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NOVEMBER 6,  2015

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

NOTHING TO SEE, NOTHING TO SEE – You'll recall, earlier this week, a stabbing spree at a California campus.  The perp, shot dead by the police, was identified as a Muslim student.  But, said the politically correct authorities, the motive was personal, not political.  Yeah.  From Fox:   A handwritten manifesto carried by a California college student whose stabbing spree Wednesday left four wounded bore names of his targets, a vow “to cut someone’s head off” and as many as five reminders to “praise Allah,” law enforcement authorities told FoxNews.com, while insisting that neither terrorism nor religion appear to be motives in the attack.  In the two-page document found in Faisal Mohammad’s pocket by the county coroner, the 18-year-old freshman wrote a numeric list outlining his plans of who he wanted to kill, and how, including beheading and shooting his victims, Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke told FoxNews.com.  “No. 27 was to ‘make sure people are tied down,’ No. 28 was 'sit down and praise Allah,' Warnke said. “I remember seeing four or five times, scribbled on the side of the two-page manifesto, where he wrote something like ‘praise Allah.’”  Nothing to see, nothing to see.

SUCH A SURPRISE – President Obama, ever devoted to securing his legacy on the political left, today formally rejected the Keystone Pipeline, which would have created many jobs, and brought Canadian petroleum to our Gulf Coast.  The elitists are cheering Obama's decision, but American workers are not cheering.  From The Hill:   The main union for construction workers is accusing President Obama of throwing them “under the bus” by rejecting the Keystone XL oil pipeline.  The Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) is one of the few labor unions that broke with the majority of Democrats and supported the project, which Obama rejected Friday after a seven-year review.  “We are dismayed and disgusted that the President has once again thrown the members of LIUNA, and other hard-working, blue-collar workers under the bus of his vaunted ‘legacy,’ while doing little or nothing to make a real difference in global climate change,” Terry O’Sullivan, the union’s general president, said in a statement. “His actions are shameful.”  When is American labor going to realize that Obama has contempt for the working class?  Today's Democratic Party doesn't rub shoulders with workers, but demands their votes at election time.  The new Democratic Party is interested in race, gender, and ethnicity, with a layer of multiculturalism thrown in.

INEVITABLE – From the Washington Times:   An illegal immigrant MS-13 gang member the Obama administration had released on bond committed an unprovoked attack on a sheriff’s deputy, slugging the deputy as he worked on a traffic report while sitting in his car, the Frederick County, Md., sheriff’s department said Friday.  Jose Misael Reyes-Reyes, 18, had been arrested in May on weapons charges and in June on charges of malicious destruction of property, but federal immigration authorities had left him free on bond while he awaited a deportation hearing, the sheriff’s office said.  Given his age, Mr. Reyes-Reyes was potentially part of the recent surge of illegal immigrant children that overwhelmed the Border Patrol over the last few years, and who have now been shipped to communities across the country.  Mr. Reyes-Reyes came upon Deputy First Class Greg Morton Thursday morning as the deputy was in his marked police vehicle finishing up an accident report. The sheriff’s office said Mr. Reyes-Reyes began banging on a back window of the vehicle, and when Deputy Morton turned to look the man reached through the half-open window and slugged the deputy in the face.  Again, nothing to see, nothing to see.  And remember, the deputy was part of the oppressor class.  Right?  Well...

November 6, 2015       Permalink

FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER 9/11 – UNBELIEVABLE – AT 10:18 A.M. ET:  Yeah, yawn, maybe it really is time for us to get truly serious about security at airports, yawn.  From the Boston Herald. 

The Transportation Security Administration is going “back to the drawing board” to design new safety protocols after airports around the country failed to find weapons brought through screening in an undercover sting operation, U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch told Herald Radio today.

The South Boston Democrat said Peter Neffenger, the new TSA administrator, is beginning the process of rethinking what passengers will have to do before boarding a plane.

“The new administrator is going back to the drawing board,” Lynch said. “He is going to come up with a new set of recommendations and reteach the entire workforce a new procedure to hopefully screen out some of these weapons.”

As we said, this is 14 years after 9/11.  What've they been doing?

The look into TSA protocol comes after an undercover sting operation during which staffers from the Inspector General’s office covertly went through security at eight airports and, in many cases, were able to sneak in weapons.

“They have failed miserably,” Lynch said, describing the classified results of the operation. “They would strap a gun on their ankle, one of them had an ace bandage with a weapon inside. They walk through the screeners and, with a very high instance, they are getting through. So there are some major problems.”

Testifying before a House Oversight Subcommittee on Tuesday, Neffenger said passengers may be “on the cusp of a very different looking checkpoint experience in the next five years.” In his written testimony to the committee, he advocated increasing the number of vetted passengers, or “trusted travelers,” and compared processing those people in a way similar to flight crews. He also expressed concern over the cost and effectiveness of certain existing programs - such as using behavior detection to examine whether a passenger may be experiencing “stress, fear, or detection.”

COMMENT:  Other countries seem to have been more successful at this.  We seem to have botched it, given the disasters revealed in the undercover sting operation.

It's a delicate subject, but I do hope they do an honest analysis – no political correctness – of personnel policies.  Who are we hiring to do the inspections at airports?  How do our personnel standards rank against those of other countries?

November 6, 2015       Permalink

PUTIN SUSPENDS EGYPT FLIGHTS – AT 9:51 A.M. ET:  Up to now, the Kremlin has resisted the growing belief by Western intelligence agencies that the Russian airliner that crashed in the Sinai was brought down by a bomb.  From The New York Times: 

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday suspended all flights from Russia to Egypt, the most popular tourist destination for Russians. The move came as several airlines imposed bans on checked luggage over concerns that a bomb in a cargo hold brought down a Russian charter jet in the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board.

Mr. Putin signed off on a recommendation by Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service, Russia’s internal state security agency, that the flights be suspended, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, confirmed to the Interfax news agency. It was not immediately clear when the suspension would begin.

Mr. Putin also ordered that measures be taken to ensure that the Russian tourists already in Egypt, including the resort city of Sharm el Sheikh, from which the doomed Russian jet departed, could be brought home safely.

The halting of flights was the first breach in what has largely been a wall of silence about the crash from Russian and Egyptian authorities, which have until now played down the possibility of terrorism — even as Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, and President Obama, have raised it as a possibility. Nearly all of the dead were Russian citizens.

COMMENT:  You get the feeling that only a small amount of the information known to intelligence agencies is being released to the public.  Suspending flights is a major step for Russia, an admission that its airliners are being targeted, and targeted successfully.

There has always been a nightmare scenario in which terrorists paralyze the international air system, and close off whole countries to air travel.  I have no idea whether that scenario is being played out, but I'd be concerned.

November 6, 2015       Permalink

MILITARY IS FED UP WITH OBAMA – AT 8:56 A.M. ET:  It was bound to happen.  The American military, weakened and battered by our first truly leftist president, is finally expressing its frustration with the temporary occupant of the White House.  From the Washington Times: 

Key lawmakers from both parties say frustration with the White House among the top military officers is at its highest level in decades, the product of President Obama’s cautious approach to the wars in Syria and Iraq and an indecisive inner circle of White House advisers who, critics say, have iced the Pentagon out of the policymaking process.

“There’s a level of dissatisfaction among the uniformed military that I’ve never seen in my time here,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain in an interview. “For some of us who are a little older, let’s go back and read the Pentagon Papers — what the administration is doing is the kind of incrementalism that defined much of the Vietnam conflict.”

The Arizona Republican is known as a fierce critic of President Obama’s foreign policy, but his complaints were echoed by an unlikely source: Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

“Frustration among the uniformed service is real,” the Washington Democrat said, adding that the administration “does keep things in the White House and has not been more inclusive in the decision-making process.”

COMMENT:   From what I've seen in many reports over recent weeks, there is a widespread feeling, not only in the Pentagon, but among our allies, that Obama has no coherent strategy in the Mideast.  It's now reported that Britain, which is assisting with air strikes against ISIS in Iraq, is growing reluctant to do the same in Syria because of our confused policy.

The bottom line is that Obama doesn't seem to care much.  He'd rather "fundamentally change America," even though most Americans don't want to be fundamentally changed.

November 6,  2015     Permalink

NOVEMBER 5,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:53 P.M. ET: 

THE UNKINDEST CUT – From The Politico:   Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee failed to make the cut for the main stage at next week’s Fox Business Network/Wall Street Journal debate, a particularly harsh blow for the New Jersey governor who has struggled to gain traction in the presidential race after being seen as a rising GOP star in 2012.  The two Republican candidates failed to meet the 2.5 percent average polling threshold, meaning they'll both be bumped to a 6 p.m. undercard debate on Tuesday, appearing alongside former Sen. Rick Santorum and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.  Christie and Huckabee weren’t the only ones to get bad news in the Fox Business lineup. Sen. Lindsey Graham, former New York Gov. George Pataki, and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore failed to register enough in four recent national polls to participate in the Nov. 10 event at all. They needed to get just 1 percent support in one of those polls. It will be Graham and Pataki's first time not getting to participate.  This was inevitable.  The herd must be thinned to allow voters to concentrate on a smaller number of candidates.  The main debate Tuesday night will feature Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and John Kasich.

NOT THE LIST TO BE ON – From frontpagemag.com:  Harvard, Columbia and Brandeis are among 10 American universities cited by the David Horowitz Freedom Center as among the “most friendly” in the nation to Islamic terrorists against Israel...In alphabetical order, the ten universities are: Brandeis University; Columbia University; Harvard University; Rutgers University-New Brunswick; San Francisco State University; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, San Diego; University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; and the University of New Mexico.  You may be sure that Israel isn't the only target of some of the radicals on these campuses.  Israel is the Little Satan.  We're the Big Satan.  You might want to slip this list to some relatives applying to college. 

WHAT A FLIP-FLOP – Bernie Sanders is learning from Hillary.  From the Washington Free Beacon: Bernie Sanders is walking back one of his statements from the first Democratic primary debate, now expressing support for the FBI investigation into the former secretary of state’s personal server.  In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Wednesday, Sen. Sanders (I., Vt.) clarified his outburst during the CNN Democratic debate on Oct. 13 during which he defended Clinton on the email issues.  “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!” Sanders shouted on the debate stage, inviting laughs and a handshake from Clinton.  “You get 12 seconds to say these things,” Sanders told the Journal Wednesday. “There’s an investigation going on right now. I did not say, ‘End the investigation.’ That’s silly. … Let the investigation proceed unimpeded.”  Gee, Bern, that's what Republicans would say.  I hope Bernie is watching his back and wearing his flak jacket.

November 5,  2015     Permalink

NOTHING TO SEE, NOTHING TO SEE – AT 11:44 A.M. ET:  Facts about a stabbing rampage in California yesterday are coming to light.  Haven't seen much about it in American media, except for Fox.  This is from London's Daily Mail:

A student who stabbed four people inside a classroom at the University of California, Merced, before he was killed by police has been identified.

Faisal Mohammad, a freshman from Santa Clara who majored in computer science and engineering, was shot dead by officers after his violent rampage on Wednesday morning.

The FBI are now trying to figure out the motives of the 18-year-old, who was living in an on-campus dorm, the Merced Sun Star reported.

Well, for starters, stabbing rampages have now become a staple item for Arabs attacking Israelis in Israel.  Copycat?  I don't know, but that's where I'd begin.

Andrew Velasquez, his roommate, told ABC30 Mohammad was anti-social and was always alone on campus.

'Didn't talk much. And I never saw him walk with anybody. Walking to class, I never saw him walk with anybody.

'Every time I would try and say something he would just ignore it.'

Police cancelled classes on Thursday so they could continue their investigation.
During a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Sheriff-Coroner Vern Warnke said that the weapon used in the stabbings was a hunting knife between 8 and 10 inches long.

The university said that two students, one staff member and a vendor were wounded but were expected to recover. Two of the victims were airlifted to specific hospitals for treatment.

COMMENT:  We now have to be alert to further knife attacks.  Guns aren't the only weapons of choice for terrorists and murderers, although you'd never know it by the behavior of the press.

November 5, 2015       Permalink

HOW MANY WARNINGS DO WE NEED? – AT 10:55 A.M. ET:   Another public servant who tried to do her job for her country, and was sidetracked by Barack Obama.  From The Politico: 

Evelyn Farkas announced last month her decision to leave the Pentagon after five years during which she advised three secretaries of defense and played a major role in securing $244 million in military support for Ukraine.

The Pentagon's former top Russia policy expert, who stepped down last week, says she worked behind the scenes to get the Obama administration to take a harder line with Moscow but was overruled — and remains concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin will test the U.S. and its allies in other places.

Evelyn Farkas, who served as deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia until last Friday, made clear in an exit interview with reporters on Wednesday that her departure "was not motivated by policy differences.”

Of course it was.  However, they play the Washington "we're all colleagues" game.

But she said she advocated, unsuccessfully, for the administration to do more to deter Russia, including providing “lethal, defensive assistance to Ukraine, primarily anti-tank weapons.”

She also said that the administration should review its force posture in Europe and consider putting more troops further east and that top U.S. officials should spend more time in the region.

“We need more high-level attention being paid to the countries that feel directly threatened by Russia,” Farkas said.

COMMENT:  Nice to hear some common sense and serious, mature thinking.  But that's not what's wanted by this administration, and it can only get worse as Obama approaches his last year in office.

I love her comment, "We need more high-level attention being paid..."

Wonder who she's referring to.  Well, he's on vacation in Hawaii anyway.

November 5, 2015       Permalink

OBAMA THE POLITICAL GENIUS (CHOKE) – AT 9:46 A.M. ET:  Liberalism lost throughout the country in Tuesday's off-year elections, especially in the gubernatorial upset in Kentucky, which elected a Republican governor for the first time in years. 

In fact, catastrophic liberal losses in off-year elections have come to characterize the age of Obama, which has resulted in a Democratic Party in the worst power position it's been in since the 1920s.  From Gateway Pundit: 

In May 2009, after the historic Democratic victories in the 2008 election that saw Democrats win the presidency, the House and a super majority in the Senate, liberal strategist James Carville argued that Democrats could dominate politics for the next four decades.

But that was in 2009.
Since then Obama has destroyed public morale and trust in government with his radical Progressive agenda and anti-American foreign policy.

In 2010 Democrats lost the House to Republicans.
In 2014 Democrats lost the Senate to Republicans.

Since Obama took office Democrats have lost:
** 14 Senate seats
** 69 House seats
** 12 governorships
** 910 state legislature seats

That’s over 1,000 seats lost!
Nice job, Barack.

COMMENT:  All true, all true.  But there is the 900-pound gorilla in the room, and that is the presidency.  Without the presidency, all the Republican gains may well be meaningless.  We see that proved every day in the sweeping executive actions Obama is taking, whether legal or not, to change America.  And the presidency is always the focus of the nation's attention.

We have a big job next year.  It must get done.

November 5, 2015        Permalink

SUPPORT FOR THE FBI DIRECTOR – AT 9:05 A.M. ET:  FBI Director James Comey was criticized by the White House for saying that recent spikes in crime were partially the result of low police morale – a situation caused by the attacks on police by the "Black lives matter" group and other groups. 

Horrors, said the White House.  Why doesn't the FBI director get with the program?

Now Comey is getting proper support from another high law-enforcement official.  From USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The nation's top drug enforcement official said Wednesday that FBI Director James Comey was "spot on'' when he recently offered the controversial assessment that violent crime surges in some cities may be linked to police officers' reluctance to engage suspects.

"I think there is something to it,'' Drug Enforcement Administration chief Chuck Rosenberg told reporters, referring to the so-called "Ferguson-effect'' in which police have been reportedly hesitant to act for fear of prompting the kind of civil unrest that engulfed Ferguson, Mo., last year. "I think (Comey) was spot on.''

Comey's remarks during appearances last month in Chicago put the FBI director at odds with some in law enforcement and the White House, which indicated that existing evidence did not support such a claim.

"I will say that the available evidence at this point does not support the notion that law enforcement officers around the country are shying away from fulfilling their responsibilities,'' White House spokesman Josh Earnest said last week. "On the contrary, I think you’ve seen a lot of local law enforcement leaders indicate that police officers and sheriffs and other local law enforcement officials are actually dedicated public servants who on a daily basis are putting their lives on the line to serve and protect the communities that they’re assigned to.''

The FBI director has acknowledged that data is lacking to support a definitive conclusion, yet he said that he maintained a "strong sense'' of a connection based on reports from local law enforcement officials.

COMMENT:  Comey is obviously correct.  As he pointed out, many police officers are reluctant to "get out of the car" when there are mobs waiting with iPhone cameras to record their every move, recordings that can be used against an officer without any context.

The war on crime in America was working quite well in many (but not all) jurisdictions before Obama came to power.  Now it is failing again.  I wonder why.

November 5,  2015     Permalink