The best Trump comeback was still the first comeback

Best Ted Cruz meme of 2016

It happened in September 2015 but the dumbest debate question of the 2016 campaign has to be . . .

. . . Jake Tapper of CNN asking each Republican candidate "What would you want your Secret Service code name to be as president?"

Do you prefer white cake, chocolate cake or lemon?

They should have thrown tomatoes at the guy.

Instead they answered.

And the 2016 Woman of the Year award goes to . . .

ENERGIZER!

Kevin Williamson flips out at National Review, compares Trump family to Saddam Hussein's, a reader can't believe it

Here:

​Apparently, N.R. editors didn't read this piece, or worse, they read it and approved it. 

Well, makes perfect sense to me. Kevin Williamson and Co. wants the entire white working class to get out of the way and die, so might as well have the Trump boys fire up the old shredder and start feeding them in.

How come Israel can't be both Jewish and democratic while Miami can?

Ann Coulter wants to know.

Today's most entertaining line: "It takes a lot of chutzpah for Obama to say he wants to help re­build the Demo­crat­ic Party when he’s busy burn­ing it down"

From Josh Kraushaar here in

"Obama’s Parting Shot Against His Party: By thumbing his nose at Israel as he leaves office, the president shows he didn’t learn anything from this year’s election".

He's burned everything else down, might as well burn his own house.

Remind you of anyone?

Obama's policies were on the ballot and defeated by Trump, but Obama still insists he would have won

Obama in October: "But make no mistake, these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them."

Obama in December: “I’m confident that if I — if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it."

In England singer George Michael gets a post mortem as a matter of routine, but in the US not Justice Antonin Scalia

From the story here:

The Thames Valley Police, calling the death "unexplained but not suspicious," sent THR the following statement: "Thames Valley Police were called to a property in Goring-on-Thames shortly before 2pm Christmas Day. Sadly, a 53-year-old man was confirmed deceased at the scene. At this stage the death is being treated as unexplained but not suspicious. A post mortem will be undertaken in due course. There will be no further updates from Thames Valley Police until the post mortem has taken place."

Flashback to February here:

[A]fter Scalia died, it was Texas state law, not any federal framework, that guided officials’ actions—and left a single judge to make the call that an autopsy wasn’t needed.

While you were preparing to celebrate Christmas, America's first Muslim president abstained at the UN Security Counsel, effectively condemning Israeli settlements

From the story "Obama faces widespread backlash after abstaining from UN Israel vote" here:

On Friday, the Security Council voted 14-0 on a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory as a “flagrant violation” of international law that have “"no legal validity." It demands a halt to "all Israeli settlement activities," saying this "is essential for salvaging the two-state solution."

The United States has veto power in the Security Council and has used it for similar resolutions in the past. The Obama administration’s decision to abstain represents a break from the longstanding U.S. policy of shielding Israel from U.N. reproaches.

A Christmas card from Ann Coulter

Carl Paladino rips "lazy ass" Obama: Flashback to Dec. 24th, 2011 when Obama admitted as much

Obama in 2011, quoted here:

Asked by [ABC's Barbara] Walters to name "the trait you most deplore in yourself," the president -- who was interviewed alongside his wife Michelle -- responded, "laziness."

"You're lazy?" Walters asked.

"You know it's interesting, there is a deep down, underneath all the work I do, I think there's a laziness in me.

"It's probably from, you know, growing up in Hawaii and it's sunny outside, and sitting on the beach," Obama said with a smile.

Carl Paladino in 2016, here:

This is in response to my comments published in Artvoice:

It has nothing to do with race.  That’s the typical stance of the press when they can’t otherwise defend the acts of the person being attacked.

It’s about two progressive elitist ingrates who have hated their country so badly and destroyed its fabric in so many respects in 8 years.

It’s about them diminishing the respect for their country on the world scene, surrendering its status as the protector of human rights, disgracing the memory of its veterans who gave so much.

It’s about demeaning and weakening what was the most powerful military in the world, firing hundreds of good soldier Generals and Admirals who refused Barack’s illegal and irresponsible dictates.

Michelle hated America before her husband won.  She then enjoyed all the attention, the multi -million dollar vacations, the huge staff and other benefits.  Then when Hillary lost, she and Barack realized that without Hillary, there was no one to protect the little, if any, legacy he had.  That’s when Michelle came out and said there is no hope for America.  Good, let her leave and go someplace she will be happy.

As for Barack, he’s a yellow-bellied coward who left thousands to die in Syria and especially Aleppo and he gets on TV and says he feels bad he couldn’t do anything about it.

He supported the mass migration without vetting of people from Muslim countries and the open borders, not for the people, but to expand the democratic base to a permanent majority.

He couldn’t care less about the people.  He just commuted the sentences of another 650 drug pushers responsible for selling poison to our kids.

It’s about the middle class, silent majority, rising up to destroy the Republican and Democrat establishment in America.

It’s about the end of an era when the people took all their information from the main street media, letting them tell us what the issues are and how to resolve those issues. People no longer trust the press.

It’s about that fraudulent, shadow government with a lazy ass president who allowed non-Americans like Valerie Jarret to run the government on a day to day basis and order the Stand down in Benghazi and the later cover-up that does matter.

It’s about Lois Lerner and the head of the IRS and the other criminal officials who haven’t been prosecuted or even investigated because the leaders of the progressive movement are above the law.

It’s about the end of the progressive movement and reset of the direction of America for the next 30 years.

It’s about a president who interfered in a presidential election for his successor so flagrantly that he called Trump unfit for office.

It’s about a president who for eight years did absolutely nothing for black children in our urban centers held prisoner by the cycle of poverty and illegitimate black leadership more interested in power and preserving their voting base by keeping them hungry and uneducated in the inner cities.

And yes, it’s about a little deprecating humor which America lost for a long time.  Merry Christmas and  tough luck if you don’t like my answer.

Glenn Greenwald: Democrats screaming "Putin! Russia!" is an implausible tactic, a sign of desperation

Here:

Obama spent eight years saying Russia is not a scary threat, he mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 . . .. Democrats, like a lot of Americans, including myself, are sort of dioriented, still in shock, and are grappling for explanations. Screaming 'Putin!' over and over and accusing critics of being Kremlin stooges, I think that is a byproduct of this desperation more than anything else.

Peggy Noonan's Democrat friends are delicate, fragile creatures

My world is full of Hillary Clinton supporters and intimates. At a Manhattan Christmas party last week a despairing Democrat told me that she had not only wept on election night she had vomited. She was still beside herself.

The rest is here.

Why the economy still feels like it sucks as Obama goes out the door

Obama's GDP in current dollars has grown 28.4% through 3Q2016.

Bush's grew 39% overall and 41.7% through 3Q2008.

If Obama's performance simply matched Bush's 41.7%, we'd have an extra $1.9 trillion in current dollar GDP right now.

But we don't.

Laugh of the Day: Ann Coulter hopes Donald Trump goes on world tour . . .

. . . apologizing for 8 years of Obama.

Here.

Winter begins, and daylight in Grand Rapids Michigan is just 9 hours and 1 minute long

The lowest daylight days of the year, until Dec. 26th when we inch up to 9 hours and 2 minutes.

And you thought there was no hope.

Hillary beats Trump in the shunning department 8-2 as 10 faithless Electoral College electors vote for somebody else

Ugh!

That's the story from ABC tonight here.

It's a stain on our election from both sides that the rules we agree to live by aren't being followed as they should be.

The two defectors from Trump voted for Rand Paul and John Kasich. Five from Hillary voted for Colin Powell, Bernie Sanders and an Injun. Three others were removed and replaced by alternates who ended up voting for Hillary as the people they replaced should have.

On net Trump wins 304-227 instead of 306-232.

Sneering at the Electoral College in 2016, Obama leaves office still hating the constitution he promised to preserve, protect and defend in 2008 and 2012

Quoted here:

“The Electoral College is a vestige, it’s a carryover from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states,” President Obama said Friday during a press conference at the White House.

Obama pardons 78 and shortens sentences of 153 in one day, a record

A total of 148 have been pardoned in his presidency so far, and 1176 have received shortened sentences, including 395 serving life sentences. Expect really bad examples to emerge from among the latter.

Story here.

Revulsion Election update: Electors pledged to Hillary in MN, ME and WA today refused to vote for her

Democrats really did not like Hillary Clinton in 2016. 5.1 million former Obama voters didn't vote for her, and now her electors won "fair and square" are balking.

You can't make this stuff up.

From the MarketWatch story here:

In Washington state, three Democratic electors voted for Colin Powell and one for Faith Spotted Eagle, who has been fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, instead of Clinton. ...

In Minnesota, elector Muhammad Abdurrahman didn’t vote for Clinton and was replaced by an alternate who did. According to the Los Angeles Times, Abdurrahman was a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention.

In Maine, elector David Bright tried to vote for Sanders but was rebuffed and ended up voting for Clinton, according to the Associated Press.

Bill Cunningham repeating stupid: "95 million Americans can't find work"

Last night in the first hour of the show.

"Not in the labor force" explained.

They aren't LOOKING for work. They are your retired parents. They are your kids in high school, college and graduate school. They are your stay at home mothers and fathers. They are the sick and the disabled.

Obama didn't "decimate" the Democrat Party, Democrats did that all by themselves

David M. Drucker here wants to blame Obama for all the electoral losses experienced by Democrats since 2009. 

Good luck with that.

Like it or not, the Democrat Congress under Pelosi and Reid gets the blame. They have done nothing but lose, lose and lose while Obama has remained the winner, above the fray. He leaves office popular, successfully escaping responsibility for his own administration for eight straight years while Democrats all over the country have paid the price.  

Democrat leadership rammed the awful Obamacare down the nation's throat, making the health insurance industry even worse than it was before. Democrat leadership failed to prosecute anyone for the 2008 banking panic and raked in the campaign cash from its grateful elite instead. Democrat leadership jacked up the federal spending which simply wasted money and ballooned the debt to $20 trillion in the process. Democrat leadership passed the growth-robbing Dodd-Frank legislation which has stalled the growth of credit and slowed the economy to a crawl.

The only thing you can blame Obama for is a lack of vision and leadership in preventing these developments and for not offering better alternatives. He was inexperienced, out of his depth and clueless, contenting himself to lecture everybody day and night in regal fashion while Congress shot themselves and the country in the foot with their stupid ideas. Obama's idea of compromise turned out to be signing awful Democrat legislation.

Except in one instance.

Obama agreed one time to compromise with John Boehner and make the Bush tax cuts permanent and fix the Alternative Minimum Tax. The stock market and the economy began to recover from that moment on at the dawn of 2013.

It was the only smart thing he ever did.

And there he goes into the sunset.

Trump misspells "unprecedented", CNBC goes nuts, Obama on the other hand . . .

. . . routinely slaughtered the English language, math and common sense and all we heard was crickets.

Let's see, there were Obama's "forebearers", "one of the finest secretary of states", "pray on the sick" (probably Politico, not Obama), "corpseman", "the intercontinental railroad", calling George Osborne "Jeffrey" 3x in one episode, saying he could see the Gulf of Mexico from three Atlantic ports he was visiting, saying Afghanistan when he meant Iraq, referring repeatedly to his "sons", calling Nazi camps "Polish concentration camps", saying he'll be turning 50 in a week when it was three weeks, three proud words "made in the USA", claiming "more than 100 million Americans" signed up for Obamacare in its first month, and of course in the 2008 campaign he had visited 57 states "so far" but might not get to them all.   

The Trump misspelled tweet story is here, where the sin apparently was Trump deleting the tweet and replacing it with the spelling corrected.

Did Obama ever correct himself? 

Revulsion Election update: Hillary underperformed Obama 2008 in 39 states by 5.16 million votes

This updates my look at 2016 candidate underperformance relative to 2008 from almost three weeks ago. The total picture for Hillary improved by about 440,000 votes in the interim, or about 11,000 votes per state on average, but doesn't change the conclusion. Hillary was far and away more revolting to the voters in 2016 than was Trump. Hillary still lags Obama 2008 by 3.7 million votes net and Obama 2012 by 74,000 votes. For his part Donald Trump has surpassed George W. Bush 2004 by 940,000 votes with 62.98 million votes, the most for any Republican in any presidential contest.

Hillary 2016 underperformed Obama 2008 in:

MI by 603,000 votes (and lost to Trump by 11,000)

OH by 546,000 (lost by 447,000)

MO by 371,000

PA by 350,000 (lost by 45,000)

IN by 341,000

IL by 328,000

WI by 294,000 (lost by 22,000)

NY by 257,000

TN by 216,000

MN by 205,000 (won by only 45,000)

IA by 175,000 (lost by 147,000)

KY by 123,000 

WV by 115,000

CT by 100,000

*KS by 88,000

*NM by 87,000 (won by only 65,000)

AL by 83,000

*OK by 82,000

*MS by 70,000

*NJ by 67,000

ME by 64,000 (won by only 22,000)

HI by 59,000

MT by 54,000

SD by 54,000

NE by 49,000

ND by 47,000

ID by 46,000

RI by 44,000

AR by 42,000

*VT by 40,000

NH by 36,000 (won by only 3,000)

OR by 35,000

WY by 27,000

DE by 19,000

*UT by 17,000

*WA by 8,000

*AK by 8,000

SC by 7,000

LA by 3,000.

That's 5.16 million former Democrat votes alienated from Hillary Clinton in 2016 in 39 states, 57% of which came from the 8 Great Lakes states (2.924 million), according to the latest numbers this morning, almost six weeks since Election 2016.

Trump underperformed John McCain in only 12 states and DC and by just 792,000 votes, 67% of which were in California alone:

In CA by 527,000 votes

*UT by 81,000

*AK by 31,000

*KS by 29,000

*NM by 27,000

*MS by 24,000

MA by 18,000

MD by 17,000

*NJ by 12,000

*OK by 11,000

*WA by 7,000

*VT by 4,000

DC by 4,000.

*nine states where both 2016 candidates underperformed their 2008 counterparts 

Hillary called us deplorable and irredeemable . . .

. . . and today Obama built on that low view of the American people, saying we're so hapless that we inevitably fall victim to "propaganda":

[I]t's not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect. It doesn't seem that far-fetched compared to some of the other stuff folks are hearing from domestic propagandists. ... [V]oters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they're going to believe it.

You've been had: The 2009 stimulus has been repeated every year, accounting for all GDP increases under Obama and then some

The February 2009 Obama stimulus got added to Bush's 2009 fiscal year spending because Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate at the time. It was scandalous, but there was nothing Republicans could do about it.

But the same thing happened every year thereafter because the Democrat Congress and then the Republican Congress deliberately passed this prior spending in the form of continuing resolutions instead of through regular order, which meant nothing got debated and the status quo was maintained. That's the evil of CRs.

Both parties did this on purpose instead of debating individual spending bills because . . . THEY ALL LOVE HAVING THE MONEY TO SPEND.

The fiscal 2008 baseline outlays were $2.9825 trillion, to which the stimulus got added for fiscal 2009, and just kept getting added and re-added and re-added right through to the present (and then some) through the continuing resolution process:

2009: $535.2 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2010: $474.6 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2011: $620.6 billion ($3.6 trillion)

2012: $554.5 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2013: $472.1 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2014: $523.6 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2015: $776.1 billion ($3.8 trillion)

2016: $1.017 trillion ($4.0 trillion).

The giant joke on the American people here is that Republicans went right along with this charade the whole time Obama was president, even after they got control of both the House and the Senate in 2014. Almost $5 trillion in "stimulus" has already been spent.

And Trump wants to add another $1 trillion?

Meanwhile under Obama current dollar GDP increased . . . $4.1 trillion. All government spending. All totally phony. And overpriced at that: $1.21 spent for every dollar of that fake GDP.

Why Democrats hate Russia so much

"They've never forgiven Russia for giving up communism."

Laugh of the Day: Communists leaked Democrat e-mails to Wikileaks, not former communists

Here.

The Nation Magazine's James Carden wonders why liberals fawn over anonymous CIA claims when John Brennan is a known liar

Here:

The recent raft of unverified, anonymously sourced and circumstantial stories alleging that the Russian government interfered in the US presidential election with the aim of electing Republican Donald J. Trump shows that today too much of the media is all too happy to do overtly what the CIA had ... once paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it. ... CIA Director John Brennan made false statements before Congress over the CIA’s hacking into the computers of Congressional staffers.

China's Xi Jinping is a liar, militarizes illegal possessions created on reefs in South China Sea

From the story here:                                                   ↑

A U.S. think tank says recent satellite images appear to show that China has installed anti-aircraft and anti-missile weapons on its man-made islands in the strategically vital South China Sea, upping the stakes in what many see as a potential Asian powder keg.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a report late Wednesday that the anti-aircraft guns and close-in weapons systems designed to guard against missile attack have been placed on all seven of China's newly created islands. ...

Chinese President Xi Jinping said on a visit to the U.S. last year that "China does not intend to pursue militarization" of the area, prompting some foreign experts to accuse China of going back on its word with its new deployments.

Ann Coulter repeating stupid: 95 million can't find work

39 million retired, 20 million homemakers, 17 million in college, 8 million in high school, 3 million in grad school . . ..

The Trump cabinet and administration so far as rated by Numbers USA

Jeff Sessions: A+

Mike Pompeo: B+

Ryan Zinke: B-

Rick Perry: C

Tom Price: C

Whew, Cathy McMorris Rodgers passed over for Interior Secretary, Rep. Ryan Zinke appointed instead

Story here.

Numbers USA gives Zinke a B- on immigration issues, which is certainly an improvement over Rodgers, who gets an F.

Democrat Football: Denver actually beat Kansas City because the Broncos had more total yards

Democrats' way of trying to rig Election 2016: 37% of all Detroit precincts showed more ballots as counted by machines than voters as counted by poll workers

The Detroit News reported here:

Of the data available, though, machines tallied at least 388 more ballots, according to a Detroit News analysis of the records. That’s 0.16 percent of the 248,000 ballots cast in the city that voted for Clinton 95 percent to 3 percent over Trump. ... The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes. “There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,” said Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.

Trump's pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was the Boy Scout who paved the way for gay boys to join

Because he thought is was in the best interests of those boys.

From the story here:

Despite increasing pressure from gay rights advocates, Exxon has refused to create a specific policy barring discrimination against gay employees, as many Fortune 500 companies have done. Nonetheless, Tillerson was instrumental in lobbying the Scouts’ board to accept openly gay youths, said John Hamre, president of the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, of which Tillerson is a board member.

“I can’t get into the intimacy of these conversations. But he agonized over this. He prayed on it, and ultimately he came to the conclusion the only thing that can guide him here is what’s best for the young boys,” he said. “I think he became a key leader in helping the group come to a consensus.”

After two decades in the US House Philly's Chaka Fattah to follow it up with one in the Big House

And with his co-conspirators pay over $600,000 in restitution to agencies they defrauded.

Story here.

Rick Perry to head Energy Department, one of three he wanted to eliminate in 2012 bid but couldn't remember the name of

Just remember "two" Rick

Which is just fine, since all he has to remember now is "gas and oil".

Trump shows little imagination floating Carly "That Face" Fiorina for DNI

When this administration comes a cropper in a few years, who will want to serve in it?

Obama populated his administration with Clinton retreads because there was no there there in Barack Obama. The guy didn't have a clue . . .

. . . and neither does Trump.

This looks silly.

Just another day at the office: Mitch McConnell lets Donald Trump know what's what

Don't get into a pissing match with the Senate Majority Leader, if you know what's good for you.

Quoted here:

“I think this level of national debt is dangerous and unacceptable,” McConnell said, adding he hopes Congress doesn’t lose sight of that when it acts next year. “My preference on tax reform is that it be revenue neutral,” he said.

All day on the radio the fake news was Hillary was up 25 votes in the Wisconsin recount

Clinton gains votes in Wisconsin!

Trouble is, Trump gained 844, Hillary 713! Trump net gain 131!

New York Times hires self-described Democrat hack Glenn Thrush to cover White House

Now why would I pay for the New York Times to read Glenn Thrush's work for the Democrat Party when I can get it for free by reading Wikileaks?

Story here.

Personally, I think Rex Nutting's a commie, but he couldn't be more right about the fake news of "not in the labor force"

Rex Nutting is right. Our side has been trafficking in this piece of fake news for years, a factoid originating with Zero Hedge and endlessly repeated by the Goodyear blimp of gasbags Rush Limbaugh, touching all and sundry from Donald Trump on down to little known radio hosts on low power stations in Michigan like Steve Gruber in Lansing. Correct it try though you may, every attempt to stop it fails. It's embarrassing, not in the least because it exposes the endemic inability to think critically and the proclivity to believe in authorities which share your political opinions.

For all the good it will do, Rex Nutting goes once more unto the breach, here, with excellent links and a good graph, too:

There are a lot of “fake statistics” bandied about in service of some ideology or another, but I’d like to focus on just one example in which I have expertise from my work covering the monthly employment report over the past 20 years: The idea that there are 95 million Americans who are out of work but not counted as unemployed.

This statistic pervades the conservative discourse about our economy (or at least until Jan. 20). The implication of this statistic is that the government and media are lying to us. Instead of an economy that’s slowly improving as President Barack Obama has been telling us, our economy is actually a catastrophic failure, unable to provide any work for nearly 100 million people. ...

This is the perfect fake statistic, because it’s absolutely true. And completely meaningless.

Bring back waterboarding, Mad Dog Mattis can go have his beer and a cigarette

James E. Mitchell, here:

It is understandable that Gen. Mattis would say he never found waterboarding useful, because no one in the military has been authorized to waterboard a detainee. Thousands of U.S. military personnel have been waterboarded as part of their training, though the services eventually abandoned the practice after finding it too effective in getting even the most hardened warrior to reveal critical information.

During the war on terror, the CIA alone had been authorized to use the technique. I personally waterboarded the only three terrorists subjected to the tactic by the CIA. I also waterboarded two U.S. government lawyers, at their request, when they were trying to decide for themselves whether the practice was “torture.” They determined it was not.

Math scores under Common Core in 2015 have fallen below the 2012 average

From the story here:

In math American teens rank 20 points lower than the international average—and 12 points lower than their own 2012 average. ... The trouble is that the standards, [Jon] Star [of Harvard] said, were designed with elementary and middle school students in mind: "It's not surprising that some of these interventions have had minimal to no effect in high school—because that's not really who they were intending to effect."

Trump admitted in Grand Rapids Thank You Rally on Friday that low turnout [for Hillary] helped him win

Trump, quoted here:

"The African American community was great to us," Trump said. "They came through bigly." ... "If they had any doubt, they didn't vote," Trump said. "And that was almost as good. Because a bunch of people didn't show up, because they felt good about me." ... But with lower voter turnout in many urban areas, where there are more concentrated populations of African Americans, and high turnout in rural areas, the numbers would tend to support his claim.

The Obamacare failure: 10 million buy plans on exchanges, 9 million buy off-exchange

Sally Pipes, here:

These off-exchange plans were never expected to be popular, especially compared to the government's marketplaces. As recently as 2013, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting that 24 million Americans would buy insurance through ObamaCare's exchanges by 2016. The CBO didn't even bother to predict enrollment figures for off-exchange plans.

Those projections missed the mark. Last year, off-exchange enrollment — 9 million — was within 1 million of that inside the exchanges. Some 2.5 million people have purchased off-exchange coverage even though they would've qualified for income-based subsidies through the exchanges. Almost half this group may also be eligible for additional federal subsidies aimed at reducing out-of-pocket costs for low-income individuals.

Congress has abdicated its spending oversight responsibilities for 20 years, and just did so again

From the story here:

Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) have repeatedly promised a return to regular order instead of relying on take-it-or-leave-it omnibus bills and short-term CRs to fund the federal government. However, they have not kept that promise. On Thursday, the House passed a $1.1 trillion short-term CR (HR 2028) to keep the federal government operating until April 28, 2017. Lankford said Thursday that he will vote against the CR when it gets to the Senate on Friday. Despite some gains made since 2014, when Republicans took over control of the Senate, Lankford pointed out that Congress has been “missing out on real oversight” by passing supposedly temporary CRs for the past 20 years.

In the two weeks between Trump's appointments of common core DeVos and open-borders Puzder, Jeb Bush figured it was prudent not to lay it on too thick

As Ann Coulter has pointed out, the only difference between a Trump cabinet and a Jeb Bush cabinet is a Jeff Sessions.

December 8th

November 23rd

Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Trump's pick for Interior Secretary, is another immigration squish

At some point someone's going to notice that Donald Trump isn't serious about stopping illegal immigration.

Here:

But, the Washington congresswoman said, she won’t rule out a pathway to citizenship, and also stated that she was open to granting a special schedule to the children of immigrants who came to the country illegally.

Rush Limbaugh is ecstatic today about Trump's cabinet picks

The guy never was on our side on illegal immigration, the income tax, Elton John, etc.

The leader of the conservative liberals, as someone once said. 

Hillary knows an awful lot about the epidemic of fake news because she started it . . .

. . . when she blamed a Muhammad video for a supposedly spontaneous attack on Benghazi at the same time Obama was trying to win reelection on "Osama is dead and GM is alive".

Trump betrays his base, picks Andrew Puzder for Labor Secretary, another amnesty advocate

Trump must think we're stupid. You know, just like the defeated elites now packing up and leaving DC.

Puzder had a long op-ed in Politico here three years ago outlining his Marco Rubio Gang of Eight immigration ideas, including 

"a pathway to adjusted status for those here illegally now; and special relief for the children of undocumented immigrants." 

Real news alert: Hillary speaks up for "true" propaganda

There's an epidemic of false propaganda. Bring back the true kind!

Here:

“The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year — it’s now clear the so-called fake news can have real-world consequences,” Clinton said during a speech on Capitol Hill.

Jennifer Palmieri should think about the over 5 million former Obama voters who rejected Hillary, not about who rejected Trump

Jennifer Palmieri still can't face what lead to the Hillary loss: A Democrat candidate more repugnant to Democrat voters than the Republican candidate was to Republican voters. Hillary was a magnet for words with a negative connotation while Trump was not at all. She was a horrible candidate. End of story. 

Here:

But it’s also important for the winners of this campaign to think long and hard about the voters who rejected them. I haven’t seen much evidence of such introspection from the Trump side. That’s concerning.

That's right, Mickey: Amnesty for dreamers will just produce more dreamers

Salena Zito nails it: Hillary's loss was never about Trump but about Democrats losing touch with their voters

Here:

What Democrats, academics and pundits keep refusing to see is that the loss was never about Trump’s candidacy; it was all about how Democrats have increasingly lost touch with their voters outside of coastal America — until those voters finally hit their breaking point.

When Trump assures the New York Times it will be happy about what he does with the dreamers . . .

. . . rest assured we won't be.

Over 2,000 Americans died horribly in a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor 75 years ago

Our public institutions remember this infamous date faithfully by flying the flag at half staff. My son's high school had the Stars and Stripes just so at oh dark thirty this morning. Good job.

So did the firehouse we passed on the way to the piano lesson this afternoon. You can always count on the fire department.

But the rest of Michigan which I saw today had their flags flying as usual at full staff, and not illuminated at night. Just another patriotic day.

So it goes.

Suddenly the commie Fredrik deBoer is fresh out of ideas

Gee, just a little while ago Fredrik deBoer was certain that all of us white guys were buying guns to off ourselves, which meant there were going to be fewer of us to stand in his way.

Instead we voted for Donald Trump . . . and now the country's a damned armed camp on top of it.

Here's an idea for deBoer, since he asked: Get out now before the border closes and the price of the drugs skyrockets.

Here. 

One month since Election 2016: Trump edges up 0.2 million votes in the last week, Hillary 0.3 million

Trump remains the king of the Republican hill in the popular vote:

Trump 2016: goes from 62.6 million a week ago to 62.8 million now

Romney '12: 60.9 million

McCain '08: 60.0 million

Bush '04: 62.0 million

Bush '00: 50.5 million

Obama remains the king of the Democrat hill in the popular vote, and also the absolute king in the popular vote with no one scoring higher:

Hillary 2016: goes from 65.1 million a week ago to 65.4 million now

Obama '12: 65.9 million

Obama '08: 69.5 million

Kerry '04: 59.0 million

Gore '00: 51.0 million

Peter Wallison points out jettisoning the Electoral College would mean electing presidents without majorities and thus without mandates

Here.

Michael Savage gets Trump's Taiwan overture totally wrong, Marc Thiessen gets it right

Savage calls it a blunder, in keeping with his generally negative assessments about Trump's post-election behavior.

Thiessen calls it deliberate, and brilliant, here, which is what it is.

What a hypocritical gasbag Rush Limbaugh is about Trump's spending plans

Why, Donald Trump could be another FDR!, he says today. He could consolidate Republican rule for decades if he spends the money correctly!

Rush doesn't have a clue about the Obama stimulus, let alone have any principles. He thinks the stimulus was $1 trillion or so, when it was actually nearly $5 trillion, so far. I say so far because the damn thing was built into the outlay train. And look what we've gotten for it. A big fat nothing-burger. Crummier economic growth than under Bush, full-time jobs over 6 million behind trend, and a big fat national debt of nearly $20 trillion.

But Trump's version is going to be successful! Sure it is. $1 trillion or $5 trillion or $10 trillion under Trump isn't going to do anything it couldn't do under Obama.

The February 2009 Obama stimulus got added to Bush's 2009 fiscal year spending, and to every frickin' year thereafter. The fiscal 2008 baseline outlays were $2.9825 trillion.

And here are the annual outlays thereafter in excess of that baseline:

2009: $535.2 billion

2010: $474.6 billion

2011: $620.6 billion

2012: $554.5 billion

2013: $472.1 billion

2014: $523.6 billion

2015: $776.1 billion

2016: $1.017 trillion.

The giant joke on the American people here is that Republicans went right along with this charade the whole time Obama was president.

And now that Trump is running the show, an even bigger joke is about to be played on the American people.

Fake news alert: Time Magazine calls CNN's Ana Navarro "a breakout star of the election"

Here:

"I don’t know how people can possibly survive this election without . . . a good liquor store.”

Democrats are still light years away from recognizing Hillary lost because no one wanted to vote for a lying crook

Democrats here blame a litany of things . . .

• Bernie's challenge
• Comey's investigation
• The Russkies
• Clinton's centrism
• Clinton's campaign
• Clinton's failure to defend herself
• Clinton's messaging
• Democrats' inability to connect with the millions they failed

. . . but never the freight train of sooty baggage which defined Hillary Clinton.

The Donald president is thinking about the South China Sea

Oh yes.

Here.

VP-Elect Mike Pence discusses Trump agenda on Meet the Depressed, never mentions illegal immigration

Pence is a squish, as we told you, but if they don't build The Wall, they are toast.

Noted here.

Where's the "orange" setting on this thing?

Hello Beijing: You illegally created new territory in the South China Sea . . .

. . . now the new sheriff Donald Trump treats Taiwan like a country fully independent of China.

Here's an easy solution: You withdraw from those illegal islands you've created, and maybe the new sheriff stops offending your sensibilities over Taiwan.

Your move. 

It's disturbing that prospective SECDEF Mattis says our hands are tied by the Iran deal when it's not a treaty

Even worse that he wants to predicate US action on prior European action. What is "European" action? And when have they EVER acted without US leadership?

And worse still that the land force part of the nuclear triad is negotiable. He's a M.A.D. dog all right.

Whatever happened to peace through strength?

Mattis, quoted here:

Mattis has voiced deep scepticism about Iran’s motives and warned that the US and its allies would have to remain vigilant for violations. But in April he argued against walking away from the nuclear deal, as Trump has threatened to do. 

“One point I want to make is there’s no going back,” Mattis said at an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Absent a real violation – I mean, a clear and present violation that was enough to stimulate the Europeans to action as well – I don’t think that we can.”

Were the US to renege on its agreement, Mattis said, “I believe we would be alone if we did, and unilateral economic sanctions from us would not have anywhere near the impact of an allied approach to this.”

November 2016 climate summary for Grand Rapids, Michigan

November 2016 climate summary for Grand Rapids, Michigan

Average temperature was 45.4 degrees F. Normal is 39.1. The month ranked 4th warmest November since 1892. The YTD average temperature was 53.4, the 4th warmest YTD average among the previous four warmest full years on record. The normal YTD average temperature is 50. The YTD average temperature in the hottest full year on record in 2012 was 54.4, in 1921 was 54.2, in 1931 was 53.7, in 2016 was 53.4 and in 1998 was 53.2 (the last three were all El Nino episodes).

The lowest temperature recorded this November was 21. The normal lowest temperature is 17. The highest temperature this November was 73. The normal highest temperature is 66.

November 2016 saw 3.24 inches of precipitation. Normal is 2.84. YTD precipitation is 43.33 inches, normal YTD is 31.94. The wettest full year on record was 2008 with 48.80 inches. The driest full year was 1930 with just 20.92.

Snowfall measured 0.8 inches. Normal for November is 6.4 inches. The seasonal total is 0.8 inches, and the normal seasonal total is 6.8. Normal seasonal snowfall is 66.7 inches. The snowiest season on record was in 1951-52 with 132 inches of snow. 1905-06 was the least snowy with 20.

There was no change to Cooling Degree Days in November. YTD there were 936 CDD, the 15th warmest on record so far. Normal CDD is 694.

Heating Degree Days totaled 44 in September, 324 in October and 580 in November for a total of 948 for the season so far. Normal HDD seasonally is as follows: July, 9, August, 19, September, 137, October, 427 and November, 770 for a seasonal normal to date of 1362. Normal for a full season is 6713 HDD. The coldest winter season by HDD was in 1903-04 with 7712. The warmest was in 2011-12 with just 5253.

Actual lower HDD presently have been indicative of the after effects of warmer conditions prevailing since the end of the El Nino this summer. The Very Strong El Nino of 2015-16, averaging 1.43 on the index and 15 months long, was longer but weaker than the 1997-98 episode, which averaged 1.56 on the index and was 13 months long. The 1982-83 VSE averaged 1.3 on the index and was 15 months long.

The Oceanic Nino Index value for the August-September-October measuring period was -0.7, the second consecutive measurement at -0.5 or lower. Five such values consecutively would indicate the onset of a La Nina, which could produce wetter conditions in the US High Plains and Upper Midwest and lots of snow in Canada.

No thanks. Been pretty wet in these parts already, Pilgrim.

Obama can negotiate with Iranian terrorists and visit the communist police state of Cuba . . .

. . . but Trump can't talk to the president of independence-minded Taiwan or invite the pusher-killing president of the Philippines to visit the White House.

Got it.

The Chicago Tribune makes the case for Betsy DeVos, only alludes to hot-button "common core"

Here:

DeVos "has a lot of influence in the reform community," Peter Cunningham, a former Obama administration education official and now executive director of the reform-minded nonprofit Education Post, tells us. "She is unequivocally a champion for choice. The question is whether she is a champion for quality."

Academic Ann Douglas' analysis is a cloister-f*^k: "Even some white men feel they've been left behind"

Here, where her attachment to the ideology of "sexism" blinds her to the real consequences of Obama's intentional inattention to the fate of the white middle class of both sexes, no sex, homosex, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera:

Yes, Hillary was a flawed candidate. Her penchant for privacy—not surprising given what the Republicans and the national press have put her through since 1992—was her Achilles heel, leading to the use of a private email server that came to symbolize her alleged untrustworthiness. It also led her to be not adroit enough with the media. Hillary misread the country: the fury about the wages of neoliberalism—which, yes, she embodied—that was gripping people, young and old, on the Right and the Left. Thus, she didn’t have a galvanizing progressive message that, as the Sanders campaign demonstrated, millions were hungering for, even some white men feeling they’ve been left behind.

Even some white men? 

How about 4 million whites of both sexes, Ann, in the core of the working population aged 25 to 54 years, who've been left behind in fact and don't just "feel" they have:

America: Where Mark Levin is on the radio discussing Sarah Palin's misgivings about Trump's crony capitalism . . .

. . . and the feed cuts off to a basketball game.

Even fascism has to pay the bills.

Kellogg's is financing the communist Black Lives Matter movement to the tune of almost $1 million

See for yourself, here, at the Foundation website.

To protest, you could send your boxes of Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Special K, Rice Krispies and Froot Loops to Kellogg Co. headquarters at:

2 Hamblin Avenue

Battle Creek, MI 49017

(269) 961-2000.

And switch to General Mills' Cheerios. Oats are better for you anyway.

Trump's Carrier intervention isn't just chilling, it's a crock of corporate welfare and perhaps explicit fascism

Jimmy Pethokoukis, on whom I have been very hard in the past, is certainly right about this one, calling the implicit intimidation in this affair "chilling", here.

But it's a lot more than chilling, it's at the very least more of the same cooperation between government and industry we have seen for decades but which used to go by the name of fascism, except it's more explicit than we're used to coming as it does from someone like Donald Trump, perhaps veering off now into explicit top-down federal intervention into business decisions.  

"We certainly don't want to take as our guide to creating jobs special tax breaks for a company that earned $7.5 billion in profits last year, got $6 billion in defense contracts, paid its top five executives $50 million, in order to preserve 1,000 out of 2,100 jobs," said [Robert] Shapiro, [former undersecretary of commerce]. "It's essentially a transfer from the taxpayers of Indiana, who are providing these tax breaks, to the shareholders of United Technology plus those 1,000 workers. That's really not a model for creating jobs across America," he added.

If #NeverTrump Bill Kristol endorsed General Mattis for a 3rd party run in April, I'm against him as Trump's pick for Defense

Bill Kristol, here:

Jim Mattis happens to be a social liberal. He's more liberal than I am. He's very concerned about the debt. He's a strong national security hawk. Why wouldn't someone like him... 

Mattis is also a conventional liberal in that he subscribes to a two-state solution for Israel, just like George Bush and John Kerry.