts for Air Force Studies Board at the National Academies of Science. The summary was made public earlier this month.

It is the first U.S. military study to sound the alarm about an arms race quietly underway for several years to develop hypersonic missiles for both strategic nuclear weapons and conventional rapid strike systems.

COMMENT:  And we're debating transgender bathrooms and creating "safe spaces" on college campuses to protect students from ideas. 

I hope the new administration will recognize the danger and take action.  I get the feeling they will.  And they'll be opposed by the mainstream media and the academic/leftist complex.

November 30, 2016       Permalink

WHO IS TEACHING OUR CHILDREN? –  An Ohio State University "diversity" officer is expressing sympathy for the apparently ISIS-inspired student who rammed a group of students and bystanders Monday, then attacked others with a knife on Monday before being shot dead by a police officer.  It's hard to make this stuff up.  From PJ Media: 

The Ohio State University assistant director of residence life allegedly expressed sympathy for Somali stabber Abdul Razak Ali Artan in a bizarre Facebook post Monday that has since gone viral.

Stephanie Clemons Thompson urged her followers to have compassion for Artan after he expressed a desire "to kill a billion infidels" and then tried to kill as many as he could at OSU. She also urged people to “think of the pain he must have been in,” and used the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHisName (which BLM uses to denote victims of police brutality).

If Ohio State officer Alan Horujko had not been able to quickly take Artan down, the terrorist could have ended up killing many people, rather than only sending ten of them to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries (one of them critical). No one in their right mind could possibly consider his actions an example of police brutality against a minority. But Thompson seemed to do so in her Facebook post.

The fact that she urged her friends not to share the Facebook post seems to indicate she understood how negatively her message would be viewed by a wider public.

COMMENT:  She should be fired like a shot, but, of course, will not be.  She is protected.  This is a public university, paid for by the taxpayers of Ohio.  I hope there's an uproar.

November 30, 2016       Permalink

A BLOW AGAINST FREEDOM – AT 9:19 A.M. ET:  Whatever happened to Charlie Hebdo, the irreverent French satirical magazine, whose headquarters were attacked by Islamic terrorists?  The answer is sad.  From Gatestone Institute: 

Over twenty years, fear has already devoured important pieces of Western culture and journalism. They all disappeared in a ghastly act of self-censorship: the cartoons of a Danish newspaper, a "South Park" episode, paintings in London's Tate Gallery, a book published by the Yale University Press; Mozart's Idomeneo, the Dutch film "Submission", the name and face of the US cartoonist Molly Norris, a book cover by Art Spiegelman and Sherry Jones's novel, "Jewel of Medina", to name just a few. Most of them have become ghosts living in hiding, hidden in some country house, or retired to private life, victims of an understandable but tragic self-censorship.

Only the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was missing from this sad, long list. Until now.

The disappointment with what Charlie Hebdo has become is reflected in the words of the French journalist, Marika Bret: "From Italy we receive many threats." The reference is not to some Italian jihadist cell, but to a September Charlie Hebdo cover that mocked victims of the earthquake in Italy. It seems that the satirical weekly, almost destroyed by French Islamists two years ago, has been "normalized".

Take Charlie's recent covers. Against terrorists? No. Against those who called them "racists"?  No. It was against Éric Zemmour, the brave French journalist at Le Figaro who has led a public debate about French identity. "Islam is incompatible with secularism, incompatible with democracy, and incompatible with republican government," Zemmour wrote.

Laurent Sourisseau, aka "Riss," now the publishing director and majority owner of Charlie, was shot during the 2015 attack on the magazine, and lives under police protection. He depicted Zemmour on the cover with an explosive vest, effectively comparing him to a terrorist.

Charlie Hebdo also recently satirized Nadine Morano, a critic of Islam, depicting her as a baby with Down Syndrome.

Riss also recently published a comic book attacking another easy target of submissive conformists, entitled "The Dark Side of Marine Le Pen." Le Pen leads France's National Front party, with a platform fighting for national sovereignty and Europe's Judeo-Christian identity. In Charlie, the political leader of the French "right" is dressed as Marilyn Monroe.

COMMENT:  We see it all the time, don't we?  Gradually, free speech and free press are disappearing, replaced by useful idiots and compliant journalists.  "Political correctness," the modern form of left-wing McCarthyism, has taken over college campuses and even high schools.

We used to say that it can't happen here.  It's happening here, and all over the Western world.

November 30,  2016     Permalink