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NOVEMBER 7,  2015

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

AIRLINER LATEST – From London's Express:  BRITISH extremists were behind the bombing of a Russian jet over Egypt, intelligence experts believe.  They were overheard celebrating moments after the explosion that blew the plane apart, killing all 224 on board.  The jihadis were heard talking in Birmingham and London accents by spies at GCHQ in Cheltenham.  Trained in Syria and with an electronics background, it is believed they may have had a hand in building the bomb.  The success of the attack could inspire them to target British airports next, a former Special Branch officer warned last night.  GCHQ, the Government’s secret listening centre, picked up “chatter” from extremist groups in Egypt immediately after the Russian plane came down.  The regional accents suggest “a definite and strong link” between British extremists and the attack, according to intelligence sources.  We cannot confirm this, but it certainly is scary.

TRUMP ON SNL – Like many of you, I couldn't resist watching Trump on "Saturday Night Live."  He came off pretty well, humorous without being silly.  The show overall wasn't particularly good, except for the wonderful, and not terribly kind, impersonations of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  But the parts with Trump neither hurt him nor helped him.  The real star actually was his daughter, Ivanka, who, in real life, is truly beautiful and brainy, and a great asset to the Trump organization.  I think this TV appearance will be forgotten quickly.  The debate this week on Fox Business is far more important.

HYPOCRISY DEFINED – From WaPo:  Two years ago, San Carlos Apache chairman Terry Rambler was at the White House, meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss the “racially offensive” name of the Washington Redskins. Last week, Rambler was in blackface. On Sunday, the Arizona tribe leader posted a Facebook photo of himself dressed as Bob Marley for Halloween, complete with fake dreadlocks and blackface makeup. The picture has caused outrage, especially given Rambler’s own public protests against racism towards Native Americans.  This what happens when political correctness, and not common sense and responsibility, start to govern our affairs.  A lot of frauds and phonies start coming out of the woodwork.

November 7,  2015     Permalink

A MUST READ – AT 12:10 P.M. ET:  Have you ever noticed how hard Republicans work to lose elections?  Have you noticed that, whenever they score a victory, they rush to ruin the moment?  Some observers already note that the party is doing all that it can to win defeat in next year's presidential contest.

Charles Krauthammer, in a brilliant column, nails it.  It's a warning to Republicans.  From National Review:

Where do Republicans get that special talent for turning gold to dross? They score an electoral “massacre” (The Economist) in 2014 and, a year later, what do they have to show for it other than another threat to shut down the government? Hillary Clinton is caught in e-mail flagrante and Benghazi mendacity and yet, with one Kevin McCarthy gaffe and a singularly ineffective 11-hour Benghazi hearing, Republicans render her sanitized.

And now their latest feat. They win a stunning victory over their perennial nemesis, the mainstream media — a slam-dunk rim-rattling exposure of the media bias they have been complaining about for a half-century — and within a week they so overplayed their hand as to dissipate whatever sympathetic advantage they gained.

The CNBC debate was a gift for the GOP, so unadorned a demonstration of liberal condescension, hostility, and arrogance that the rest of the media — their ideological cover exposed — were forced to denounce and ridicule their ham-handed colleagues. What happened then? Instead of quitting while they were ahead, the Republicans plunged into a week of meetings and statements, whining and complaining, bouncing around a series of demands, including control of the kind of questions that may or may not be asked at future debates.

Who’s the genius who thought up that one?

COMMENT:  Read the whole column.  It's worth it, a fine examination of the GOP's suicidal tendencies.

Hillary won't win the election next year.  The Republicans will lose it if their current amateurism continues.  Republican presidential candidates should be reminded that their opponent is Hillary Clinton, not other Republicans.

There used to be, in the Republican Party, the "Eleventh Commandment."  It read, "Thou shalt not speak ill of other Republicans."  Reagan used to quote it all the time because internecine warfare is an old Republican problem. 

The first caucuses and primaries start in February, only months from now.  I fear the GOP isn't ready. 

November 7, 2015       Permalink

OH DEAR, THEY'VE GOT IT IN WRITING – AT 11:51 A.M. ET:  No matter how much the mainstream media tries to cover for her, Hillary Clinton's past keeps catching up.  From Fox: 

On January 22nd, 2009, Hillary Clinton signed a Non-Disclosure agreement, or NDA, where she agreed to protect highly classified information, and a failure to do so could result in criminal prosecution.

"I have been advised that any breach of this Agreement may result in my termination of my access to SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) and removal from a position of special confidence," the NDA reads.

"I have been advised that any authorized disclosure of SCI by me may constitute violations of United States criminal laws, including provisions of Sections 793, 794, 798 and 952, Title 18 United States Code..." These are provisions of the Espionage Act, and as Fox recently reported, 18 USC 793 subsection (f) is of special interest to the FBI investigation as it includes "gross negligence" in the handling of national defense information.

The NDA was first obtained through a federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or CEI, which says on its website that it is a "...non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty."

The NDA signed by Mrs. Clinton as Secretary of State is significant because the State Department has never publicly acknowledged that she signed documents, confirming she was "advised that the unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized retention, or negligent handling" of top secret material was a punishable offense.

The use of a private server for government business, on its face, is a clear violation of the NDA agreement.

COMMENT:  The idea that Clinton might be president is chilling.  She has no ethics.  She has no character.  She has no integrity.  She has no record of accomplishment.  Other than that, she's outstanding.

November 7, 2015        Permalink

OBAMACARE DEATH WATCH – AT 10:46 A.M. ET:  It's story after story these days, stories about the slow collapse of Obamacare.  The Obama "legacy" achievement isn't making it, in part because results have come nowhere near meeting projections and needs.  From Forbes:

Humana said it will discontinue several products offered on government-run exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, impacting about 100,000 individuals currently covered by the insurer’s plans across the country.

The move, disclosed this morning in the company’s third-quarter earnings report, comes due to higher-than expected medical costs from sick newly insured patients covered under the health law.

“Operating results for the company’s individual commercial medical business continue to be challenged primarily due to the volatility related to the start of the healthcare exchange program created under the Affordable Care Act as well as the morbidity of membership served under this relatively new program,” Humana said in a statement this morning.

The plans Humana will discontinue had “product designs which attracted a higher-utilizing member base than was assumed when the 2015 plan offerings were priced,” the company said but didn’t specify the kind of plans that will be pulled. “The transitory nature of the population served has also contributed to use of emergency room services and non-participating providers above priced-for levels.”

COMMENT:  Not to worry.  The leftists will soon announce that Obamacare is in trouble – they'll probably blame climate change – and that the solution is more government, not less.  The single-payer system, which makes the government the dictator of all things medical, is on the way.

November 7,  2015     Permalink

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