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

HORRORS – Stand by for major journalistic ecstasy, as the mainstream media rushes to give huge hugs and gender-appropriate greetings to The New York Times for publishing its first front-page editorial in 95 years.  We'll have plenty to say about that in the next few days.  Oh, the subject of the heavy thinking?  Gun control.  Guess the other stuff over the last 95 years – The Holocaust, World War II, the atomic bomb, the Great Depression, the birth of radio, television and talking pictures, the Salk Vaccine, the assassination of a president, and a fourth term for another, and the Civil Rights movement – didn't make the cut.   We will send honorable mention to each of these.  People don't know whether to laugh or cry.

THE T-WORD – The FBI said it.  Even CNN said it.  San Bernardino was a terrorist act.  No more workplace violence.  No more personnel issues.  No more "searching for a motive," although investigators will try to determine why that particular target was hit.   FBI Director James Comey and his alleged boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, held a press conference to discuss the attack.  The picture of both of them together was striking.  The FBI is now the center of the Universe in terms of the terror investigation.  But it is also the center of the Universe into the investigation into Hillary Clinton, a potential president.  The spotlight will be on the Bureau and on Mr. Comey.  What he discovers, and says, and recommends, may change American history.  If the political powers try to thwart him, he may well have the power, and the spine, to resist, and come out a national hero.

POLITICAL FUN – From The Politico:   The most accurate pundits in the history of American presidential politics reside far from the Beltway, on a 403-square mile patch of land along the western border of Indiana. At the intersections of U.S. Highways 40 and 41, and off Interstate 70, you find yourself in Vigo County, with its 108,000 residents and its ho-hum county seat, Terre Haute, situated along the Wabash River. Terre Haute is the land of Clabber Girl Baking Powder—and its citizens call it the “Crossroads of America.” It’s the place where both Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh and labor leader and Social Democratic Party founder Eugene Debs were born, and home to the U.S. penitentiary where the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh died.  And, in nearly every presidential election since 1888, voters here in this blue-collar county have selected the winning candidate, missing only twice: Once, in 1908, when they opted for Williams Jennings Bryan instead of William Howard Taft, and again in 1952, when they chose Adlai Stevenson rather than Dwight D. Eisenhower.  And the county appears to be tilting toward...Donald Trump.  Well, remember they've been wrong twice.

December 4, 2015