From Cars to Chickens
As I assume you’ve heard, General Motors is closing factories in Michigan, Maryland, and Ohio, but not, God forbid, in China or Mexico. You might suspect that the company is looking to dash Donald Trump’s reelection hopes in 2020. He did, after all, include bringing back factory jobs as a major plank in his 2016 platform.
As I assume you’ve heard, General Motors is closing factories in Michigan, Maryland, and Ohio, but not, God forbid, in China or Mexico. You might suspect that the company is looking to dash Donald Trump’s reelection hopes in 2020. He did, after all, include bringing back factory jobs as a major plank in his 2016 platform.
Some people have said that the president should stay out of it and not threaten GM with reprisals.
As a rule, I prefer not to see the federal government getting too involved in publicly owned companies, but this is different. General Motors was bailed out with our tax dollars back in 2008, just as Chrysler was some years earlier. What’s more, GM is still the beneficiary of federal subsidies for its electric cars, which nobody wants to buy. That means we, with Trump as our intermediary, should have a say in the company’s future.
So, as far as I’m concerned, if Trump decides to bust General Motors down to a corporal or even a buck private, it’s okay with me.
Apparently, the plants that GM has targeted for closure are those turning out models nobody seems to want. Therefore, it probably makes sense to shut them down. But there are thousands of workers and their families who will be on the dole through no fault of their own, so perhaps a better idea is to simply convert them so they can make the cars people are willing to pay for. Perhaps the very ones that can presently be found rolling off the assembly lines in China and Mexico.
I’m not a lawyer. (Can I hear an amen?) As I was saying, I’m not a lawyer, but when James Comey said that Matthew Whitaker, the temporary attorney general, “is not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” I think he opened himself up to a lawsuit for slander. Where, after all, does the dullest spoon in the world get off deciding which knives are sharper than others?
Eric Bauman, who, until recently, was the chief honcho of California’s Democratic Party, had to resign over credible charges of sexual harassment. It occurs to me that a great many left-wing, self-identified defenders of women have met their Waterloo in recent years in just this way.
I am wondering if the GOP should seriously consider using this as a way of thinning the liberal herd. After all, we all know that for decades Russia has used what it euphemistically refers to as honey pots, attractive female spies, to gain leverage over American diplomats; and, I assume, attractive male spies, in order to gain leverage over British diplomats.
At least until the Democrats think to turn the tables on us, we might even force enough resignations in the House to regain the majority.
In Bauman’s case, his downfall is to be especially celebrated because one of his last official acts was to call for a boycott of the In-n-Out burger chain because its owners had the audacity to contribute to the campaigns of California Republicans.
Speaking of boycotts, Rider College of New Jersey surveyed the students to find out which of a multitude of fast food franchises they wanted represented on campus. Although their overwhelming choice was, with good reason, Chick-fil-A, the administrators decided to conduct a do-over, this time without Chick-fil-A being one of the options.
The reason given was that the authorities didn’t find the company in sync with the LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ community. It’s not that Chick-fil-A refuses to hire or to sell chicken sandwiches to people who are perpetually confused about their sexual identities. The company simply objects to same-sex marriages. That would seem to be its right, just as it is its right to close its shops on the Christian sabbath, as well as Thanksgiving and Christmas, when I suspect its founder, S. Truett Cathy, thought his staff should be home with their families.
Mr. Cathy, who died a few years ago, was an interesting character, a Southern Baptist who created a multibillion-dollar franchise with 1,950 outlets and never attended college. He lived to be 93 years old, which brought an end not only to his life but to his 66-year marriage. He and the missus had three children, a daughter and two sons, one of whom was actually named Bubba. Until now, I had thought that Bubba was a made-up name that only appeared in jokes about southerners.
One of the reasons I quit watching Bill O'Reilly even before he was dropped by Fox was because I disliked his guests nearly as much as I dislike wasting my time with some of Tucker Carlson’s. One of O'Reilly’s chief offenders was a black pinheaded professor named Marc Lamont Hill. What I hadn’t known, but probably could have guessed, is that with O'Reilly’s departure Hill wound up on salary at CNN.
But now, thanks to a speech he gave at the UN, he’s become too toxic even for CNN.
I’m unclear why a man who is a professor only because these days you can have an academic career even if your field of expertise is hip-hop music was invited to deliver an address. But because he called for “a free Palestine from the river (the Jordan) to the sea (the Mediterranean),” a favorite phrase of anti-Israel terrorist groups, CNN faced such an immediate backlash, it felt it had no option but to unload the pompous anti-Semite.
Hill insisted that he wasn’t calling for the extermination of Israel’s Jews. I suppose he wasn’t, providing that the Israelis simply agreed to pack up and vacate the premises by sundown.
I assume if the standards for speaking at the UN have been lowered to such an extent that even Prof. Hip-Hop can be invited to take the podium, Rosie O'Donnell, Whoopi Goldberg, and Joy Behar are all sitting by their phones waiting to be called.
Post-election polls have shown that 60% of white female college graduates voted for Democrats, whereas 57% of white females who didn’t attend college voted for Republicans. Further proof that, with the possible exception of booze and pot, nothing kills off brain cells quite as effectively as spending time in college classrooms.
As if it’s not bad enough that the Democrats and their intrepid leader, ditzy Nancy Pelosi, have resumed control of the House, it seems that Muslims have become something of a political force in America. Three Muslims, two from Minnesota, one from Indiana, will now be serving in Congress, while Keith Ellison, formerly a congressman from Minnesota, is now the state’s attorney general. Can Sharia Law be far behind?
In addition, 13 Muslims in nine different states won state office. Only one of them, in New York, of all places, is a Republican.
Dozens more have won county and city office all over the nation, along with half a dozen judgeships.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Dan Parker has come up with a brilliant suggestion. When the Democrats used every dirty trick in the book to prevent Robert Bork from taking his place on the Supreme Court, a new verb was born. From that day forward, whenever the Democrats set out to destroy a man’s life simply because they disagree with his politics or his judicial philosophy, as they did with Brett Kavanaugh, it is said that they borked him or that he was borked.
It is Parker’s notion that if a reporter ever misbehaves in the boorish way that Jim Acosta did at the president’s press conference, the speaker, whether it’s Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or one of the Cabinet secretaries, should declare that the offender has just pulled an Acosta and the session is over.
Perhaps the White House Press Corps will then begin to police itself and stop pretending that yanking the press credential of a jerk is not really tantamount to invalidating the First Amendment.
According to John Lewis, “The teen years are a psychotic state that parents are called upon to endure.”
That is so obviously true, it occurred to me that grandchildren are the reward you get for not justifiably murdering your children.
