2016 Dec 1^st

Look at all those Carrier jobs Donald Trump saved, jobs that would have gone to Mexico except for Mr. Trump’s remarkable negotiating skills. Last night Rachel Madow, that firebrand liberal, shed some light on Trump’s “deal.” As it turns out Trump really had nothing to do with saving those jobs, that was the work of Vice-president elect Mike Pence.

Here’s the story: Pence is still the governor of Indiana and Indiana is where this Carrier plant is located. Pence controls a discretionary fund, and as governor he can use this fund as he sees fit, no legislative approval is required. Pence has informed Carrier that if they keep those jobs in Indiana they will have a 700 million dollar state tax abatement over the next ten years. The result is that the jobs will stay in Indiana, at least for a while.

Trump is off on a victory tour holding rallies in a variety of states important for his presumed Electoral College win. Naturally, he begins tonight in Indiana where he will take credit for saving a thousand jobs as a result of a few phone calls. The absence of 700 thousand dollars of tax revenue for just his year, well, who would be churlish enough to mention that. Thank you Rachel Madow.

Trump continues to fume about his increasingly large loss of the popular vote. At this point, and not all the results are in yet, Trump lost the popular contest by well over 2 million votes. This is the largest discrepancy in the popular vote favoring the loser of the Electoral College vote in this country’s history.

Trump, like the un-gracious winner he is, now cries “fraud.” He asserts, with no evidence at all, that Clinton’s popular vote victory was caused by the votes of…illegal aliens. At least he isn’t claiming that extra-terrestrial aliens were involved. Let’s be thankful for whatever glimmer of sanity we can find

We have a local weekly paper, “The Leelanau Enterprise,” in which a columnist Tim Skubick has published a laudatory column about Trump’s appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Skubick points out that DeVos played in the percussion section of her high school band and that this was unusual for a woman and that she has a history of being a “scrapper.” Skubick goes on to tell us of the many confrontations the woman has had with parts of the educational establishment and how she was victorious in many of them.

She is an enthusiastic supporter of using public funds for the support of religious schools, an issue supposedly settled long ago by courts that disallowed even Bible reading and prayer in public schools.

Nowhere does Skubick tell us about anything DeVos has done that would have improved public education. Her forte seems to be a concerted effort to abolish it altogether. None of her children has ever attended a public school. She, herself, attended a private Christian high school. A bull is certainly able to stir things up in a china shop, but the china shop in snot much improved by these efforts.