The President isn’t going to Davos, and the Democrats have gone home refusing to budge on our safety

President Donald Trump remains at the White House this weekend, saying he is ready, willing, and able to negotiate the end to the government’s partial shutdown, which  we on the right call the Schumer Shutdown, and the need for border security. Many members of Congress, however, have returned to their home states.

Meanwhile, about 800,000 non-essential government workers didn’t get their paycheck yesterday.  TSA is just part of a security plan—but Democrats think it’s OK for aliens, tourists, job seekers, drug lords and human traffickers to walk across our borders and no one to check their backpacks or suitcases. Also, no one is checking for illnesses like TB.

If the President had a Special Assistant for Reality

Great "what if" story by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, wishful thinking about getting the President out of the Washington bubble with just one more staff member.

If Mr. Obama had a special assistant for reality this week, this is how their dialogue might have gone over the anti-TSA uprising.

President: This thing is all ginned up, isn't it? Right-wing websites fanned it. Then the mainstream media jumped in to display their phony populist street cred. Right?

Special Assistant for Reality: No, Mr. President, it was more spontaneous. Websites can't fan fires that aren't there. This is like the town hall uprisings of summer 2009. In the past month, citizens took videos at airports the same way town hall protesters made videos there, and put them on YouTube. The more pictures of pat-downs people saw, the more they opposed them.

President: What's the essence of the opposition?

SAR: Sir, Americans don't like it when strangers touch their private parts. Especially when the strangers are in government uniforms and say they're here to help.

President: Is it that we didn't roll it out right? We made a mistake in not telling people in advance we were changing the procedure.

SAR: Um, no, Mr. President. If you'd told them in advance, they would have rebelled sooner.

President: We should have pointed out not everyone goes through the new machines, and only a minority get patted down.

SAR: Mr. President, if you'd told people, "Hello, there's only 1 chance in 3 you'll be molested at the airport today" most people wouldn't think, "Oh good, I like those odds."

President: But the polls are with me. People support the screenings.

SAR: At the moment, according to some. But most Americans don't fly frequently, and the protocols are new. As time passes, support will go steadily down.

President: I've noted with sensitivity that I'm aware all this is a real inconvenience.

SAR: It's not an inconvenience, it's a humiliation. In the new machine, and in the pat-downs, citizens are told to spread their feet and put their hands in the air. It's an attitude of submission—the same one the cops make the perps assume on "America's Most Wanted." Then, while you stand there in public in the attitude of submission, strangers touch intimate areas of your body. It's a violation of privacy. It leaves people feeling reduced. It's like society has decided you're a meat sack and not a soul. Humans have a natural, untaught understanding of the apartness of their bodies, and they don't like it when their space is violated. They recoil, and protest.

President: But you can have the pat-downs done in private.

SAR: Mr. President, you don't know this, but when you ask for that, a lot of TSA people get pretty passive-aggressive. They get Bureaucratic Dead Face and start barking, "I need a supervisor! Private pat-down!" And everyone looks, and the line slows down, and you start to feel like you're putting everyone out. You wait and wait, and finally they get another TSA person, and they take you into the little room and it's embarrassing, and you start to realize you're going to miss your plane. It's then that you realize: all this is how they discourage private pat-downs.

President: I've wondered if this general feeling of discomfort might be related to a certain Puritan strain within American thinking—a kind of horror at the body that, melded with, say, old Catholic teaching, not to be pejorative, might make for a pretty combustible cultural cocktail. This heightened consciousness of the body might suggest an element of physical shame we hadn't taken into account.

SAR: Mr. President, the rebellion isn't shame-based, it's John Wayne-based.

President: I don't follow.

Follow the rest of the story, obviously a fantasy, but telling, none the less, with a great ending.

Ms. Noonan you may remember was one of George H.W. Bush's speech writers, but fell from grace during the G.W. Bush era, and lost her credibility with me when she when all gushy over candidate Obama's phony speech pattern and good looks. The lefties didn't like her for what they saw as her lame excuses for Bush (really weak, no matter which side you took), so I guess she just can't win. She's slowly, slowly been crawling her way back from her Obama-gusher mistakes of the campaign.

Fried Librarian Giblets Awakens ALA Council to Take On Yet Another Non-Library Issue

I got a chuckle out of the title of this blog--Fried librarian giblets. I wonder if ALA will look into the San Francisco Happy Meal melt down? The ALA spends so much time on non-library issues. I suppose that's a sign that everything is super duper OK in library land. Salaries are up; bond issues aren't failing; and the political balance is improving.

SafeLibraries: Fried Librarian Giblets Awakens ALA Council to Take On Yet Another Non-Library Issue

Does he have anything to say about dark skinned Muslims who shoot up military bases and hide bombs in their underwear?

It seems the Obama Administration is fearful of the word "terrorist," unless it's not connected with Muslims or non-white ethnic groups. This may be the most racist appointee yet. Obama thought the power of his charisma and personality would calm things down--even the Norwegians thought so--gave him a useless peace prize for doing nothing. But he continues to appoint crooks, cheats, marxists, losers and racists. This guy Southers used his FBI position to snoop on his ex-wife. I'd put that in the Geithner tax cheating category. It would certainly have stopped a Bush appointee.

I was looking at the "World News" section of the paper yesterday. . .

1) Militants attack crude oil pipe line in Africa
2) Togolese soccer squad attacked and killed in Angola
3) Afghan blast kills U.K. journalist and U.S. Marines and photographer injured.
4) Chavez devaluing their currency--dismantling the middle class.
5) Argentin constitutional crisis threatens Central banks--ripple effect at our Fed.
6) Merkel leadership under attack
7) Northern Ireland rocked by sex + money scandal.
8) 3 Palestinian militants were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
9) Australians are in trouble in China for commercial crimes and in Vietnam for fuel-hedging trades.
10) Beijing cracking down on dissidents who are using the Internet.

No, the world hasn't changed yet. Not much hope either.

Napolitano claims the system works?

If you include a sharp eyed, very brave Dutch vacationer as part of your "system." Nothing worked, lady, including the terrorist's parents alerting authorities that their son had disappeared and been radicalized, his name, Umar farouk Abdulmutallab, being in a watch database, the Netherlands not agreeing to use our information (wasn't our president going to use his charm on the European nations, not clout?), his side trips to Yemen, his paying cash for his ticket, and his smuggling explosives aboard when the rest of us can't even get a water bottle or shampoo smuggled in. Now she wants to inconvenience the rest of us with a final one hour proscription against bathroom use (no one will want to sit next to me since I've had vomiting and diarrhea on my last two international flights). I hope she's retracted this ridiculous statement that no one, not even her boss, believes.
Link. Now he'll get a pro-bono lawyer and sue the airlines for his burns, I'm guessing.

Update from all sides of the political spectrum: Hell No, it didn't work! And she has now admitted it didn't, but her words on CNN Sunday were "taken out of context."

Update 2: This administration's backpeddling is just amazing. A day after his fourth day wimp-out that sounded like a weather report followed by a game of golf, Obama comes out with "new information" trying to pretend a little fire in his belly, but he's hopeless. Either he was hopelessly uninformed yesterday for that speech, or he doesn't care, never has, never will. Obama's second speech link. Never mind, couldn't find one except Tadjikistan.