?Please…. Pay attention to those around the table with you this day. Look them in the eye. Let them know. Give thanks for them while you have them. Consider that no relationship is forever, since we are all mortal.
Put aside what petty differences you have with these special people in your life, for special they are. Alas!, that many of us find out how special they were only after they are gone from us. I think there’s no pain deeper than that belated understanding. Celebrate those relationships today and celebrate that whatever else happens, you are together, on this day.
The Breakfast Scramble:
Draining the Swamp, media edition:
“So until members of the media come clean about colluding with the Clinton campaign and admit that they knowingly broke every ethical standard they are supposed to uphold, they should not have the privilege, they should not have the responsibility of covering the president on behalf of you, the American people,”
Sean Hannity, Politico
Draining the Swamp, NASA edition:
Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.
Hat tip and reax, David Middleton, Watts Up with That:
The swamp draining can’t begin soon enough. This will be a good start.
Conflating campaign donors with heroes, from Kim Bellware, Puffington Post
For the final time in his presidency, Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, to 21 recipients at the White House on Tuesday.
Honorees included entertainers Tom Hanks and Diana Ross, philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, architect Frank Gehry, scientist Margaret Hamilton, and athletes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and (a crying) Michael Jordan, whom Obama noted “was more than just an internet meme.”
The honor is awarded to individuals who have made “especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors,” the White House said in a statement earlier this month in announcing the nominees.
Reax, MOTUS:
I would be remiss if I didn’t report on the Won’s last Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards show. The last, like the first, was all about Obama:
Dim Won, b/k/a Barack Obama seems to conflating people who pretended to be a hero with real heroes. How sad. Please tell me how producing Saturday Night Live advances the cause of freedom.
Choices, choices, suddenly ‘rats will choice a dirty word, from Red State:
Earlier today, news broke that Donald Trump picked Betsy DeVos to be his Secretary of Education, a position she has accepted. Conservatives who don’t know much about her and are worried about the state of education in the United States can actually breathe easily. DeVos, simply put, is a phenomenal pick.
One of the biggest issues conservatives have been fighting for, an issue we’ve fought for for decades, is school choice.
Choice resulting in dead babies is good. A choice with not funnel tax payer dollars, via unionized teachers, into democrat campaign coffers is evil.
How many campaign promises need to be broken before it rises to the level of betrayal of the voters?
People, this is precisely what I warned about before the election. Is this really what you wanted?
I will doubtless hear about how I’m not giving it a chance.
Whoever ends up being the Attorney General, Sessions, or whoever has just been turned into Eric Holder.
The Breakfast Scramble:
Howard Dean loses it, redux,
Godwin’s Law:
“As an online discussion grows longer, the … mentioned Hitler has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.”
Dean, via Mediaite:
[F]ormer DNC chairman Howard Dean spoke to a Texas news station about [Steve] Bannon.
While speaking about Trump, Dean — who is running to be named chair of the DNC again — straight up called Bannon a “Nazi.”
Lay off the DNA talking points and go home and get some rest, Howie.
Draining the Swamp, via Red State:
The protections for federal workers often come as the result of federal unions negotiating with friendly Democrats in Congress to gain those protections. The unions repay the favor by endorsing Democrats and donating to their campaigns. It is quite a racket. And it is one that is a drain on taxpayer dollars as well as efficiencies within government agencies. If there is no fear of being terminated, what point is there in working hard?
[…]
The free ride is over. The pension is a relic of the past, and it should go the way of the dinosaur in the federal government. Federal employees get paid handsomely for their work, and it is the time they started contributing more to their health care benefits and shift from a pension system to a free market 401K based system.
Liberals use public employee labor contracts as a way to funnel tax payer dollars into democrat campaign coffers.
Draining the Swamp, Media version, Patterico on reports networks meeting with Little Donny in Trump Towers:
Aside from that, I doubt there is anyone here who doesn’t think that Big Media deserves a serious dressing down, and to have their viciously destructive biases against Republican candidates repeatedly exposed and thrown back in their faces (See: Palin, Romney, George Bush). Yet the media is a necessary part of any administration. How the MSM finds their footing with such an unknown quantity who seems impervious to their smug dictates remains to be seen. And it remains to be seen how much access Trump will grant the press. With that, Trump plans to meet with the New York Times’ publisher Arthur Schulzberg tomorrow.
As Glen Reynolds would say, the media are no more than democrat operatives with byline.
?Just so we understand this…
The ones who have been trying to sell us “global warming” for decades are now suddenly wetting their shorts over “fake news”?
We must be warming… My irony meter just melted.
United Nation thugs shut down Marc Marano for symbolic shredding of Paris climate accord, video:
Hat tip and more: Climate Depot.
The United Nations declaration of human rights gives lip service to protecting free speech, but in practice there is no such protection.
The Breakfast Scramble:
The Keith Ellison Report, has Ellison become the new face of democrats? Professor William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection:
We will see if discussion about Ellison’s past creates enough of a critical mass to make a difference as Democrats who vote on the matter assess their current situation. Moving the Democratic Party further to the left, further into anti-Israel Soros-land, may satisfy some. But Democrats will need to decide if it is good for the party.
The fact is that the vast majority of Americans support Israel.
Puffington Post lede:
The Clinton Campaign Was Undone By Its Own Neglect And A Touch Of Arrogance, Staffers Say
Sure seems that Mrs. Clinton ran her campaign like and as well as she run the State Department. So much for the media myth that experience in and around government somehow make you competent.
In key battleground states, calls for help weren’t taken seriously enough.
Much like Ambassador Chris Stevens’ call for adequate were flat out ignored.
More on competence, or lack of same, from Power Line:
Clinton, through her campaign once again demonstrated that she is not competent. That she was outperformed by an “amateur” undermines her “competence” theme all the more.
Hillary lost to Barack Obama in 2008, it has been credibly argued, because Obama focused on state caucuses in out-of-the way places that Team Clinton largely ignored. The delegates Obama obtained from these caucuses gave him an edge that Hillary, even though she closed well in big state primaries, couldn’t overcome.
Obama made the rules work for him; Clinton was flummoxed by them.
Mrs. Clinton was flummoxed by national security rules, also.
Imported from Canada it is the Snark of the Day, from Kate, Small Dead Animals:
Did anyone notice that the “Trump ditches press for steak dinner” story hit the news cycle just as Obama was giving a keynote speech in Athens?
Neither did the press.
See Kate for the links to originals.
The Breakfast Scramble:
via Red State:
WKGW reported 69 of the 112 people arrested in recent protests either weren’t registered to vote or didn’t turn in a ballot. The TV station compared the names of the people arrested by police and compared them to state voter logs compiled by Multnomah County elections officials.
Funny these scum are too apathetic to vote, but they sure both the time and energy to protest how I voted. Take a long walk off a short pier.
Donald Trump ran a campaign of racist demagoguery against Muslim Americans, Hispanic immigrants, and black protesters. He indulged the worst instincts of the American psyche and winked to the stream of white nationalists and anti-Semites who backed his bid for the White House. Millions of Americans voted for this campaign, thus elevating white nationalism and white reaction to the Oval Office.
Move over James Comey.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a new culprit for its loss to Donald Trump: Self-loathing, sexist women.
During an appearance on MSNBC on Monday, former Clinton campaign communications director Jess McIntosh claimed it was women with “internalized misogyny” who couldn’t bring themselves to vote to elect the first woman president.
So the Mrs. Clinton’s campaign holds that a woman is supposed to vote according to her vagina and not her values, or perceived self-interest. Where do transgendered men fall on McIntosh’s scale?
Double speak on illegal immigration, from Washington Times:
Illegal immigrants are preparing to ask President Obama to pardon some 750,000 Dreamers, saying such a move is their last, best hope to stave off what they fear will be a wave of deportations once Donald Trump takes the Oval Office.
Community leaders have planned a rally in New York on Wednesday to make the request.
“Millions of law abiding undocumented immigrants are fearful of what will happen when the new Administration takes control in January,” the group of New York state lawmakers and immigration advocates said in a statement announcing the rally. “However, President Obama has the power of pardons that he can use to protect all DACA enrollees.”
In what alternate universe can one person be both a law abiding undocumented immigrant and an illegal alien?
Rush Limbaugh on the democrat riots,
I tell you what I would do, and I would have already done it, but since it isn’t done already, here’s what I would do. I’d call Obama and I’d call Hillary, and I’d say, “You’re gonna shut this stuff down. You’re gonna stop it right now. It’s your people doing this. And if you don’t shut it down, I’m going to, and I’m gonna call every law enforcement department all over this country where these riots are taking place, and I’m gonna tell ’em I got their backs after I’m inaugurated.”
The riots will end one way or another, with or without the cooperation of the democrats.
The Breakfast Scramble:
To know her is to love her, from Wesley Pruden, Washington Times:
Hillary Clinton, who started plotting her path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. when she was a law student at Yale, took a detour through Arkansas and if she still wants to be a president will have to settle for Wellesley, or Smith or one of the other Seven Sisters. But it won’t be anything in Arkansas.
Even with her borrowed family name, her brief but famous law practice in Little Rock and other ties to the state, her election day was particularly dismal in Arkansas. She won just under 34 percent of the popular vote, winning only eight of the state’s 75 counties. She won the vote in Little Rock and surrounding Pulaski County, still a stronghold of what passes for liberalism in Arkansas, and a handful of Delta counties along the Mississippi River, which are predominantly black
B.J. Clinton may be a charming rat. His wife on the other hand is just a rat.
Has the Identity Card been trumped, Victor Davis Hanson, via Robert, Small Dead Animals:
… the more Clinton Inc. talked about the Latino vote, the black vote, the gay vote, the woman vote, the more Americans tired of the same old identity politics pandering. What if minority bloc voters who had turned out for Obama might not be as sympathetic to a middle-aged, multimillionaire white woman? And what if the working white classes might flock to the politically incorrect populist Trump in a way that they would not to a leftist elitist like Hillary Clinton? In other words, the more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump.
Of course the social justice mob had to play identity politics, because their wee brains are too small to hold any real ideas.
Would be nice.
Draining a very big swamp, the swamp extents far beyond the Beltway, from Andy Ngo. Free speech is not a social justice concept, but violence is.
Rural voices fall on deaf ears in Brooklyn. There a urban – rural divides, From NPR:
Here’s another divide that started to get more attention this election: the rural-urban gap. Rural voters vote more Republican, while urban voters vote more Democratic, and that divide grew this year from where it was in 2012 and 2008. It’s a nuanced divide, too; strikingly, as counties get progressively more rural, they more or less steadily grow more Republican. And it’s possible that living in a rural area caused people to vote more Republican this election.
Exit polls show that the rural-urban divide grew from 2008 to 2012, and again this election. What’s particularly interesting is that the rural vote seems to have moved more than the urban or suburban votes.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in Brooklyn neither listened to these rural voices, nor even seem to care, from Politico:
By all accounts, the Clinton campaign didn’t think it really needed rural voters, a shrinking population that’s reliably Republican. The campaign never named a rural council, as Obama did in 2012 and 2008. It also didn’t build a robust rural-dedicated campaign infrastructure. In 2008, Obama had a small staff at campaign headquarters dedicated to rural messaging and organizing efforts and had state-level rural coordinators in several battleground states throughout the Midwest and Rust Belt.
In the fire is hot department, Mrs. Clinton did not win the votes from people whom never asked to vote for her. Who would have thunk?
The Breakfast Scramble:
‘Rats need to call off their dogs, from WaPo:
Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, said it is incumbent upon Hillary Clinton, President Obama and other Democratic leaders to calm their supporters and encourage a peaceful transition of power amid anti-Trump demonstrations that have swept U.S. cities since Election Day.
Practice what you preach, from CDR-M, Ace of Spades:
Practice what you preach lefties otherwise nobody will listen to you. Female anti-bullying ambassador arrested at Trump Tower protest for pushing 74 year old man to the ground. Seriously though, keep it up. You make it that much harder for your side to regain power.
Mrs. Clinton too smart by half, from Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics:
Meanwhile, Hillary[Mrs. Clinton] lost not merely because she misread the “real” people, she decided to run a very divisive and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According to WikiLeaks emails from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise what they thought would be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the road to hide her agenda.
Ever wonder with the strongest GOP field, maybe ever, we ended up with a four time bankrupt reality television host as President-Elect? What good does it do too rig the process to run against a lame horse when your horse is both old and crippled? Even a hare can’t win a race when can’t be bothered to run. See Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Lurching forward, J. Forbes Kerry bitterly clings to the fable of anthropogenic global warming, from Eric Worrall, Watts Up with That:
US Secretary of State John Kerry has vowed to fight climate change up to the very last day of his term of office – by flying to lots of photogenic climate hotspots, and demanding we ordinary people cut back on our profligate wasteful lifestyle choices
What kind of fool jets down to New Zealand to preach against a myth? In somewhat related news Oriental James Simpson promised to continue is sit-in at the Nevada State Prison he until he finds the really killer or killers.
?Wait… What?!?!?!?
Donald Trump has named Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus as chief of staff to his new administration and former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon as chief strategist and senior counselor to the president.
If you guys will recall this is exactly the kind of betrayal I predicted what happened 6 months ago
The Snark of the Day, Barrack Hussein Obama:
“Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”
Hat tip and more: Clarice Feldman, American Thinker
Obama’s almost eight years in office have led to a significant weakening of his party both in the Congress and the states and left his own party in shambles. Contrary to the oft-repeated meme that Trump would destroy his party, Pelosi seems to be fighting a backfire and it looks as though the far left Moslem convert Ralph Ellison of Minnesota will head the DNC, a choice revealing that the party has now been captured by those who
still don’t get it about their own country and will lose even more clout.
And I had thought that the ‘rats could not do worse than Debbie Wasseran Shultz or Donna Brazile. My bad.
