Please note that you can leave a comment on any of our posts at our Facebook page.  Subscribers can also comment at length at our Angel's Corner Forum.

MARCH 16,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

THOSE STINGY AMERICANS – FROM THE NEW YORK POST:    A GoFundMe page set up to pay off the mortgage on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s $14.6 million California estate has gone bust — after raising a measly $110, a report says.  Anastasia Hanson, 56, of California told Britain’s The Sun that she started the fundraising effort because she seriously felt sorry for the multimillionaire royal couple — after Harry publicly whined to Oprah Winfrey about being financially cut off by the Palace.  “When they came to the USA, they were without jobs and with limited funds,” said Hanson, who lives about 25 minutes from the princely pair’s palatial estate in swanky Montecito.  “They’ve stated that they’ve had a very rough time, so this fundraiser is a way to give help, compassion, and love by paying their home loan in full.”  In Markle and the prince’s bombshell TV sit-down last week, Harry defended their inking of a multitude of uber-lucrative media deals since leaving royal life, saying, “My family literally cut me off financially, and I had to afford security for us.”  Hanson’s online bid to try to financially help the royals was started a few days ago — and shut down by Saturday after just three donations, The Sun said.  Is this a serious story?  I really don't know, but it was too good to ignore.  I'm proud of the fact that only three Americans fell for this stuff.

DISGRACEFUL – FROM BIZPACREVIEW.COM:    California Gov. Gavin Newsom assured MSNBC host Joy Reid during an interview Monday that he would fill Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat with a black woman should she decide to retire.  “I have multiple names in mind. We have multiple names in mind — and the answer is yes,” Newsom, a Democrat who is facing a recall over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, assured Reid, who suggested that an “African-American” woman should be chosen to replace Vice President Kamala Harris.  Feinstein, who has served as a Democratic senator from California since 1992, has not indicated she is preparing to retire. But several Democrats belonging to the party’s more leftist faction have increased calls for her to step down after she angered them over her handling of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court hearings. Feinstein was civil in her dealings with Barrett and even praised then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) for his handling of the hearings.  Newsom is in trouble, and is facing a recall election.  How sickening to see him grovel like this to get support – pledging to appoint someone to the U.S. Senate if Sen. Feinstein retires, based strictly on that person's race and gender.  This is identity politics at its worst.

March 16, 2021       Permalink

SOMETIMES THERE IS CAUSE FOR CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM – AT 11:50 P.M. ET:  THERE ARE TENTATIVE SIGNS THAT GROWN-UPS ARE FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE CRUSHING OF FREE SPEECH ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES – FROM THE NEW YORK POST: 

Here’s some fresh hope for free speech on US campuses: Some 200 scholars and professors from across the country last week launched the Academic Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting back against “cancel culture” efforts to silence faculty targeted by “woke” outrage.

Sparked by conversations among faculty at Princeton University about fading support for free expression on American campuses, the alliance aims to help educators “speak, instruct and publish without fear of sanction, bullying, punishment or persecution.” Membership fees and donations will help cover legal fees for professionals in hot water over free-speech controversies.

In recent years, universities have been hyperactive in penalizing staff for alleged insensitivity, as administrators strive to appease student outrage, no matter how unjustified and counter to the fundamentals of academic freedom.

In 2015, the University of Chicago released a statement affirming the centrality of free speech in education. Six years later, only 81 of the 4,000-plus US higher-education institutions have adopted or endorsed it.

Princeton’s Keith E. Whittington, a leader of the new group, points to two cases last year that show why faculty need protection.

In one, the University of Southern California put a prof on leave for lecturing about a common phrase in the Chinese language that some students felt sounded too much like the N-word. In another, Auburn University pulled a professor from the classroom for expressing an opinion about police on his personal Twitter account. Both academics later apologized — in effect, for exercising fundamental free-speech rights.

With members across the political spectrum, the alliance means to “foster a national conversation about these kinds of issues.” Cross your fingers that this will inspire more faculty to stand by their peers when politically correct mobs of students (and, all too often, faculty) start waving their pitchforks.

COMMENT:  Good luck to them.  They are brave, and facing enormous opposition and ridicule.  What we have today on too many college campuses is students not having their freedoms taken from them, but, instead, giving them up quite voluntarily.  It goes along with an old Communist Party admonition – "You don't need your rotten freedoms.  We'll tell you what to think."  And too many kids, already softened up by the totalitarian message in American high schools, go right along with it.  Much easier than to resist.  And thinking independently is, wow, kinda like hard, and, hey, oppressive, like slavery or Trump.

March 16, 2021       Permalink

THE CONTINUING TRAGEDY OF PORTLAND – AT 6:40 P.M. ET:   WHEN THE WOKE LEFT TAKES OVER, IT DESTROYS.  PORTLAND IS NOW IN A DIVE TOWARD THE BOTTOM.  THE MOVING VANS ARE GOING OUT, NOT COMING IN.  FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER:

Last June, the city of Portland, Oregon, hopped on the “defund the police” bandwagon. Now, it is flooded with gun violence, and the mayor is already backtracking from his support for the cuts.
Mayor Ted Wheeler has requested $2 million in emergency funding for the police department, pointing directly to the surge in gun violence. At this point last year, Portland had seen just one homicide. This year, that number is 20, with 208 shootings in the city so far.

Wheeler backed the Portland City Council’s decision to cut $15 million from the police budget last June, which included disbanding police units that investigate gun violence. Predictably, that move backfired in a city that saw 100 consecutive days of violent rioting last year.

Riots are back once again in the city, thanks to Wheeler’s spinelessness. Rioters have once again targeted a federal courthouse in the city, a reprise of the violent storming of the courthouse last July. In June, it was reported that the city lost around $24 million due to the riots. Damage to federal buildings totals roughly $2.3 million.

Portland, like Minneapolis, doesn’t have and never did have an overpolicing problem. The city has an underpolicing problem, compounded by cowardly city leaders who pander to anti-police activists. Portland city leaders, just like their Minneapolis counterparts, humored these leftist ideologues while turning a blind eye to riots. Now, they reap the whirlwind in the form of a surge in violent crime.

And this is Portland, so there is no Republican to blame for this issue. Wheeler is a Democrat. So are the city council members, with one independent who was endorsed by the council’s Democratic members. Gov. Kate Brown, who said that former President Donald Trump was “provoking confrontation for political purposes” by protecting the courthouse, is a Democrat. So is President Biden, who currently has federal agents trying to protect the courthouse.

Nor is there any plausible way to blame the availability of guns in Oregon or in neighboring states. Guns are exactly as available today as they were before this 2,000% surge in murders.

This is what happens when people who are tasked with actually running a city embrace ridiculous ideologies to please activists. I would say that Portland residents deserve better, but this is the leadership they chose for their city. Given the failures of Wheeler and the city council to this point, the voters are the only ones who can change course. 

COMMENT:   It is happening throughout our country.  A nation dies when it will not protect its citizens.  A nation dies when it forgets what made it great.  And a nation dies when it learns it can raid its treasury.  In America today, all three conditions are present.

March 16, 2021       Permalink

MARCH 15,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

SUCH GREAT PRACTICE FOR AMERICAN POLITICS – FROM FOX:   A Pensacola teenage girl and her mother, an elementary school assistant principal, were arrested Tuesday for allegedly hacking hundreds of student accounts to fraudulently vote for the teen as homecoming queen in the fall, police said.  Laura Rose Carroll, 50, and her 17-year-old daughter, Emily Rose Grover, have each been charged with offenses against computers, unlawful use of a two-way communications device, criminal use of personally identifiable information, and conspiracy to commit these offenses.  An investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began in November when the Escambia County School District reported that hundreds of student accounts had been illegally accessed.  Investigators determined that Carroll, an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School, and her daughter, a student at Tate High School, had accessed student FOCUS accounts.  The FDLE said Carroll had district-level access to the school board’s FOCUS program – the school district’s student information system.  The investigation came after hundreds of votes for Tate High School’s Homecoming Court were flagged as fraudulent, with nearly 120 votes coming from the same IP address within a short period of time, the FDLE said.  Today homecoming queen, tomorrow president of the United States.

SMART GUY, HE'S RIGHT – FROM DAILY CALLER:   Democratic political strategist Doug Schoen says the situation at the border is a “full on crisis” and the media is using a double standard to cover the increasingly tense situation while speaking to the Daily Caller’s Brianna Lyman.  “We have a crisis, a full on crisis,” Schoen said. “Unless the Biden administration takes the issue on forcefully, we will have a full on crisis of politics and more important substance as we go forward.” Schoen said one of the causes for the recent surge at the border is that the Democratic Party won’t promote a bipartisan immigration policy.  “I am afraid that the uncertainty in American policy and certainly the uncertainty with how the Democrats are going to approach immigration have only facilitated and developed a problem that’s a tragedy for all of us.”
“I fear, and this is fear, that it will take a serious crisis reported in even greater substance by the national media for the Biden Administration to deal with [the surge in migrants],” Schoen said. “I think it’s certainly the case that if the media does put a greater spotlight on the situation, the Democrats will be forced to take on a very very difficult issue for them and for their political base.”  “I do believe there is a double standard and that the media was far more apt to criticize Trump,” he added, noting he was also one of former President Donald Trump’s biggest critics. “I believe the media owes it to us to report fully on what’s going on at the border.”  I'm glad a Democrat finally spoke the obvious – that the media, the so-called "watchdog of democracy," isn't doing much watching.  The bottom line here is that this is a Biden-created crisis.  Two months ago, under a different president, we weren't seeing the border cracked by onrushing illegal immigrants.  The public will put two and two together.

March 15, 2021       Permalink

CALIFORNIA GETS SERIOUS – AT 11:45 P.M.:  THE RECALL EFFORT AGAINST THE GOVERNOR REACHES A CRITICAL POINT, AS DEMS REALIZE THEY COULD LOSE THIS THING.  OH JOY.   From Fox:  

Democrats are rallying behind California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s effort to defend himself from a recall drive, which his campaign is attempting to characterize as an effort supported by right-wing extremists.

Democrats unveiled an effort to combat the drive, dubbed "Stop the Republican Recall," which has the support of Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Alex Padilla, D-Calif., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as well as Reps. Katie Porter, D-Calif., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif.
Stacey Abrams is also listed as a supporter on the group’s website.

Nothing like surrounding himself only with the fringe left of the party. 

In a tweet last week, Sanders said "extremist Republicans" had done enough to undermine democracy, as he called on all Americans to unite in opposition to the recall, while Warren and Booker sent out posts on Monday.

The White House has also said President Biden opposes any attempt to remove Newsom.

As previously reported by Fox News, Newsom vowed to fight the recall effort, which his campaign alleged was being propped up by "anti-mask and anti-vax extremists," as well as "QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-immigrant activists and Trump supporters."

In a tweet on Monday, the California governor said he refused to be "distracted" by the "partisan, Republican recall."

The "Stop the Republican Recall" initiative has "major funding from" the California Democratic Party, according to the website.

Last week, the initiative to recall Newsom announced it has collected 2 million signatures – enough to trigger a recall election, assuming that roughly 1.5 million are verified as valid.

COMMENT:  Most oddsmakers still favor Newsom to win the recall election, considering the Democratic Party's deep advantage in California, and the fact that the Republicans haven't got a star candidate, as they did early in this century when they ran Arnold Schwarzenegger in a recall election against Governor Gray Davis.  Arnold won, and Davis became the second governor in U.S. history to be successfully recalled. 

Republicans in this probable recall election will depend heavily on public resentment against Democratic policies, like open borders and school closings.

March 15, 2021       Permalink

WHAT? – AT 6:45 P.M. ET:  THE WASHINGTON POST MADE A MISTAKE?  THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE.  THE WOKE NEVER MAKE A MISTAKE.  IT'S A BAD DREAM.  From Fox: 

The Washington Post made a massive correction Monday to a January report about a phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Georgia elections investigator Frances Watson, admitting it wrongly attributed multiple quotes to Trump based on an anonymous source.

The Post initially reported Trump had told an official working in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office to "find the fraud" in the state, which he lost narrowly to Joe Biden, and that she would be a "national hero" if she did.

However, a newly emerged recording of the Dec. 23 call found he didn't use those words. Instead, Trump said she would be "praised" when the "right answer comes out" and encouraged her to closely examine mail-in ballots in Fulton County, the heavily blue and most populated county in the state.

The Post published a lengthy correction to its story: "Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to "find the fraud" or say she would be "a national hero" if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find "dishonesty" there. He also told her that she had "the most important job in the country right now." A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump."

CNN also reported on the call citing an unnamed source and has not yet corrected its story, which charged Trump with saying "national hero" and "find the fraud" in its opening paragraph.

While news outlets often cite sources who paraphrase conversations they participated in or overheard, using quotes indicates to the reader a subject said those exact words.

"Our media are so, so, so breathtakingly corrupt," Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway tweeted. "They always mischaracterized this call -- in a corrupt and fraudulent way. But to actually make up quotes in service of that? We are so screwed by our disgustingly corrupt and unaccountable media."

After MSNBC's Hayes Brown defended the Post and praised its correction, Hemingway fired back that it was hardly a "self-policing win."

"So, they made up quotes. What in the actual F," conservative CNN commentator Mary Katharine Ham tweeted.

Conservative writer Mark Hemingway said the Post's correction and new headline did not adequately reflect its wrongdoing, calling the mistake "beyond serious" and indicative of the lack of accountability in corporate media.

COMMENT:   This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  It was long ago, back in the storied 1960s, when some journalists decided that simply reporting the news without fear or favor was beneath them.  They would report a "higher truth," one that often existed only between their ears.  They would "make a difference."  They would be "change agents."  They would "speak truth to power."  Ah, we know all the slogans, don't we?  And we know what those ideas have done to the American press. 

The most important virtue of a news service is credibility.   Lose that and nothing else matters.  And our press is losing just that.

March 15, 2021       Permalink