SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

SIGN OF THE TIMES – From Fox: A Texas Whataburger employee was fired Wednesday for refusing to serve two police officers in what the company is describing as an appalling incident.  Officers Michael Magovern and Cameron Beckham were working off-duty security at a construction site on I-35 early Wednesday morning when they decided to stop at the restaurant in Lewisville, FOX 26 reports.  Magovern said before he could even place his order, the man behind the counter told him “We don’t serve police officers.”  The two officers decided to leave and went and got food at Dairy Queen instead.  "We were appalled to hear of an employee refusing service to two officers, as we have proudly served first responders across our system for decades,” Whataburger said in a statement Wednesday. “As soon as we heard of this isolated incident, we began our own internal investigation overnight. The employee that refused service is no longer employed with Whataburger. We've also invited the officers back today so we can apologize in person and make this right."  We haven't seen any identification of the dismissed employee, who will probably now sue for wrongful termination.  There have been a number of similar incidents reported across the nation in recent months.  More hope and change.

I'M SO DISAPPOINTED – From Fox:   STAVANGER, Norway – In a break with Nobel tradition, the former secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize committee says the 2009 award to President Barack Obama failed to live up to the panel's expectations.  Geir Lundestad writes in a book to be released on Thursday that the committee had expected the prize to deliver a boost to Obama. Instead the award was met with fierce criticism in the U.S., where many argued Obama had not been president long enough to have an impact worthy of the Nobel.  "Even many of Obama's supporters believed that the prize was a mistake," Lundestad wrote in excerpts of the book read by The Associated Press. "In that sense the committee didn't achieve what it had hoped for."  The best thing the Nobel Peace Prize committee could do for peace would be to abolish itself.  The prize is a farce, having been given to Obama, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, and assorted other unworthies.  It was given to Mikhail Gorbachev, but not to Margaret Thatcher, Pope John II, or Ronald Reagan, who actually did create the conditions for peace.  The prize is a leftist prize given by minor Norwegian officials.

WHY CHINA? –  From Bloomberg:  A China Railway Group-led consortium and XpressWest Enterprises LLC will form a joint venture to build a high-speed railway linking Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the first Chinese-made bullet-train project in the U.S.  Remember when we used to build things without the help, thank you very much, of foreign dictatorships?

CUBA SI – From Latin American Herald Tribune:   WASHINGTON – U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday urged businessmen to pressure Congress to lift the Cuban embargo, emphasizing the “significant economic opportunities” created by the process of normalizing bilateral relations.  After delivering a speech at the Business Roundtable Headquarters in Washington at which he responded to several questions from the audience, Obama also said that the imminent visit of Pope Francis to Cuba will be “an opportunity” to broaden the “conversations” that are already occurring on the communist island.  The thousands of Cuban political prisoners could not be reached for comment.

September 17, 2015