Let Us Never Forget: A Memorial Day Reflection

Posted by Karl “KJ” Johnson on May 26, 2017

We will never forget. It’s a maxim in the armed forces that we do not forget our fallen.

I’ll never forget July 22, 2010: The day the AH-1W Super Cobra (manned by my roommate and his co-pilot, call sign “Dealer 54”), was felled by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). They were flying a combat mission in support of the US Marines under fire from insurgents. This was a routine mission in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. Insurgents attacked daily and we regularly directed close air support to protect our ground forces, usually without incident. But as I stood in the combat operations center that day — as I did every day to ensure each mission was on track — I was stunned by a flurry of reports that Dealer 54 was down. Insurgents had fired multiple RPGs and one of them struck Dealer 54, causing the main rotor to separate from the aircraft and resulting in a catastrophic loss of our friends.

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The New York Post featured a column last week by Lauren Tousignant about a worrying trend for Oreo aficionados. It seems increasing numbers of Americans are finding their favorite sandwich cookies have changed, now tasting “chalky,” “cheap,” or “weird.”

Tousignant’s article is titled “Did Nabisco Ruin America’s Favorite Cookie?” But that headline is a bit misleading. Oreo and Nabisco are now both brands of Mondelez International. Most people have trouble pronouncing Mondelez’ name, let alone keeping track of their many brands. Oreo is a huge business for Mondelez; they made $2 billion dollars in 2016 producing more than 40 billion cookies. Would they really mess with success?

The company says no. In a statement to Breitbart News, Mondelez International said, “Oreo cookies which are made for sale in the US have the same recipe and taste profile, regardless of which manufacturing plant they are made at within our supply chain network. In addition, all of our manufacturing sites are held to the same high standards for safety and quality.”

Writing in the Post, Tousignant did a good job of documenting the problem. She gathered anecdotal evidence from family and friends, and also studied consumer complaint forums, which there is no shortage of on the Internet. She found a “significant increase” in complaints starting in November of 2016.

She also effectively laid out some of the reasons why food products may experience changes in flavor, both intentional and unintentional. These include the recipe change which Mondelez denied to both the Post and Breitbart News. As Tousignant points out in the Post, even a change in equipment used between old and new production plants can play a huge role in the flavor of the food they produce.

Readers that have kept up on the flow of American jobs to Mexico will note the fact that Mondelez moved a portion of their Oreo production from Chicago to Mexico. Oreos were made in Chicago for 60 years, would the move from that old of a production plant to a new Mexican facility be the exact type of equipment change Tousignant describes? Some customers boycotted Oreos over the Mexico move, but that was primarily over the lost jobs. Who knew that a few short years later Mondelez might be in a position to lose customers due to their product quality?

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((This “news” article is a great example of liberal news bias))

NEW HAVEN >> The smell of barbecue wasn’t enough to weaken the resolve Friday of eight Yale University graduate student teachers who have not eaten in days.

The students are protesting the university’s unwillingness to negotiate a contract with its recently formed union, Local 33 Unite Here, saying that the school, which is contesting the National Labor Relations Board ruling, is delaying to start the negotiations because they are hoping President Donald Trump will appoint anti-union members to the NLRB.

Friday, just feet away from the tent erected in Beinecke Plaza on Wall Street, where protesters have stayed for the past three days, the Yale College Republicans were serving up a meal of barbecued beef, baked beans and corn to its members and others in the Yale community.

“I’m not really focused on that,” said Local 33 chairman and city Alder Aaron Greenberg, D-8, who is a graduate student teacher and Ph.D. candidate in political science. “I’m focused on making sure we have lots of water, make sure I’m healthy. We have a check-in with our nurse this afternoon. We are focused on that.”

Representatives of the Yale College Republicans would not comment on their presence in Beinecke Plaza Friday afternoon. Immediately after a reporter requested comment, a Yale University police officer arrived to remove the media presence from the plaza.

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Only a day before journalists are set to meet at their annual self-congratulatory dinner, a new poll finds that their intended customers, the American people, don’t trust them. Indeed, the poll finds Americans trust the Trump White House to tell the truth more than they do the media.

The poll taken of 2,006 adults between April 23 and 26 is certainly bad news for the political media as 37 percent of respondents said they trust the Trump White House, while only 29 percent said they trust the media.

Worse for the media, the day before their April 29 dinner, the poll found that 51 percent of respondents said the national political media “is out of touch with everyday Americans,” while only 28 percent said the media “understand the issues every day Americans are facing.”

The poll sponsored by Morning Consult unsurprisingly found a partisan outcome with its questions. But what should concern the media is that independents also said they trust the White House more than they trust the media.

Republicans had an extremely lopsided view of the press with 72 percent saying the White House was more apt to tell the truth. Only 10 percent said the media would deliver real news while 18 percent said they did not know.

Of course, Democratic respondents trusted the media more than they do Trump, but at a much closer margin. 54 percent favor the media with only 12 percent saying they trust the White House. Perhaps a bit surprising was the 34 percent who said they were not sure which was more truthful.

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Let’s reverse angle. The president’s first 100 days in office have been analyzed, dissected, evaluated. Not much left to say about them. What about the opposition? What do the Democrats have to show for these first months of the Trump era?

Little. Trump’s defeats have not come at the Democrats’ hands. Those setbacks have been self-inflicted (over-the-top tweets, hastily written policies, few sub-cabinet nominations) or have come from the judiciary (the travel ban, the sanctuary cities order) or from Republican infighting (health care). Deregulation, Keystone pipeline, immigration enforcement—Democrats have been powerless to stop them.

Chuck Schumer slow-walked Trump’s nominations as best he could. In fact his obstruction was unprecedented. But the cabinet is filling up, the national security team in place. On the Supreme Court, Schumer miscalculated royally. He forced an end to the filibuster for judicial appointments, yet lost anyway. If another appointment opens this summer, and the Republicans hold together, the Democrats will have zero ability to prevent the Court from moving right. No matter what he says in public, Schumer can’t possibly think that a success.

The prevalent anti-Trump sentiment obscures the party’s institutional degradation. Democratic voters despise the president—he enjoys the approval of barely more than 10 percent of them—and this anger and vitriol manifests itself in our media and culture. So Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert enjoy a ratings boom, the women’s march attracts a massive crowd, the New York Times sells more subscriptions, and Bill Nye leads a rainy-day “march for science.” The desire to ostentatiously “resist” Trump leads to better-than-expected results for Democratic candidates in congressional special elections. But the candidates don’t win—or at least they haven’t yet.

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How did big media miss the Donald Trump swell? News organizations old and new, large and small, print and online, broadcast and cable assigned phalanxes of reporters armed with the most sophisticated polling data and analysis to cover the presidential campaign. The overwhelming assumption was that the race was Hillary Clinton’s for the taking, and the real question wasn’t how sweeping her November victory would be, but how far out to sea her wave would send political parvenu Trump. Today, it’s Trump who occupies the White House and Clinton who’s drifting out to sea—an outcome that arrived not just as an embarrassment for the press but as an indictment. In some profound way, the election made clear, the national media just doesn’t get the nation it purportedly covers.

What went so wrong? What’s still wrong? To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.

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