Bits and Pieces of Good News

The news from home and abroad is almost uniformly bad. The damage wrought by the Obama misadministration is now in the incalculable range. As I have mentioned before some of the damage this horrid president has inflicted on us and the Western world might well be permanent.  I, however, don't want this post to be yet another recitation of the Obama catalog of destruction. For one of very few times, I am going to write a relatively optimistic piece.  Please note the word relatively.

While as noted the picture is bleak, there are glimmers of light that give some hope. Let me rattle off a few, starting overseas.

In Australia, of course, we see a conservative government in charge and, one hopes, on the way to undoing the progressive damage to that great country's economy, image, culture, and soul. We hope, at a minimum, that the new PM will be able to reverse the destructive "green" and immigration policies that threaten Australia and the rest of the West. Lead the way Australia!

In other good news, this time from Latin America, the Nobel-prize winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez is dead.

One of the great phonies and bootlickers of leftist dictators has passed from the scene. Those who love freedom can only be grateful.

I will speak ill of the dead. It is hard to exaggerate the damage that GGM has done to the image of Latin America and Latin Americans, portraying the region and the people as some sort of quasi-magical place, a place filled with ethereal, mystical beings without logic, common sense, and ordinary human emotions and foibles. For all his "magical realist" vision, he could not or would not see, for example, the horrors brought to Cuba and Cubans by the Castro brothers. On the contrary, he had an enormous house in Havana provided by the regime, with servants and cars at his beck-and-call, and a ready chummy access to the bloodstained brothers and their rule of terror. He convinced generations of gringo academic Latin American "specialists" that the region could not be understood in conventional terms; that supply-and-demand economics did not work there; and that ordinary people did not want individual liberty and political democracy. He helped create and perpetuate a horrid stereotype of Latin America, one in which the atrocities of leftist regimes could be ignored because the region operated on another level of consciousness, one beyond our poor powers to comprehend. Good riddance to this poseur and his unreadable sentences! An enemy of freedom is gone.

In Venezuela, the revolt against dictatorship continues.

Ignored, when not maligned by the rest of the Americas, the Venezuelan protestors have revealed the Chavez-Maduro regime for what it truly is: an economic, political, humanitarian, and moral disaster. It is a rotten regime that now survives only by eating its foreign reserves, using the full power of the state to try to crush dissent, and by lying non-stop. Despite the lack of international support, the sort of support that would have been shown students, for example, revolting against a right-wing regime, the protests continue on a daily basis. The Maduro regime is in a death spiral, and that is all to the good. The passing of this hideous regime will be due to the people of Venezuela, who abandoned by their alleged friends, took matters into their own hands.  

Here in our own beloved but sorely distressed and bedraggled USA, we also see some signs of hope that the fog of leftism is not impenetrable.

I have written before of the defeat handed the bloated, corrupt, and politicized United Auto Workers (UAW) in Tennessee.  We have more good news on that front. The press is reporting that,

The United Auto Workers has dropped its challenge of a vote to organize workers at Volkswagen's only U.S. plant that went against the union. 

The National Labor Relations Board was set to start a hearing Monday on the UAW's complaint that Republican politicians improperly interfered before the Feb. 14 vote at the Chattanooga, Tenn. plant, which the union lost 712 to 626.

But the union issued a statement Monday saying it was dropping its appeal because fighting the election through the NLRB could have dragged on for years. 

"The UAW is ready to put February's tainted election in the rear-view mirror," said UAW President Bob King in a statement. 

The union said even if the NLRB ordered a new election -- the board's only available remedy under current law -- nothing would stop politicians and anti-union organizations from again interfering. 

But some experts had suggested that the union stood little chance of winning a new vote, even if the NRLB ruled in its favor. 

"Most people thought they'd win the first time around," said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. "I think the chances of winning a second vote will be more difficult than winning the first vote."

They will just have to go home to Detroit and rest on their laurels . . .

Gun ownership has won some significant battles. We see the idea of concealed carry by law abiding citizens gaining currency throughout the country. Come on folks! How many of you thought you would see concealed carry in Illinois in your lifetimes? The anti-gun hysterics are losing and losing badly. Oh, and guess what? As gun ownership and concealed carry have expanded, crime rates, including gun crime, have declined.

Sherryl Attkisson, the former CBS reporter and one of the very few MSM reporters outside of FOX who tried to report the truth on Benghazi, has now reported that (Surprise!) the folks at CBS were ideologically reluctant to criticize the government, and that reporters who do not toe the lib line will come under attack. You mean the media has a leftist bias? Wow! That's a scoop!

The Bundy Ranch standoff I have covered before. It still remains a remarkable event, and I think one that is going to force the government to rethink its heavy-handed SWAT tactics in the future. American citizens stood up to armed agents of the Federal government and forced them to back down. That is a major development.

Despite its best efforts, the Obama misadministration has been unable to stifle US oil production. The US, by some calculations, is now the world's top energy producer, and we're only getting started. Making the US energy independent is the best way to increase our foreign policy options, and provide a steady stream of good paying jobs here at home.

These are just a few of my favorite things. I am sure readers can come up with more. Look, I realize that the overall trend line is not promising, but that should not blind us to the occasional bits of good news which come to us thanks to the actions of some brave and dedicated people.