Please note that you can leave a comment on any of our posts at our Facebook page.  Subscribers can also comment at length at our Angel's Corner Forum.

Our Angel's Corner archive is here.

DECEMBER 3,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 5:43 P.M. ET: 

A SICKENING MOVEMENT – FROM POWERLINE:   Black Lives Matter is mourning the death of “El Commandante,” known to the rest of us as Fidel Castro. BLM feels “an overwhelming sense of loss” at the passing of the communist dictator.  And well it should. BLM is a Marxist revolutionary movement — if you don’t believe me, read its sickening eulogy of Castro. Naturally, it views “El Commandante” as a hero to be mourned.  BLM praises Castro for harboring some its heroes: " [W]e are particularly grateful to Fidel for holding Mama Assata Shakur, who continues to inspire us. We are thankful that he provided a home for Brother Michael Finney Ralph Goodwin, and Charles Hill, asylum to Brother Huey P. Newton, and sanctuary for so many other Black revolutionaries who were being persecuted by the American government during the Black Power era."  Who are these people? Cop killers.  As usual, the mainstream media glosses over the real beliefs of this movement.  Leftist journalistic doctrine does not permit such a discussion.

UNBELIEVABLE – FROM JUDICIAL WATCH:    Requiring employees in the United States to speak a foreign language is not discriminatory but forcing them to speak English violates federal law under a sweeping order issued by the Obama administration to crack down on “national origin discrimination” in the workplace. The government’s new enforcement guidelines state that bilingual requirements don’t meet discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act but English-only rules do because they’re restrictive language policies.  The administration asserts that the new rules, which cover a broad range of scenarios that could get employers in trouble, were created because the American workforce is “increasingly ethnically diverse.” The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces the nation’s workplace discrimination laws, made them public a few days ago. “The increased cultural diversity of today’s workplaces presents new and evolving issues with respect to Title VII’s protection against national origin discrimination,” the agency writes in the lengthy document. “This enforcement guidance will assist EEOC staff in their investigation of national origin discrimination charges and provide information for applicants, employees, and employers to understand their respective rights and responsibilities under Title VII.”  Fortunately, this administration and its nuttiness will be gone in about seven weeks.  But they'll probably try to do as much damage as possible during those weeks.

WHAT REAL OPPRESSION LOOKS LIKE – FROM BRITAIN'S SUN:   A YOUNG woman in Saudi Arabia is facing calls for her execution after she was pictured without a hijab.  Malak Al Shehri sparked fury on social media after she went out in public in the conservative capital Riyadh without a full body cloak – called an abaya – or a veil.   Some raged that she should be “thrown to the dogs” or “beheaded” for daring to stand against the country’s strict rules.  But hundreds came to her defence and praised her “bravery” for sharing the picture on Twitter...“Kill her and throw her corpse to the dogs,” one Twitter user wrote.  Another said: “We want blood.”  I want to be sure we're sensitive about this.  Would it be Islamophobic to object to her being executed? 

December 3, 2016       Permalink

OUTRAGEOUS – AT 9:39 A.M.:  We have seen too many of these stories, stories about Defense Department procurement programs that fall short of objectives.  Correcting this problem should be a major priority of the incoming administration.  From the Washington Examiner:   

The Navy's Littoral Combat Ship program is behind schedule, hundreds of millions over budget, and incapable of conducting most of the basic missions it was intended to carry out. Senators on Thursday said they wanted to know why.

"Like so many major programs that preceded it, LCS's failure followed predictably from an inability to define and stabilize requirements, unrealistic initial cost estimates, and unreliable assessments of technical and integration risk, made worse by repeatedly buying ships and mission packages before proving they are effective and can be operated together," said Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., told Pentagon witnesses during a hearing.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was more blunt. "The process is completely broken. If you want this to stop, somebody needs to get fired."

The current fleet of eight ships "have a near-zero chance of completing a 30-day mission, the Navy's requirement, without a critical failure of one or more seaframe subsystems essential for wartime operations," Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon's Director of Operational Test And Evaluation.

COMMENT:  Appalling.  Behind schedule.  Over budget.  Can't do the job.  There have always been problems with military procurement, but they just seem to persist.

Help wanted.  Marine General James Mattis will be secretary of defense.  He will care.

December 3, 2016        Permalink

WE'RE SEEING THE CHANGES ALREADY – AT 9:21 A.M. ET:  Trump understands the bully pulpit, the power of the presidency to persuade.  Some major names in America are listening.  From Bloomberg:   

Ford Motor Co. was a target of Donald Trump’s criticism on the campaign trail for building cars in Mexico, and now that Trump will be president, Ford said it’s willing to work with him to keep jobs in the U.S. -- provided Trump puts the right policies in place, according to the automaker’s chief executive officer.

“We will be very clear in the things we’d like to see,” Mark Fields said in an exclusive interview Friday at Bloomberg offices in Southfield, Michigan.

Among them, according to Fields: currency-manipulation rules to promote free and fair trade, tax reform and safety guidelines for autonomous vehicles.

Fields said that Ford plans to lobby the new president to soften U.S. and state fuel-economy rules. They hurt profits by forcing automakers to build more electric cars and hybrids than are warranted by customer demand, he said.

“In 2008, there were 12 electrified vehicles offered in the U.S. market and it represented 2.3 percent of the industry,” Fields said in the interview. “Fast forward to 2016, there’s 55 models, and year to date it’s 2.8 percent.”

This isn’t exactly a formula for success, he said. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to have customers, so obviously, there would be pressure on the business if there’s not a market,” he said.

COMMENT:  Of course Ford and others will ask for concessions.  They'll get some, and others will fade away.  Each company will be different.  But keeping jobs in America will be a major objective of the Trump administration, and dealmaking may well be in order.  That's Trump's specialty.  Give the man a chance to perform.

December 3, 2016        Permalink

THE LATEST COLLEGE DEMAND – AT 9:08 A.M. ET:  They're getting more and more ridiculous, and there are more and more of them every day.  From The Columbia Spectator:

Building on demands for Columbia to acknowledge its involvement in the colonization of the Americas and the displacement of indigenous peoples, the Native American Council of Columbia University submitted a document proposing reparations from the University.

The proposal follows a success for Columbia’s Native American community in October, when a plaque honoring the Lenape people was installed outside of John Jay Hall. In the document, NAC calls for changes in financial allocations, admissions policies, and the names of buildings on campus.

The proposal also includes a timeline that indicates when NAC would like to see each change addressed, with the majority of changes expected by the fall of 2017. It also asks for a formal response from the University before the coming spring semester.

And...

One change that NAC has considered is the renaming of certain buildings.

“It wouldn’t be too much to ask to change the name of a building [named after someone] that sold guns to frontiersmen,” Ramage said. “Or to generals that fought against Native people in the frontier.”

Ramage pointed specifically to buildings like Hartley Hall and Earl Hall, both named after members of the Dodge family. Marcellus Hartley Dodge Sr. served as the chairman of the board of Remington Arms, a company that manufactured weapons used in frontier expansion.

Renaming buildings requires approval from the University’s board of trustees. The trustees took several months to approve the installation of a plaque acknowledging the Lenape people earlier this year.

Additionally, NAC has taken issue with the placement of statues of men like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, historical figures who supported the displacement of Native Americans.

COMMENT:  How far back in history do we have to go?  How about a thousand years?  Maybe two thousand years.  Hold Italy today responsible for the Roman Empire.  Some bad stuff went down.  And how about that Coliseum in Rome, which never accepted fair labor regulations.

Every time I see one of these aggrieved groups making these demands I feel like shouting back to them, "Physics, chemistry, math, engineering.  Those are the words that will set you free."

But no one would listen.

December 3,  2016     Permalink

DECEMBER 2,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:31 P.M. ET: 

VICTORY – FROM FOX:   Hampshire College in Massachusetts raised the American flag back to full staff Friday after outraged veterans protested the school's decision to stop flying all flags across campus.  The college in Amherst had lowered the U.S. flag to half-staff after Election Day. The flag was found burned on Veterans Day, and the school chose to stop flying it – and any other flags – a week later.  "We understand that many who hold the flag as a powerful symbol of national ideals and their highest aspirations for the country -- including members of our own community -- felt hurt by our decisions, and that we deeply regret," the college's president, Jonathan Lash, stated Friday. He added, "We did not lower the flag to make a political statement. ... We acted solely to facilitate much-needed dialogue on our campus about how to dismantle the bigotry that is prevalent in our society."  Yeah, right.  You ban the flag to fight bigotry.  Sure, that makes sense.

LOWER EDUCATION – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   Many professors try to tell students what to think and give them only one side of the story inside the classroom. But then there’s scholars who go above and beyond in their attempts to indoctrinate students.  Young America’s Foundation has pulled together a list of examples, calling it “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses of 2016-2017.”  “The sad truth is that many of America’s greatest minds are spending four formative years and tens of thousands of dollars sitting in classes such as ‘Ecofeminism,’ and ‘Queering God,’ which clearly do little to equip them to face the real and complex problems our country desperately needs them to solve,” the foundation stated in releasing its list.  The list of classes named by YAF as the most egregious this year are:

1. Diversity and Design, University of Arkansas
2. Black Hair Politics, University of Florida
3. Gender and Food Politics, University of Florida
4. Ecofeminism, University of South Carolina
5. Transgender Cultural Production, Yale University
6. Hand to Mouth: Writing, Eating, and the Construction of Gender, Dartmouth University
7. Racial Capitalism, Williams College
8. Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology, Swarthmore College
9. Environmental Justice, University of Missouri
10. White People, Middlebury College
11. Transgender Latina Immigration: Politics of Belonging and Labor in the United States, Bowdoin College
12. Saints and Sexuality, University of Mississippi

I'd like to meet some of the students who would choose stuff like that.

A GREAT CULINARY LOSS – FROM TAIWAN NEWS:   Chef Peng Chang-kuei (???), the founder of the famous Hunan-style restaurant chain Peng's Garden Hunan Restaurant (?????) and inventor of the world famous Chinese dish General Tso's Chicken, died on Nov. 30 at the age of 98 from Pneumonia.  A native of Changsha, Hunan Province, Peng began training at the age of 13 under the tutelage of the famous Hunan chef Cao Jing-chen (???), who was the family chef of Tan Yan-kai (???), the prime minister of the Nationalist government from 1926 to 1928. After WWII, he was put in charge of running Nationalist government banquets, and in 1949 he fled to Taiwan after the Kuomintang's forces were defeated by the communists in the Chinese Civil War.  According to an interview with the China Times, Peng says that his most famous dish was created in 1952 during a four-day visit by U.S. Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Arthur W. Radford. After three days, he had served the guests most of his repertoire of dishes, so to try and mix things up a bit, he decided to chop some chicken into big chunks, fry it to a golden hue and then added a different combination of sauce and seasoning to create a new dish.  The admiral was so impressed with the dish that he asked Peng what it was called, he thought quickly on his feet and said "General Tso's Chicken" (????).  I noticed that the flag on our local Stop and Shop was flying at half staff.

December 2, 2016       Permalink

THE COLLEGE LEFT DOUBLES DOWN – AT 11:53 A.M. ET:   Barnard College, the women's college of Columbia University, is looking for a new president.  And what are the main qualifications, according to a number of its students?  Oh, you'll never guess.  From College Fix: 

Following the announced resignation of Barnard College’s president, many students at the women’s college are hoping that her successor brings more intersectionality to the job.

In other words, they don’t want another white woman – and preferably not a heterosexual.

Debora Spar told the student body earlier this month she would leave Barnard in March to become the president of Lincoln Center.

Students quickly flooded message boards, expressing their dissatisfaction and sadness with how Spar had led the college and demanding that the next president look nothing like her.

Posts from a public Facebook forum, Overheard @ Barnard, show the disdain that many students have for Spar as a paragon of “white feminism.”

“Can we write a letter and get like all of the students to sign it… no more white presidents [please],” student Talia Kay wrote on the page. “It’d be great if [we seniors] ushered in our last year by advocating for the administration to hire a woman of color to fill the position.”

Student Josh Zoeller of Columbia University, which is affiliated with Barnard, then chimed in: “hire a Native American woman.”

Upon hearing Spar’s pending resignation, Barnard student Krish JB wrote: “We gone finally have that WoC [woman of color] now?”

Krish, who identifes as “he/they,” then suggested they should ask for “maybe even a TWoC,” meaning a nonwhite transgender woman such as actress Laverne Cox.

COMMENT:  The sad fact is that they may get what they want.  The boards of trustees of these "schools" are often made up of cowards who look for the next invitation to a campus cocktail party. 

It's pathetic.  Our next generation of leaders.  I hope not.  The American people started a rebellion in 2016.  Now they have to see it through and drain the campus swamps, as well as the one in Washington.

December 2, 2016       Permalink

WHAT HAPPENED? – AT 9:44 A.M. ET:  The postmortems on the election are mostly in, but Michael Barone, one of the best political analysts we have, has now written his, explaining how the polls and predictions could have been so wrong.  From RealClearPolitics:   

Springtime polls seemed to assume the electorate would look much like the one in 2012. The signs that Trump would run much better than Romney among non-college-educated whites weren't very clear, particularly when his controversial comments caused his overall numbers to sag.

Going well into the fall, few polls showed the surge of votes that decided the election in what I have called the outstate Midwest -- the counties outside metropolitan areas with a million-plus people in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and (sort-of-Midwestern) Pennsylvania, states with 64 electoral votes that went to Barack Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016.

Those outstate areas trended the same way as Iowa, none of whose 99 counties is in a metro area with a million-plus people and whose six electoral votes went for Obama and for Trump. There, polls showed Trump opening up a significant lead over Clinton in mid-September. In Iowa and the outstates, Trump won percentages higher than George W. Bush did in 2004, while Clinton ran far behind Obama's 2012 showing -- 12 points behind in outstate Ohio, 11 points behind in Iowa and outstate Michigan, 9 points behind in outstate Wisconsin and 8 points behind in outstate Pennsylvania.

These are all places with many non-college-educated whites and few blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Trump's stands on trade and immigration -- distinctly different from those of other Republicans -- were surely partly responsible for his outstate margins, and it seems unlikely another Republican nominee could have matched them.

Two other factors were in play, factors that led to sharp Democratic gains in these same areas in the 1970s. One was honesty. The outstate Midwest recoiled against Richard Nixon's Republicans in the Watergate years, and this year, these voters had a similar reaction to Clinton's email lawbreaking and lies. That helped Trump, though it probably would have helped any other Republican nominee.

The other factor was dovishness. The Upper Midwest has long been the most isolationist part of the country. In the 1970s, voters there reacted against Republicans' support of the Vietnam War. This year, they seem to have moved toward Trump, who opposed military interventions supported by other Republicans. It seems unlikely another Republican nominee could have duplicated this appeal.

Finally...

So the familiar partisan lines of the past 20 years have been redrawn, and now we have a more downscale Republican Party and a Democratic Party confined to its coastal and campus cocoons. We'll see how that works out.

COMMENT:  Very well analyzed.  Barone knows this nation county by county.  Even the parts where they don't have an Apple Store.

December 2, 2016       Permalink

MAGNIFICENT – AT 9:21 A.M. ET:  There have been many articles reporting the reaction of American adolescents (of any age) to Trump's victory, but the best I've seen is by the Australian writer Roger Franklin.  Consider this, from the Quadrant:

In another example of the craven, bended-knee attitude of the US Fourth Estate, reporters solicited questions from Team Hillary that might embarrass Trump and his surrogates. Not that this is solely an American vice, as anyone would be aware who saw the Seven network’s Mark Riley ask Julia Gillard at the National Press Club how the media might be of greater assistance. It seems that to be the very model of a mainstream media journalist one needs a certain narrow, fixed and port-canted worldview. Blame it on groupthink or the blinkered education doled out in university journalism schools. Or just blame it on sheer laziness. It requires some effort to leave the office or climb off the campaign bus and put “dirt on your shoes”, as the editors of old used to say. Whatever the factors, as newspapers die, this campaign and its coverage are a good reason not to shed too many tears for a business that has thrown away that single asset even more valuable than advertising revenue: its credibility.

The walk from West 72nd Street to the anti-Trump protest took about thirty minutes, but there was no need to hurry, as the marching throng had only just begun to tap the deep wells of its bitter fury. The first thing, the most striking, was the cookie-cutter sameness of those who had turned out to denounce the result of an entirely democratic election. With few exceptions, the oldest faces—other than my own—would not have been much more than thirty, with most demonstrators of college age. The overwhelming skin pigment was whiter than any Westchester country club.

The truculence being paraded down Fifth Avenue seemed the product of political disappointment and a consequence of errant parenting. This was Generation Brat in full voice and the self-absorption was deafening. The anticipated pleasure of victory on election night had been denied them, so the response was a tantrum. The election was invalid, yelled a bearded young fellow from beneath his fashionable man-bun, never bothering to exclaim why the orderly and honest exercise of a nation’s franchise needed to be overturned. At another corner, an obese young woman was being hugged in her tearful misery by a coterie of friends, all equally upset. There was the chanting of predictable couplets—“Hey, ho, / Trump’s gotta go” and “Dump Trump / Dump Trump”—and vows and pledges to oppose and frustrate “the racist Trump agenda” at every turn. Had these children never before been denied that for which they wished? Evidently not, and now they were throwing a tantrum worthy of toddlers. And not just in New York: across America similar rallies were congealing.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It sums up the state of this country superbly.

December 2,  2016    Permalink