The Realities of a New Year; Ravens End Season With Loss; Burnley in Scoreless Draw With Ipswich Town

BALTIMORE, Maryland January 4, 2016 - The New Year just rang in around this part of the world.  It seems strange as you describe it, but no matter how often you read it or see it on television, the fact that the New Year has been ringing in in one part of the world or another for 24 hours is still an anomaly and hard to get one's arms around.   In New York, Fox News is on live from Time Square and, via a video hook-up, two of their hosts are interviewing Donald Trump and his family.  The Trumps are holding court in the great state of Florida. It is a New Year.  In the Middle East, in Dubai, and immediately next to the world's tallest building, and also immediately adjacent to another impressive skyscraper which is the base for shooting off the city's fireworks display for this holiday, a raging fire breaks out, causing a rushed yet fairly orderly evacuation.  Except for one man suffering a heart attack and several others sustaining what are described as minor injuries, the casualty toll is negligible, especially for the way the situation looked to first hand witnesses.  In these United States, right smack in the midst of a governmental regime inhabited by uber leftists who lost touch with reality long before they squirmed their way into power, the President ignores the world's real problems as his brief attention span undulates between climate jive and getting guns away from law abiding citizens while rushing non-law abiders (who have the uncanny knack of being fully armed at all times in spite of already-existing gun laws against such things) into these environs.

Law abiding citizens disarmed by Obama.  Perpetual Criminal Types who are fully armed rushed into the same area by Obama.  This is Obama's World.

Meanwhile: Americans continue to fund charities at rates that are truly staggering.  Even when taxes are up, even when disposable income drops precipitously, Americans still give to charity.  It is almost unbelievable.  When you speak of exceptional people doing exceptional things, you must include this trait of Americans.

On Friday Morning, which was New Year's Day, Kathleen Willey was a guest on a Baltimore radio station.  With the arrest of Bill Cosby for a sexual assault that occurred more than a decade ago, other perpetrators of these crimes are not only starting to sweat, they are also slipping back into the headlines.  The idea that time protected sexual predators may no longer be true.  And one of the most notorious sexual predators, or, more accurately, "alleged" sexual predators, is former President William Jefferson Clinton.  No more than two weeks ago his wife, the current Democratic front-runner for President, Hillary Rodham Clinton, announced that she was "unleashing" her husband and sending him back onto the campaign trail.  It wasn't necessarily the best choice of words.

The truth-challenged candidate also declared, and I'm not kidding on this one, that any victim of sexual assault deserves to have her story believed.  Another statement she probably needs to think through.  How many women charged Mr. Clinton with all manner of sexual assault?  Too many to list here, that's for sure.  Is this infamous list being excluded from her demand that victims be believed?  Only in the mind of Hillary Clinton and her inner circle of functionaries.

There are other debates, including those that show just how stale and unrealistic the plans of the far left are.  Many know about the "Section 8" program.  It was said to be for the purpose of providing rent subsidies to certain disadvantaged souls.  But the left used it to transplant the poor into middle class neighborhoods.  The left believed it would pull the poor up by having them rub elbows with middle class folk.  Instead, it pulled the middle class neighborhoods down.  Some Middle Class Neighborhoods are failing because events previously thought to be confined to City neighborhoods are now commonplace in middle class neighborhoods:  street crime, urban blight, burglaries and declining property values.  Now, the Left is doubling down.  The City Housing Authority has spent some $19 million dollars to purchase homes in affluent white neighborhoods.  Into those homes were placed poor inner city black folk.  I am not being a racist.  The white and black mentioned above are requirements of the program.  What's more, City Housing Officials admit that they started the program as far under the radar as they could because they knew it would be wildly unpopular once word got out.  Now that it is getting out, they are at least right about that.  Meanwhile, the City's only daily newspaper, the wildly leftist Baltimore Sun (it still has a good sports staff), printed an editorial that labeled a Baltimore County legislator who opposes the new program as a racist.  This is the old, tired and mostly untrue trick of the uber left.  When a leftist program is failing and coming under criticism, the criticizers are, by definition in the minds of the left, racists.  But the legislator in question, Pat McDonogh, isn't a racist.  He lives in a biracial neighborhood and is elected there over and over.  Left-wing programs do not work.  Neighborhoods that become integrated on their own are solid neighborhoods with rising property values.  There are lots of them.  This is apparently a revelation to the uber left.

Sports: Ravens - ahead at halftime despite having TD taken off the scoreboard by game officials - fall in Cincinatti to end season 5-11; Burnley Draws With Ipswich Town, 0-0