More good links

Acting Attorney General Sally Yates wanted to get fired

Investor's Business Daily comments on the ban against folks from some Muslim countries

Good links

How Democrats Can Learn To Talk To 'Real People'

My Islam Problem and Yours

Dems would honor illegal alien killer, not victim

Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked out of rooms

The intolerance of the left: Trump's win as seen from Walt Disney's hometown

A guide to Trump's first 17 executive orders

Remember The Time Bill Clinton Got A Standing Ovation For "Cracking Down On Illegal Aliens"

The Women's March and the March for Life

The women’s march organizers blew it, and even the media realize it.

A short and seemingly insignificant segment on CNN this morning illustrates just how badly the organizers of the so-called Women’s March on Washington blew their chance to turn their event into a national, bipartisan movement against Trump.

In the segment, CNN reporter Brianna Keilar reported live from the scene of Friday’ March for Life — itself a noteworthy event given the normal media blackout that surrounds the March for Life — and explicitly compared the pro-life event to the Women’s March

President Trump forced the media to cover the March for Life by scorching David Muir in his widely watched interview for the usual lack of coverage of the march.

“This is what the pro-lifers around me say, David — say it isn’t so?”

Of course, Muir could not, and the exchange was so widely covered that the media cannot help but at least notice the marchers this year. Trump has made media dishonesty such a central focus of his early presidency that when he scores a genuine point against them, they dare not prove him right. And so Brianna Keilar was sent out into the cold in Washington, D.C., to acknowledge that, yes, hundreds of thousands of people will be peacefully marching in protest against abortion this year, as they do every year, ending at the steps of the Supreme Court, where they will pray and hold vigil for the millions of unborn who have died and who will continue to die at the altar of legalized abortion.

Read the whole thing

She's with him

An interresting collection of stories by educated women who voted for Trump.

I didn’t know I was a racist until I read it in the papers. Hillary would call me Islamophobic for wanting immigrants to be vetted. That makes me so mad. As a university professor who also believes in the American dream, I want immigrants to come into this country, contribute and prosper. But the terrorists know that we don’t vet. Nor am I a misogynist for voting for a guy who talks a certain way in private

Trump is adjusting to the White House

Here's a fun article in the New York Times about how Donald Trump is adjusting to life in the White House. Not as gilded as his place in the Trump Tower, but he seems to be getting along just fine.

Read the article here

Money doesn't seem to fix schools

The proposed solution to bad schools from the establishment (politicians, unions) is always the same: more money.  Well the Obama administration just spent an extra $7 billion on education and the results from a government study are in; no improvement.

Remember this when the establishment comes out against Betsy DeVoes because she has different ideas.

Protein in 80-million year old fossils

Whether you are a "young earth" advocate or an evolutionist, you will find this article interesting. Scientist are comparing collagen from dinosaur fossils to modern animals. The young earth folk say that it's obvious that organic matter can't survive for millions of years. Old earth folk are interested to discover that it can.

Planned Parenthood doesn't really provide pre-natal care

Planned Parenthood, when arguing for continued government funding (at the rate of $500m/year) says that most of the money is spent on prenatal care and breast exams, and only 3% of their budget foes to abortions.

These statements are false of course, and these folks did their own research

Tim Kaine presides over same-sex wedding

Remember Tim Kaine? He ran for Vice-President with Hillary Clinton. On Inaguration Day he presided over a same-sex wedding. We can be so glad that Hillary lost.  Kaine was so obnoxious in the VP debate that that was enough to cost Hillary the election.

Noteworthy articles

A page where I collect noteworthy stories:

A bad week for journalism

The women's march reinforced every negative stereotype about women

Women's march protesters booed Trump hotel staff aiding woman having heart attack

Elections matter

Pastor Robert Jeffress preached at inauguration

On Inaguration Day, Chris and I watched an outstanding interview on Fox News with Pastor Robert Jeffress, who preached a sermon on Friday morning that Trump attended with several others. Chris liked the interview so much she watched it three times.

To see the interview, go to www.foxnews.com and click on the search icon (magnifying glass) and type in Jeffress. After the search results come up, click on the January 20 one.  

The Washington Post published the text of the sermon at the end of this article. It's a pretty good sermon, about Nehemiah building walls.

A handy guide to Trump's Cabinet nominations

Since the cabinet is pretty big to cover in one article, there's a lot of material here in this well-researched article

Obama leaves the White House

And what kind of shape did he leave the country? Here's what Quin Hillyer thinks:

The very day after Obama was elected in 2008, I predicted in this space that his team would steal the Senate by hook and crook (see: Al Franken); nuke the filibuster at least for judicial nominees; liberalize voting laws (or enforcement thereof) to make fraud easier while charging opponents with “vote suppression”; drum up spurious allegations of civil rights violations; punish anti-abortion protesters; enact “copious new regulations, especially environmental, to be used selectively to ensnare other conservative malcontents”; invasively use the IRS to harass conservative organizations; and tacitly encourage civil unrest in furtherance of Obamite goals.

All those predictions of course came true.

Obama and company also waged bureaucratic war against independent inspectors general; tried their hardest (even illegally) to hobble fossil fuels industries; evaded Congress’s intent by sending cash and uranium to a near-nuclear-ready Iran; fumbled and stumbled while veterans suffered virtually criminal neglect; wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on projects that were not “shovel-ready” and did not create many jobs; oversaw an economy in which the workforce participation rate dropped to historically low levels while real median household income also fell and personal debt rose, and in which food stamp rolls grew to a number larger than the population of Spain; horrendously politicized the Justice Department; and saw race relations worsen for the first time in decades.

There's more

Obama's biggest whoppers

Normally, the Washington Post is in bed with Obama, but in an unusual divergence from their usual news policy, they have published a list of his biggest lies and misstatements of his presidency. Use this list to refresh your memory

Hollywood, liberal to its core, was shocked that Trump won.

Zip Code 90210 and environs has long been one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable ATM branches, the town where rich liberals can feel better about being rich by contributing to causes that prove their liberal bona fides and let them rub shoulders with real power. Celebrities like Magic Johnson, Seth MacFarlane, Lionel Richie and George Clooney—together with moguls like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Bob Iger, Haim Saban, Barry Diller and Michael Eisner—had held dozens of fundraisers for Clinton, or entertained for free to support her, over the past two years.

Hollywood’s top Democratic players were all set to watch one fellow liberal superstar, Barack Obama, pass the torch to another, Clinton herself. They were planning their inauguration parties, polishing their résumés and, in some cases, measuring the drapes in embassies around the world. Instead, they faced a shocking overnight reversal, as if a big budget movie that the tracking polls had guaranteed would be a blockbuster inexplicably tanked on opening weekend with no warning. A cadre of megastars and megadonors that had counted on four or eight more years of Access Washington, that has been happily benefiting from the psychic and social rewards of the increasing intermingling of celebrity culture and Democratic politics, suddenly found the door to the White House slammed squarely in its face.

And the rejection came with an extra, and especially scary, sting: It turned out that the industry supposedly known for having its finger on the popular pulse didn’t understand America—“red America,” the “real America,” the “rest of America”—at all.

Read the whole thing

Make America great again

How Donald Trump came up with the slogan. A very interesting article about the slogan. Be sure and read through to find out his slogan for the 2020 election--looks like he's already making plans to run again.

How the media reacted when Trump ran for President

This is a pretty entertaining roundup of the media's response to Trump announcing he was running for President. The liberal MSM remained out of touch with America from the beginning right up to the election.

Trump’s victory in November, and his inauguration tomorrow, are just the latest reminders that the media’s political coverage is often seriously distorted by journalists’ smug confidence in a liberal world view that blinds them to the facts in front of them.

Read the whole thing 

Eight years of Obama was enough

From the New York Times, commentary on the Obama administration

Eight years ago, Barack Obama won the presidency promising to transform America. A supremely self-confident politician, Mr. Obama was the object of extravagant hopes that he nurtured and encouraged.

After his Super Tuesday primary victories in 2008, Mr. Obama said that the movement he began would “ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, make this time different than all the rest.” He would slow the rise of the oceans, end wars abroad and bridge political divisions at home. For his supporters, Mr. Obama was almost a figure of myth, comparable to Lincoln. When he won the presidency, nothing seemed beyond his reach.

It didn't turn out as expected:

The Obama presidency has been characterized by injurious incompetence, in particular with regard to his signature achievement, Obamacare. The unveiling of the website was a disaster, and the promises the president made — that Americans could keep their doctors and plans if they chose to — were false. Mr. Obama guaranteed lower insurance costs to families and lower health costs to the taxpayer; instead, costs rose. Several of the state-run exchanges appear to be headed for collapse.

Overseas, the Obama years have been defined by spreading disorder and chaos, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, with nations collapsing and borders dissolving. More terrorist safe havens have been established than ever before. Russia and China have become more aggressive and significantly increased their geopolitical influence. America is now held in brazen contempt by our enemies and mistrusted by many of our allies.

Yet in some respects the greatest failure of the Obama years is in the area where many people thought he would excel. Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his 2008 campaign a promise to end a politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism.” In February of that year, I praised him for “a message that, at its core, is about unity and hope rather than division and resentment.” Yet he leaves office with America more conflicted and cynical than when he took office. More than 70 percent of Americans say the country is either more divided or no more united than it was in 2009. Race relations are the worst in decades, and our nation is as polarized as it has been in the modern era. 

Read the whole thing

The Smithsonian Institute goes liberal

First sign that the Smithsonian was going off the rails was when they distorted the Enola Gay ehibition. The initial exhibit was designed to be critical of the atomic bombing of Japan.  For more on the atom bomb controversary, watch this video by Bill Whittle

Further indications of the left-leaning leadership can be found here

The Smithsonian has opened a new National Museum of African American History and Culture, a long overdue addition to its offerings. And in this version of African-American history and culture, black conservatives do not exist. Specifically, the life and career of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas have been — forgive the term — whitewashed from the record.

Anita Hill, an obscure functionary who achieved for herself a moment of fleeting fame when she advanced the interests of the Democratic party by smearing Clarence Thomas with lurid, flimsily documented allegations of sexual harassment, is presented as a major figure of the 20th century.

How distorted is that coverage? Read the whole thing

More here on Justice Thomas

Want to see fake news? Turn on network television

Fake news is in the news, with plenty of coverage by the mainstream media. The problem is that the MSM is full of fake news.

In December, PolitiFact awarded its “2016 Lie of the Year” award to “Fake news.” But mainstream press deserves plenty of blame. We can’t all be gullible rubes, after all. Why are American news consumers turning away from mainstream media?  The answer is simple: contemporary reporting is awful.

How does MSM create fake news?

Michael Cleply, a former New York Times reporter, wrote after the election that his editors often assigned stories to him with prepackaged narratives. His job was to gather facts and comments from sources to support the storyline. This is not “reporting.” It is little wonder that many people distrust mainstream media 

Read the whole thing 

Martin Luther King's instructions for bus riders

Clinton supporters are organizing a boycott of LL Bean

The Left is organizing a boycott of LL Bean just because one of the 50 people in the Bean family gave some money to Trump. This is unconscionable

L.L. Bean has been targeted by the anti-Trump campaign called "Grab Your Wallet" (GYW) because a granddaughter of the L.L. Bean founder, one of ten members of the firm’s board of directors, had given $60,000 to a Trump PAC during the campaign.  Ignoring the fact that she was not speaking for the firm but only for herself, GYW has undertaken a nationwide campaign to boycott not only L.L. Bean, but other companies, businesses, department stores, and even magazines that financially or otherwise support Donald Trump or sell his products, especially those of his daughter Ivanka. 

Obama gives Biden a medal

Food stamps buy lots of soda

People on food stamps spend more on soda than any other food category.

The findings show that the No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks, which accounted for 5 percent of the dollars they spent on food. The category of ‘sweetened beverages,’ which includes fruit juices, energy drinks and sweetened teas, accounted for almost 10 percent of the dollars they spent on food. “In this sense, SNAP is a multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidy of the soda industry,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “It’s pretty shocking.”

SNAP households spent 9.3 percent of their grocery budgets on sweetened beverages alone, not including soft drinks. That was slightly higher than the 7.1 percent figure for households that do not receive food stamps.

Read the article

 

Judge Betsy Devos by her enemies

The Teacher's Unions are going all out to fight the Betsy Devos nomination.  As usual, they could care not one bit about the students, but want to maximize the number of teachers in the union. They could get a little more symphathy from me if they made it actually possible to fire incompetent teachers. Read the article

Political correctness gone wild

Political correctness got Trump elected, that is, the opposition to it. PC has gone overboard in institutes of higher education and preventing students from actually getting educated.

In the last decade, however, the obsession with minorities and their victimhood may have gone overboard. In a much-discussed opinion piece for the New York Times last month, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, argued that American liberalism in recent years has been seized by hysteria regarding race, gender and sexual identity. Lilla says it was a strategic error on the part of Hillary Clinton to focus her campaign so heavily on African-Americans, Latinos, the LGBT community and women. "The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups," he wrote.

Political correctness ignores the really significant issue: class

With their focus on skin color, gender and sexual orientation and the microaggressions associated with them, he argued, students were overlooking what Trump was able to recognize: Most people in the United States aren't unhappy or angry because of their gender, their personal pronoun or the lack of a trigger warning in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (due to misogyny). They're angry because they aren't able to pay their rents, and they have the feeling that nobody cares -- that the liberal-progressive public is more concerned about whether the bathrooms used by transsexuals should be those of their biological or perceived gender. Shouldn't the discussion be about the fight for wealth redistribution rather than definitions and identities? 

Sidestepping such issues often underscores just how helpless many of these students have become, Blecher says. Still, he doesn't want create any misunderstandings. "They are not spoiled sons and daughters. Oberlin's brand is social progressivism. The school wants to admit students from financially weaker families, students from Hispanic or African-American families, some are kids from the streets. Some have spent the last five years trying to get in and then their guidance counselor at high school gets them into a place like Oberlin. They were the most promising students we could find. And you know what? They arrive here and it is hell for them!"

Academic expectations are high, which he says makes the students feel like they don't belong here -- and, in a way, they don't. "At its core, Oberlin is a highly exclusive place that wants to be inclusive. It's an unavoidable contradiction. So some lash out." And how do they do that? They look for a discourse, for a language. What they find is language like "microaggressions," "safe space" and "intersectionality," meaning the traits that some minorities have in common. "Their frustration keeps growing to the point that they start attacking the food in the cafeteria!"

What happened to freedom of speech?

In places where microaggressions lurk and trigger warnings become necessary, certain things can simply no longer be discussed. The children of the 1968 student protest generation took for granted the freedoms that their parents fought to obtain, holding them to be self-evident. The grandchildren of the 1968 generation now want to retract some of those freedoms. Free speech -- once the highest achievement the leftist student generation had fought for -- is now largely and paradoxically being invoked by populists and the right-wing.

The roles have been completely reversed. Whereas today's leftist student movement is willing to sacrifice the freedom of speech -- fought for by their political predecessors - on the altar of trigger warnings and "safe spaces," this right is now being defended by the very same right-wing whose political antecedents sought to prevent it back in the day. 

Read the article

Obama's legacy examined

We Deserved Better Than Obama for Our First Black President

Schadenfreude

Noun: satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune.

Democratic operatives are having a hard time finding jobs in Washington DC.

Democrats who served under President Barack Obama and campaigned for defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton are finding it difficult to find work in a city that for eight years has been flooded by the blue party – a city that is now being submerged by a red tide as the Trump administration prepares to take over the nation’s capital next week.

Tough times are setting in for Democrats in 2017, as Politico reports that thousands of Obama’s appointees and hundreds of Clinton’s campaign staffers are now searching for work in a city where their demand “couldn’t be any lower,” as President-elect Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration is just over a week away.

Read it and smile

Kellyanne Conway - the lady that beat Hillary

Kellyanne Conway got Trump elected. Read this story about the lady who turned around his campaign. It's a fascinating read about the first female campaign manager to win a presidential election.

Betsy Devos for Education Secretary

If you want to help poor kids get ahead, then you need to support Betsy Devos. She is being attacked by a coalition of people who care more about teachers and politicians than students.

Read the whole thing

What is Trumpism - Victor Davis Hanson

Donald Trump is hated by liberal Democrats because, among other things, he is likely to reverse the entire Obama project. And, far worse, he probably will seek fundamental ways of obstructing its future resurgence — even perhaps by peeling off traditional Democratic constituencies.

The proverbial mainstream media despise Trump. Culturally, he has become a totem of their fears: coarseness, ostentatiousness, flamboyance, and the equation of big money with taste and success. His new approach to the media may make them irrelevant, and they fear their downfall could be well earned.

The Republican Washington–to–New York establishment is alienated by Trump. It finds his behavior reckless and his ideology unpredictable — especially given his cruel destruction of in-house Republican candidates in the primaries and his past flirtations with liberal ideas and politicians. That he has now brought them more opportunity for conservative political change than any Republican candidate in a century only adds insult to their sense of injury.

Note the common denominator to the all these hostile groups: It is Trump the man, not Trump the avatar of some political movement that they detest. After all, there are no Trump political philosophers. There is no slate of down-ballot Trump ideologues. If Trump were to start a third party, what would be its chief tenets? There is as yet neither a Trump “Contract for America” nor a Trump “First Principles” manifesto.

Nonetheless, from the 2016 campaign and from President-elect Trump’s slated appointments, past interviews, and tweets, we can see a coherent worldview emerging, something different from both orthodox conservativism and liberalism, though certainly Trumpism is far closer to the former than to the latter. Here may be a few outlines of Trumpist thought.

Read the whole thing 

Piers Morgan on Meryl Streep's blast against Trump

If you haven't been in a cave, you've seen Meryl Streep's rant against Donald Trump at the Golden Globes. Piers Morgan is a well known liberal, commenting here on her speech.

When you've lost Piers Morgan, you ought to question your liberal attitudes.

When she speaks, the world listens.

Last night, Streep received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Golden Globes, and chose the moment to launch a very personal attack on Donald Trump.

She began by saying that Hollywood, foreigners and the press are ‘the most vilified segments of American society right now’.

At which point the cameras panned out to hundreds of the richest, most privileged people in American society sitting in the audience in their $10,000 tuxedos and $20,000 dresses, loudly cheering this acknowledgement of their dreadful victimhood.

She then said that if all the ‘outsiders and foreigners’ were kicked out of Hollywood, ‘you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

Her real target was Trump. She’d come to take him down, and that is exactly what she proceeded to do.

‘There were many powerful performances this year that did breathtaking, compassionate work,’ she said. ‘But there was one performance that stunned me. It sank it hooks in my heart, not because it was good – there’s nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege and power and the capacity to fight back.’

Meryl’s bottom lip began to tremble. ‘It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,’ she cried, ‘and I still can’t get it out of my head. This instinct to humiliate when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.’

Trump has always furiously denied – and has again today on Twitter - he was mocking the reporter’s disability and a Conservative website produced video evidence of numerous other instances where he made the exact same gesture to fully able-bodied people when attacking them. The reporter is hardly a powerless individual with ‘no capacity to fight back’; he’s a long-time Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist at the New York Times, a paper that’s trashed Trump for decades

The rest of the article pretty much demolishes her comments and Hollywood in general. Read the whole thing

Chris Pratt is a Christian--liberals react

Chris Pratt is a major Hollywood star: Passengers, Jurassic World, Magnificent Seven. Contrary to expectations, he is also a Christian. Liberals have a hard time understanding.

Vanity Fair's Rich Cohen sought to explain it:

O.K. Let’s stop for a moment. Because this is strange and so distant from what we expect of a movie star, especially of the clever, slapdash, wise-guy variety. But everyone needs a story to make sense of their life. Even the most successful. The extreme demands explanation. For Pratt, success, so extreme it scared him, is explained by metaphysical intervention. Which caused him to take control. In that moment, he yielded. His path has been clear ever since.

In Cohen's telling, Pratt's story of faith can't be real — it must be psychologically explained. Unfortunately, this is the kind of bigoted view of faith liberals have shown us again and again (attacking religious freedom as a smokescreen to discriminate against LGBT people, or targeting Chip and Joanna Gaines, because their beliefs might make them "hateful" people)

Chris Pratt described his conversion from a sinful lifestyle to Christian living.

I was sitting outside a grocery store—we’d convinced someone to go in and buy us beer. This is Maui. And a guy named Henry came up and recognized something in me that needed to be saved. He asked what I was doing that night, and I was honest. I said, ‘My friend’s inside buying me alcohol.’ ‘You going to go party?’ he asked. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Drink and do drugs? Meet girls, fornication?’ I was like, ‘I hope so.’

I was charmed by this guy, don’t know why. He was an Asian dude, maybe Hawaiian, in his 40s. It should’ve made me nervous but didn’t. I said, ‘Why are you asking?’ He said, ‘Jesus told me to talk to you . . .’ At that moment I was like, I think I have to go with this guy. He took me to church. Over the next few days I surprised my friends by declaring that I was going to change my life.

Read the whole thing 

 

Memories of the media drooling over Obama

13 years ago, the media began drooling over Barak Obama.  This article brings back those memories. The sad thing is that they still think he is great, despite all evidence to the contrary. Even the Nobel Prize Committee was enamored, giving him the peace prize just in anticipation of the wonderful things he would do. Is there no end to the delusions of the Left?

Victor Davis Hanson on California

Read the article

Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps.

California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the over regulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment. 

And my personal favorite

When Jerry Brown leaves his governorship, he will not live in Bakersfield but probably in hip Grass Valley. 

How to fight terrorists? Shoot them yourself

Or so says the government of Czechoslovakia

A couple of months ago, Czech President Milos Zeman made an unusual request: He urged citizens to arm themselves against a possible "super-Holocaust" carried out by Muslim terrorists.

Now the country's interior ministry is pushing a constitutional change that would let citizens use guns against terrorists. Proponents say this could save lives if an attack occurs and police are delayed or unable to make their way to the scene. To become law, Parliament must approve the proposal; they'll vote in the coming months.

Read the article

What did we learn from the "Russian" hackers?

Roger Simon analyzes it

Which leads me to the real question. What was learned by the American people, the Russians, or anybody else by the supposed Russian hack of the Hillary campaign and the DNC?  Let's break it down to three basic areas that appeared via WikiLeaks.

1. The mainstream media was 99.9% in the pocket of the Democratic Party and their candidate Hillary Clinton.
2. Backbiting goes on inside political campaigns.
3. Democratic Party officials wanted Hillary, and absolutely not Bernie Sanders, to be the nominee .

Am I missing anything of importance? I don't think so. More importantly, was there anything in the WikiLeaks that anyone with an IQ in the proverbial triple digits wouldn't have assumed in the first place?  Not that I can think of.

Climate scientist resigns over unscientific science

Read the article here and then watch the video

Fun satellite images from 2016

This is a collection of interesting and somewhat beautiful satellite images

Will the world ever switch to clean energy?

I was attracted to this article because of my disdain for clean energy, except nuclear power, but it made my blog because of its very clever writing style.  Read it from top to bottom, and then read the article from bottom to top, and you will see it works in either direction

Texans love trucks

This is a fun article about how Texans feel about trucks, from the New York Times. They went on a safari to this exotic local and found something difficult to comprehend about people in the nether regions. Read it here

ACLU position on the nomination of Jeff Sessions for Attorney General

The ACLU (what Rush Limbaugh calls the "American Civil Liberals Union") has issued a report attacking the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. Out of curiosity, I read the executive summary which you also can read here.

To be honest, I think the report is a powerful endorsement of Mr. Sessions.  Considering that the ACLU made a serious effort to make this choice look bad, I have to say that I agree with just about every one of his positions the ACLU is complaining about.  Read it yourself and see if you don't want to cheer for this candidate.

Read this follow up article, an interview with a black staffer of Senator Sessions. The Democrats should read it as well; they are unconscionable hypocrites.

The first casualty of the election

was the illusion that liberals are good, nice people It turns out that liberals are not the loving, gentle spirits they were alleged to be.

The coronation of a new king

Read this terrific satire by an oil and gas consultant

The media gets its just reward

2016 was the year that the mainstream media got punished for its incompetence.

In movies, it's called the "cheer moment" -- that wonderfully satisfying part of the motion picture when the bully/bad guy finally gets his richly deserved comeuppance: Rocky flooring Apollo Creed in the first Rocky; John McClane sending Hans Gruber to hell off a high floor of Nakatomi Plaza. And in 2016, nobody's demise was cheered more vociferously than the mainstream media's. But don't take it from me, take it from a tattered remnant of what was once one of the seven pillars of the MSM (along with the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, and Time magazine), Newsweek. 

For more on media incompetence, read my previous post on coverage of the Russian hacking.

Possibly the best reason to get out of the UN

The UN, heavily funded by the US, and using up some prime real estate in New York, is reinforcing the disdain many Americans have for the organization, whose main function seems to be criticizing Israel.  Read this list of the members of the Human Rights Council. The list doesn't contain the names of very many countries that believe in human rights.

Update: Defund the United Nations

Fake news from the New York Times

The NYT ran a story about how economists view charter schools. The writer deliberately misstated the results of a survey of economists to show the opposite of what the study actually meant, of course the story reflected the democratic position as controlled by the teacher's unions.  Read the analysis here. There is a link to the original NYT article to compare.

The hacking story is suspect

This New Year's weekend, the news has been full of reports that the Russians hacked a power grid in the Northeast. It seems that they are relying on facts not in evidence. 1) The actual grid was not hacked, but a laptop used by one of the employees that was never attached to the grid, and 2) the malware is a commodity available from many sources and can't necessarily be associated with the Russians. Read the analysis  More here Probably the owner of the laptop clicked on an e-mail attachment like those I get every day. I am also suspicious about the alleged Russian hacking of the election.

Update: The Washington Post has updated the story to indicate that the grid was not hacked by the Russians Funny, I knew this by the second day when NBC was still leading with the Russian version. Don't any of those news interns read the Drudge Report?

Update 2: Assange insists it wasn't the Russians who provided the DNC e-mails. Who do you trust: Assange or "you can keep your doctor" Obama?

Update 3: Let's don't start a new cold war because somebody hacked Podesta's e-mail
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/02/russians-hacking-podesta-emails-democrats-glenn-reynolds-column/96081006/