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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Of Class And Classes: If you want to help poor kids get ahead, then you need to support school choice. “The long knives have come out for Education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. But her critics aren’t attacking her because they think she’ll do a bad job. They’re attacking her because they’re afraid she’ll do a good job. But I think that her success will be important, if you care about addressing inequality in America.”
TRAFFIC INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE: Uber debuts Movement, a new website offering access to its traffic data.
Uber says it was looking at all the data it gathered and began to realize that it could be used for public benefit, and assembled a product team to make this happen. The result of this effort was Movement, which aims to address problems city officials and urban planners encounter when they’re forced to make key, transformational infrastructure decisions without access to all of, or the proper information about actual conditions and causes.
Essentially, according to Uber, it’s hoping to make it easier for those with influence over a city’s transportation picture to make the right decision, and to be able to explain why, where and when the changes are happening with accurate data backing them up. It also wants to do this in a way that makes it easy for organizations to work with, so it’s releasing the data organized around traffic analysis zones within cities, which are agreed-upon geographic demarcations that help with existing urban planning and traffic management.
Uber is the only major vested interest I can think of which stands to make more money under a sane infrastructure planning regime — which is why I doubt urban planners will make good use of this treasure trove.
THE 28TH INFANTRY DIVISION BAND MAKES A STAND AT WILTZ: The latest in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge series.
In this action, for which the Band was awarded the Meritorious Unit Commendation, all but thirteen of sixty member were killed or captured. Of the thirteen, eleven were wounded…
Here’s the official history of Fifth Panzer Army’s attack on the 28th Division.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1341: Another View Of The Republicans’ Reactivation Of The Holman Rule And Lois Lerner. It’s cute when people think that there’s an existing structure of accountability or rule of law to depart from. . . .
SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS OF THE SEA: Shark babies eat each other.
Watch the amazing moment when Sir David Attenborough and BBC filmmakers recorded the discovery that some shark babies eat each other before birth.
No. The video clip does not show the cannibalism.
THE CHICAGO WAY: U. Chicago offers $500 for ‘creative ways’ to fight city’s ‘perception of violence’
Perception?
WHAT VLADIMIR PUTIN AND HILLARY CLINTON HAVE IN COMMON:
The unclassified version of the Intelligence Community assessment has been published, and as widely predicted, it contains no bombshells. Part of that has to do with the IC protecting its sources, and part of that has to do with the fact that one could have reached most of the conclusions merely by closely following the news and being aware of recent history.
One quick observation: If Putin thought helping Trump win the election would give him the weakest possible opponent, he would not be alone in his assessment: Hillary Clinton thought the exact same thing. Team Clinton tried to help Trump win the GOP nomination race because they thought he would be the weakest possible opponent in the general.
There are lots of people in the United States that underestimated Donald Trump who now have Trump’s footprints all over their faces. Just maybe, the trend will continue. . .
Heh.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. forces strike ISIS-held village in Syria.
Four American Apache helicopters and two back-up helicopters, carried out a commando raid” in Al-Kubar on Sunday at noon…The attack targeted vehicles driven by senior IS fighters coming from Raqa, killing several and capturing others…
Didn’t Obama say the tide of war is receding?
CHANGE? U.S. Navy destroyer fires warning shots at Iranian vessels.
A U.S. Navy destroyer fired three warning shots at four of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps vessels on Sunday after they closed in at a high rate of speed in the Strait of Hormuz, two U.S. defense officials told Reuters on Monday.
The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the USS Mahan established radio communication with the boats but they did not respond to requests to slow down. The Navy destroyer fired warning flares and a U.S. Navy helicopter also dropped a smoke float. The Iranian vessels came within 900 yards (800 meters) of the Mahan, which was escorting two other U.S. ships, they said.
Back in ’87 or ’88, when Donald Trump was first being talked about as a possible GOP contender, he did an interview (if memory serves) with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl. Asked about the latest Iranian provocation, Trump said that if he were President, he’d respond by ordering the military to seize an Iranian offshore oil rig.
Thirty years later, we’ll get to see if Trump still holds to that view now that he’s in office.
THIS IS BETTER THAN ANGELA MERKEL’S APPROACH: Czech government tells its citizens how to fight terrorists: Shoot them yourselves.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Of Class And Classes: If you want to help poor kids get ahead, then you need to support school choice. “The long knives have come out for Education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. But her critics aren’t attacking her because they think she’ll do a bad job. They’re attacking her because they’re afraid she’ll do a good job. But I think that her success will be important, if you care about addressing inequality in America.”
SMART DIPLOMACY: U.S. Surrendered More Than $10 Billion in Gold, Cash, Assets to Iran.
Senior Iranian officials late last week confirmed reports that the total amount of money paid to Iran over the past four years is in excess of $10 billion, a figure that runs counter to official estimates provided by the White House.
The latest disclosure by Iran, which comports with previous claims about the Obama administration obfuscating details about its cash transfers to Iran—including a $1.7 billion cash payment included in a ransom to free Americans—sheds further light on the White House’s back room dealings to bolster Iran’s economy and preserve the Iran nuclear agreement.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi confirmed last week a recent report in the Wall Street Journal detailing some $10 billion in cash and assets provided to Iran since 2013, when the administration was engaging in sensitive diplomacy with Tehran aimed at securing the nuclear deal.
Ghasemi disclosed that the $10 billion figure just scratches the surface of the total amount given to Iran by the United States over the past several years.
Barack Obama kept the Iranian terrorist regime on financial life support long enough to get his reckless nuclear deal — and the sanctions lifted.
KATE’S LAW: House to Reconsider Law Named for San Fran Woman Murdered by Illegal.
It’s a safe bet that Senate Democrats will filibuster Kate’s Law to death. Again.
CONNECTICUT DEMOCRAT SEN. CHRIS MURPHY ON HUGH HEWITT: Yeah, the Reid Rule precedent applies to Trump’s appointments too. “The precedent, yeah, I mean, I think the precedent of changing the rules in the middle of the Congress, right, was, you know, was the basis on changing the number of 60 to 50 for presidential appointees. So I assume that that precedent still holds. You can argue against it for policy grounds, but I’m not sure that the precedent changes in this Congress.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, COST-HIDING EDITION: How University Costs Keep Rising Despite Tuition Freezes: Ballooning fees are leaving some students feeling nickel-and-dimed.
At a time when public anger is laser-focused on tuition charges that are rising three times faster than inflation, something less well understood has actually been largely responsible for pushing up the cost of college: fees.
Think tuition is high? Now add fees for student activities, fees for athletics, fees for building maintenance, fees for libraries—even fees for graduation, the bills for which often arrive just as students and their families thought they were finally done paying for their higher education.
All are frustratingly piled on top of a long list of expenses beyond tuition that many people never plan for or expect, or that can’t be covered by financial aid—sometimes forcing them to take out more and more loans, or quit college altogether.
“It was, like, what is this?” Ann Roach remembered thinking as she kept getting billed for fees when her oldest son went to the University of Dayton. “It’s like buying a car. You think you have a price, and then they tell you, ‘Here’s a conveyance fee, or here’s a fee for $200 to put the license plates on.’ Nobody told us about these.”
Fees nationwide continue to increase even faster than tuition—often covering the same things but letting institutions claim tuition hikes are slowing. Now, however, in response to anger from parents and students, and pressure from legislatures, or for marketing reasons in a time when they’re struggling to attract applicants, a few universities and colleges are pledging to make them more predictable or even drop them altogether. And the resulting decline in borrowing and dropout rates on those campuses suggest the significant toll that fees were taking on their students.
They are a lot like car salesmen, when you get right down to it. Well, except that cars have gotten steadily better over the past several decades, whereas the quality of higher education has actually declined.
FRENEMIES: Airstrikes by Russia Buttress Turkey in Battle vs. ISIS.
The air missions, which took place for about a week near the strategically important town of Al Bab, represent the Kremlin’s first use of its military might to help the Turks in their fight against the militant group. The Russians seized an opening to try to build a military relationship with Turkey, a NATO member, as the United States has sought to keep the emphasis on taking Raqqa, the Islamic State’s self-declared capital.
The Russian bombing is a remarkable turnabout from November 2015, when a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Su-24 attack plane that had violated Turkey’s airspace.
Russia and Turkey had already been involved in a joint effort to establish a cease-fire in Syria — one that does not involve the United States. At the same time, ties between the United States and Turkey have come under growing strain as the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has become increasingly alarmed about the Kurdish forces known as the Y.P.G. The United States has aligned itself with those forces to combat the Islamic State in Syria.
The question remains whether Turkey will lean east or west after “the reunification of Syria.”
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Of Class And Classes: If you want to help poor kids get ahead, then you need to support school choice. “The long knives have come out for Education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. But her critics aren’t attacking her because they think she’ll do a bad job. They’re attacking her because they’re afraid she’ll do a good job. But I think that her success will be important, if you care about addressing inequality in America.”
UPDATE: BTW, I notice that this passage should be in quotation marks: “You are made invalid, and so are your views, if you cannot speak as we speak. Eat as we eat. Dress as we dress. Properly pronounce. The tools to remind you of your place — that you are uneducated — are satire. Mocking. Condescending. Smug. Disdain. Or just dismissal.” It’s from the Chris Arnade tweetstorm that I link. The marks are in my draft, but disappeared along the way somehow. I’ve emailed USA Today to get it fixed.
DON SURBER: “The media parrots Democratic Party talking points without embarrassment, which helped elect Obama president. But as those talking points corroded the credibility of the press, the parroting helped elect President Trump.”
THE BEACON CENTER OFFERS A THREE-POINT PLAN for attacking poverty in Tennessee. School choice, occupational licensing reform, and criminal justice reform — looks solid to me.
IF YOU WANT TO SEND A MESSAGE, CALL WESTERN UNION: Stars snub fans with Donald Trump snits.
They better watch out. Trump might repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts, or crack down on “Hollywood Accounting.”
UPDATE: From the comments: “This could have a different headline: ‘Hollywood Stars Remind Voters Why They Voted For Trump.'”
VIOLA DAVIS AT THE GOLDEN GLOBES: “There is no way that we can have someone in office who is not an extension of our belief system.”
You get used to it.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Spicer: Media doesn’t treat Trump with respect, cheers on Democrats.
The media doesn’t treat President-elect Donald Trump with the proper respect, the man set to be the next White House spokesman said in an interview with The Hill.
Sean Spicer, a longtime GOP operative and strategist for the Republican National Committee, criticized a media landscape that he said mocked Trump even as it cheers on Democrats.
While he said the media seems to understand that Trump represents a larger movement after his presidential win, his remarks reflected longstanding antipathy on the part of the Trump team on how the businessman has been treated.
“There’s some positive aspects here and there, but largely it still continues to not treat him with the respect that he deserves,” Spicer said.
“I think for a lot of folks inside the beltway, and inside pundit-world, they don’t fully appreciate the understanding that he has of where the American people are,” Spicer continued. “They continue to mock him in ways, when it frankly just shows the lack of understanding of that they have of where the American people are and what they think.”
Spicer also criticized what he said are “countless examples” of the media cheering on Democrats.
“There are countless examples of the media engaging — overtly or covertly — cheering on Democrats and there’s no accountability. But it’s also not even frowned upon,” he said.
No, it’s cheered on by their fellow Democratic Party operatives with bylines.
THIS DEAL KEEPS GETTING WORSE ALL THE TIME: U.N. chief concerned Iran may have violated arms embargo.
The United Nations chief expressed concern to the Security Council that Iran may have violated an arms embargo by supplying weapons and missiles to Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah, according to a confidential report, seen by Reuters on Sunday.
The second bi-annual report, due to be discussed by the 15-member council on Jan. 18, also cites an accusation by France that an arms shipment seized in the northern Indian Ocean in March was from Iran and likely bound for Somalia or Yemen.
Most U.N. sanctions were lifted a year ago under a deal Iran made with Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, the United States and the European Union to curb its nuclear program. But Iran is still subject to an arms embargo and other restrictions, which are not technically part of the nuclear agreement.
It’s easier to attempt and to get away with this kind of thing once you’re suddenly flush with cash.
EGADS! Republicans Would Repeal Obamacare In Precisely The Way They Accuse Democrats Of Enacting It.
The story that Obamacare opponents tell about its enactment is that backers conceived the health insurance proposal in secret, misled the public about its provisions, and passed it without thinking through the consequences.
That’s a totally accurate account ― of what Republicans are planning to do right now.
How dare they play by the Democrats’ rulebook.
OF COURSE NOT. THIS IS AN EFFORT TO BUY GENTRY VOTES: There is actually nothing for low-income students in Cuomo’s free-college plan.
LATE STAGE CORRUPTOCRACY: Illinois Is In A Death Spiral Thanks To The Democratic Machine. “The press remains complicit by missing the full scope of the crisis.” Well, that’s one of the ways they’re complicit.
RETAIL BLUES: The Limited Is Closing All 250 of Its Stores.
The retailer isn’t even making it online; last month it was reported that the company is likely headed for liquidation.
PURGE ON: Turkey may hold referendum on new constitution in early April.
Turkey may hold a referendum in the first week of April on a new constitution which would create an executive presidential system, handing incumbent President Tayyip Erdogan greater powers, Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli said on Monday.
Parliament’s general assembly is due to start debating the proposed constitutional changes later on Monday and work on the package is expected to be completed in 18-20 days, Canikli said in an interview with A Haber television.
The reform package is expected to be approved by parliament, in which the ruling AK Party has a strong majority, and would then go to a referendum.
The last remnants of Ataturk’s Republic will be swept away forever.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Young Obama Voter Says Race Relations Worse After 8 Years Of America’s First Black President.
STOP! IN THE NAME OF THE PRONOUN POLICE! “Queer Activist Arrested for Murder, Friend Insists He Goes By ‘They,’” and Berkeley newspaper updates story accordingly:
Berkeleyside, a local independent news outlet, rushed a story to the presses on Friday, but it had to issue an important correction. Reportedly, the suspected murderer would rather be called by the pronoun “they,” as opposed to “he.”
Facing murder charges is nothing compared to being “misgendered,” apparently. (A later update would clarify Gomez’s age at 22.)
Police have identified the wanted person as 24-year-old Pablo Gomez Jr. of North Hollywood. According to Gomez Jr.’s Facebook page, they are a UC Berkeley student who lives in Berkeley. [A friend contacted Berkeleyside after publication to say that Gomez Jr. uses the pronoun “they.” This story has been updated.]
As if this note were not enough, the article also included a correction statement at the bottom.
This story was updated after publication to reflect Gomez Jr.’s preferred pronoun, according to a friend who contacted Berkeleyside.
Time to update the Newspeak Dictionary again, comrade.
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KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL: Christian, Newsom families reflect 10 years after slayings.
The families of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom held memorial services Saturday at the graves of the two Knoxville torture slaying victims, marking the tenth anniversary of their deaths.
Christian and Newsom, 21 and 23 years old, were the victims of a 2007 carjacking in East Knoxville that ended in the torture, rape and slaying of the couple.
There’s much more, including video, at the link.
UPDATE: 10 Years Later: The Brutal Murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.
THE CATHEDRAL INTERPRETS THE CHICAGO ATTACK:
4. The mechanism for this homogenization is not obvious. Unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathedral has no pope (although I read recently that Warren Buffet owns 71 newspapers, and the New York Times is owned in part by Carlos Slim, whose vast fortune has a lot to do with his special relationship with the Mexican government). One factor is that the credibility of a set of information sources depends on their being able to agree on a story (coordination games, the peloton effect, the parliament of clocks). Another factor is self-dealing: people with high verbal skills tend to support a system of government that is controlled by people with high verbal skills, and once they control it, they tend to want it to be unlimited in scope. Another factor is self-selection: once an institution becomes dominated by members of a political movement, it tends to become unpleasant and career-limiting for anyone else to work there. Another factor is that the easiest way to write a newspaper story is to copy it from a politician’s press handout. To a considerable extent, these institutions are deliberately manipulated by politicians (broadcast licensing, educational and research funding, journalistic access, selective leaking of secrets, etc., aka Gleichschaltung; in many cases, journalists are literally married to political operatives or are involved in “revolving door” relationships with the political institutions they write about, such as Jeff Immelt of GE, MSNBC and the Obama administration). But the two biggest factors are probably that (1) intellectuals are seduced by political power (the Boromir effect), and (2) these institutions are quasi-religious, and have taken on the peculiar characteristics of the dominant quasi-religion of the day.
5. Three things make an intellectual movement quasi-religious: (1) the outputs that they produce are credence goods, (2) they provide a framework for competition for social status, and (3) this basis is insecure. The fact that credence goods are involved means that conflict about them will tend to be irrational. The fact that social status is involved, and that the basis for social status is insecure, means that this conflict will be relatively vicious, and will carry a strong odor of a witch hunt.
6. The Cathedral is powerful partly because its relative homogeneity allows it to serve as a gatekeeper of politically relevant mass-market information and interpretation. But its real power comes from control of what ideas are associated with high status. Everyone thinks, “I’m my own man. I think for myself.” But unconsciously, people tend to copy the opinions of people who are one step above them on the social ladder. This was explained in the Cerulean Top scene in The Devil Wears Prada.
Read the whole thing; and don’t miss the clip of that aforementioned “Cerulean Top” scene from The Devil Wears Prada, a nifty variation on the line Claude Rains’ sly ambassador character tells Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia: “If we’ve been telling lies, you’ve been telling half-lies. A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.”
RACISM TODAY: The White-Hot Rage Of The Left.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Police: Teacher accused of sex acts with student fled country.
Police said Ekatherine Pappas, 24, of Nottingham, started teaching Spanish at the school on Nov. 16.
A school resource officer became aware Thursday of a video showing a female teacher engaged in a sex act with a male student, police said.
“He came across a student who actually had a copy of the video on their phone,” Baltimore County police Officer Jennifer Peach said.
Detectives confirmed the existence of the video and the teacher’s involvement in sex acts with the 16-year-old student on two occasions, once on Dec. 21 and again on Dec. 22. The incidents were not committed on school property, police said.
“As a teacher, she should’ve known that she’s not allowed to have any kind of a relationship with a student, and secondly a sexual relationship is an unlawful relationship between her age and a 16-year-old child,” Peach said.
Why are public schools such cesspits of sexual abuse?
PLAGIARISM PROBLEMS FOR MONICA CROWLEY? Well, they didn’t sink Fareed Zakaria, but without reading all the relevant text in her book and elsewhere, which I’m certainly not going to do, I don’t have an opinion of my own.
But here’s a whole chapter on plagiarism from my book (coauthored with Peter W. Morgan, and originally published during the Clinton years), The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.
IS A 2017 RECESSION ALREADY BAKED IN THE CAKE? “The current economic expansion is the fourth-longest on record. This record stretches all the way back to the 1850s. . . . Whatever the reasons that expansions end, the fact that the U.S. has never had an expansion that lasted longer than a decade does not bode well for the current one lasting much longer.”
HOWIE CARR IS NOT IMPRESSED with the Boston Globe’s plan to go from “paper of record” to “organization of interest.” I’m not sure what that means, and neither is Howie:
In a memo to his decimated staff this week, editor Brian McGrory says the Globe will no longer be the “paper of record” (as if it ever was). Instead, he said, the Globe will be an “organization of interest.”
Sorry, not interested.
McGrory’s memo reads like it was composed by a recent graduate of an ESL program, or perhaps translated from another language, most likely consultantese. Everything is to be interesting, “relentlessly interesting.”
After all these years of printing dreary left wing agitprop, how will the Globe become interesting?
“We’ll set up an Audience Engagement team,” McGrory writes. “We will refine and refine again the Hubs system that was proposed by the Mission working group.”
Yeah, that should bring back the readers all right. The Registry of Motor Vehicles couldn’t have put it any better.
But I suspect the outcome will be reprinting Democratic Party and lefty interest group press releases with even less editing. And so does Howie:
Here’s how that will work. If you go to the website at 8 a.m., the lead story might be headlined, “Donald Trump is a terrible man.” If you come back at noon, there will be a totally different, fresh story: “Donald Trump: Threat or Menace?” And then at 3, yet another brand new piece will be posted — “Trump Linked to Cannibal Cult.” . . .
Meanwhile, the last six reporters who haven’t been laid off will have a role in the new imaginary newsroom. McGrory is having one of his deputy senior associate assistant junior managing editors send out a questionnaire asking them “what beats you’ve been dreaming of covering.”
Think of the sharp elbowing that will be going for those most coveted beats: the transgender-bathroom civil rights beat, religion (at the Globe, that’s climate change) and so on. But the prime beat at the Globe, even more prized than the get-Marty-Walsh beat, is the phobia beat. Homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, fake hate crimes — you’re guaranteed front page every day. Literally dozens of readers, some of them under the age of 85, will get to know your name!
Heh.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
Were I Cuban, I suppose I’d be targeted as a counterrevolutionary for having asked Che Guevara — the only time I met him at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations — whether he could possibly envision eventual free elections in Cuba. Although he professed not to understand English, Che — still lionized on T-shirts in this country — didn’t wait for the translator and burst into laughter. It was then I learned that laughter can be chilling.
—From a 2008 column by the great Nat Hentoff, who passed away yesterday at age 91.
Related: Nat Hentoff, the last honest liberal.
DON SURBER: “A year ago today, I wrote this. The next day, I started Trump the Press.”
SO MUCH WINNING YOU’LL BE TIRED OF WINNING: Fiat Chrysler announces $1 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, 2,000 new jobs.
AN ALL-TERRAIN WHEELCHAIR.
This wheelchair is also cool.
SHED NO TEARS: Iran’s Rafsanjani is dead. He died of a heart attack.
I differ with this assessment:
…a moderate counter-figure to the ultra-hardliners clustered around Ahmadinejad, under whom Iran’s relations with the West plummeted…
Moderate counter-figure? Try calculated rhetorician in robes. Here’s one reason why I differ:
He held the chairmanship of Iran’s main political arbitration body, the Expediency Council, since 1990, when he was appointed by the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
That would be the Expediency Discernment Council.
Khomeini’s Iran plays a long game and it’s a dangerous game. Rafsanjani was a hard line Khomeinist who was dedicated to advancing Khomeini’s violent vision.
RELATED: Yesterday I added a link to a recent StrategyPage update as background to a post. It drew a couple of thank yous and that’s good. Over the years I have shared my disgust with lack of media context with Glenn, Ed and Stephen. The StrategyPage archives are a trove of “deep news” or “deep dive news.” Here’s the latest Iran update, from December 2016. It’s long. But here’s a useful extract:
The new American president-elect was elected in part because of popular anger over the 2015 Iran treaty. Then there is the fact that the most dangerous threat to Israel is not even Arab but Iran. Iranians are constantly reminded by their leaders that the official Iranian position is that any Moslem nation (especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey) that improves relations with Israel is betraying Islam. Iran also insists that the United States cannot be trusted and that the economic sanctions the July 2015 treaty lifted are not the main economic problem for Iran. That would be the two years of very low oil prices, which is Saudi Arabia’s way (along with some other local Sunni oil states) to put the hurt on Iran. That is only partially true but not relevant to the Iranians. One reason for seeking nuclear weapons is to give Iran the ability to persuade the Saudis to ship less oil and let the price go up. After that there will be the demand to let Iran run the Moslem holy places in Mecca and Medina. The Saudis are not willing to make deals that involve Iranian domination of the region. Yet the low oil prices have hurt the Saudis as well and all the Gulf oil states recently agreed to lower production in an effort to get prices up. What Arabs and Iranians both downplay is that the American fracking technology is changing the oil market more than anything else as is the growing use of non-oil fuels for energy. Even with record low prices the fracking industry survives and as the price of oil goes up more fracking operations resume production. Add to that recent natural gas deposits discovered and rapidly developed in Israel coastal waters and you can see why political relationships are shifting in the Middle East.
CELEBRATE DIVERSITY: Liberal hires only “native English speakers.”
REP. ADAM SCHIFF: FORT LAUDERDALE GUNMAN claims he had contacts overseas.
COMCAST-NBC SPOKESMAN THREATENS COMCAST-NBC EMPLOYEE: Al Sharpton promises a “season of civil disobedience” in reaction to the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general in the Trump administration.
Somehow though, I doubt Trump is losing much sleep over Sharpton’s latest bloviations.
HENCE, TRUMP: Virtue-Signaling SJW Leftist San Francisco CEO Tweets to Middle America: Stop being a Sh*thole full of Stupid People:
Future dictionary editions will include the above tweet in their definition of oikophobia.
ALSO, A GLENN BECK LISTENER: Prince Was Apparently Hoarding Gold Bars.
THE HUFFINGTON POST TRANSFORMED INTO THE ONION SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Sad Inauguration Workers Prepare To Celebrate A Man They Despise — Some federal workers have no choice but to be at inauguration for Donald Trump.
Gosh. I wonder if they’ll have to bake cakes and serve pizza, as well?
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K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems.
RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Flashback: Schumer calls flight attendant who told him to turn off cell phone ‘bitch.’
WHAT HATH MERKEL WROUGHT? Germany’s Islamist scene growing: security chief. “Germany’s domestic security chief warned Sunday that the country’s radical Islamist scene is not only growing, but becoming more decentralised, posing greater challenges to surveillance operations. . . . Overall, the number of Salafists — or fundamentalist Sunni Muslims — in Germany has risen to more than 9,700, sharply up from 3,800 people in 2011, said Maassen.”
Admit a bunch of people who despise you, then act weak. What could go wrong?
ANDREW KLAVAN: Atrocity in Chicago and in the Media:
In fact, the Chicago torturers don’t represent “black people” any more than do Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas or Martin Luther King. Dylann Roof doesn’t represent “white people” or “American culture” any more than John Glenn or George Washington. These are individuals acting on good and bad ideas and doing good and evil according to those ideas. If there is a bigger story behind any of it, it’s the ideas not the color of people’s skins.
But if journalists reported that story rather than their tired black versus white fairy tales, they would not only expose the truth behind these horrible incidents but also the malevolence of their own political bias. They will not do it.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S BEEN A BAD YEAR FOR THE FBI: Sun-Sentinel: FBI owes better answers on Fort Lauderdale airport shooting. “According to various reports, Santiago said he wanted to talk about the government having taken over his mind, about being forced to watch propaganda videos on ISIS and about feeling forced to fight for the Islamic State terror group. You’d think words like ISIS and Islamic State would hit agents in the face.”
Well, it’s not like he said he was a Tea Partier and opposed ObamaCare or something. That would have gotten a much more vigorous response.
IN THE MAIL: Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation.
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THE ONLY GOOD TIGER IS A DEAD TIGER: A German Tiger tank transformed into a junk pile. Today’s StrategyPage Battle of the Bulge photo. This is really a superb post-combat photo.
Well, after all, it was an IRS targeting scandal. One of the things that has disappointed me about that scandal is the extent to which so many tax professors have gone out of their way to ignore it, to try to minimize it, and even to try to shame Paul Caron out of continuing to cover it. I used to think of tax folks as wonks who cared more about getting it right than about politics, but — as with pretty much every species of seemingly-honest wonkery — that turned out not to be the case once Obama was in office.
LAWPROF SCOTT GERBER ON THE LAW PROFESSORS’ LETTER AGAINST JEFF SESSIONS: “Of course, this is not the first time that leftist law professors have tried to influence Congress with preposterous arguments.” “Lobbying Congress in such transparently partisan terms as my leftist colleagues are prone to do — Sessions is a Republican, so he must be evil; Bill Clinton is a Democrat, so it was OK for him to commit perjury — only makes us look worse to prospective students. It’s time to start behaving like professors again.”
Plus, from Northwestern’s Stephen Presser: Sen. Sessions and the smug self-satisfaction of the law professoriate.
Well, colleges and universities now serve as “political action committees for the left,” and there’s no reason why law schools should be different.
UPDATE: Flashback: “People would happily trust experts, but experts have again and again proven themselves to be untrustworthy. Intellectual authority requires integrity and self-discipline, and those have been in notably short supply.”
BUSINESS AS USUAL: White House Shifts Blame From Obama When Confronted With Damaging Stat on Sluggish Growth.
When confronted Friday with a damaging statistic about sluggish economic growth during President Obama’s tenure, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that Obama would take responsibility for whatever happened during his presidency before shifting blame to events that preceded him entering office.
“The president is also going to leave office, I believe, with a distinction of being the first president since Herbert Hoover not to experience a year of growth three percent GDP,” NBC News reporter Ron Allen said during the White House daily press briefing. “That’s correct, right?”
Earnest said that he is unaware of the statistic but can “certainly look into it.”
“That’s what I’ve read,” Allen said before asking if the statistic is true, would Obama accept responsibility for it.
He also wanted to know how the White House would explain the “sluggish” economic growth over the past few years.
“And the other thing, some would argue that the slow growth is, in part, what has contributed to this feeling of anxiety in the country, that things aren’t getting better and that may be one of the crucial variables that swung the election, if you want to keep going on down this road or what,” Allen said.
Earnest started his response by saying that Obama will take full responsibility because he has done so in the past.
“Well, I’ll say a couple things about that,” he said. “I think the first is that the president of the United States is somebody who takes responsibility for what happens in this country while he’s president, and President Obama has certainly done that in a variety of settings.”
Earnest then said that Obama has acknowledged and given credit to the private sector for “driving our recovery.”
He then shifted the blame to the 2007-2008 financial crisis that occurred under former President George W. Bush before Obama entered office.
Of course he did.
JOHN KERRY: I’m “proud” of our efforts in Syria.
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MITT ROMNEY: Trump Has Made A Smart Choice For Education Secretary. “In 1970, it cost $56,903 to educate a child from K-12. By 2010, adjusting for inflation, we had raised that spending to $164,426 — almost three times as much. Further, the number of people employed in our schools had nearly doubled. But despite the enormous investment, the performance of our kids has shown virtually no improvement. The establishment predictably calls for more spending and smaller classrooms — in other words, more teachers and more pay. But more of the same is demonstrably not the answer.” Public schools nowadays are primarily Democratic Party vote farms maintained with taxpayer money. Any actual education that goes on there is purely secondary.
I’M SURE THAT PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL KEEP THEM SAFE: Feds will guard voting machines after Russian hack. “The Department of Homeland Security took the crucial step Friday night of designating voting machines as critical infrastructure, and subject to federal protections.”
This will also help with Attorney General Sessions’ efforts to end voting fraud.
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NEWS YOU CAN USE: Ebony Magazine Editor: Hate Crimes Can’t Be Committed Against White People, Cops. “When we use a phrase like ‘hate crime,’ we’re typically referring to crimes against people of color, people of various religious groups, LGBT people, people who have been historically attacked, abused or disenfranchised on the basis of their identity. To now extend that to the majority group and a group of people that have a history with African-Americans that has been abusive, and we can apply that to either police officers or to Caucasians, I think gets into very tricky territory.”
HETEROPHOBIA: ‘Outsiders’ Author SE Hinton Says She’s ‘Being Attacked for Being Heterosexual.’ As she says, want a great gay novel? Write it.
RICH WEINSTEIN: “Interested in how we got to this Obamacare craziness? This is pretty much a Gruber confession video.”
EUGENE VOLOKH: Donald Trump 1, New York Times “fact-checking” 0.
WHY TRUMP WON (CONT’D):
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BRENDAN O’NEILL: Why are people so terrified of Milo Yiannopoulos’s book?
The response to Milo Yiannopoulos getting a big-bucks book deal with Simon & Schuster has been nuts. Even by today’s standards. The cry has gone up that S&S — or SS, amirite? — is endangering the wellbeing of women and gays and blacks and other minorities that have felt the sting of Milo’s camp polemics. Please. It’s a book, not a bomb. It’s words, sentences, ideas, not fire and pogroms. Everyone needs to calm down.
Milo is the Breitbart editor turned darling of the agitated, anti-PC right, given to manicured fuming against feminism, Islam, censorious students, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and other things that apparently threaten Western civilisation. When it was revealed that Simon & Schuster would be publishing his first book in March, and that it is called ‘Dangerous’, and that Milo has been remunerated very handsomely indeed for it, Twitter went epileptic; snowflakes melted; literary doyens called for a boycott.
The New Yorker went full haughty, calling on its readers to protest ‘vociferously’ against S&S, ‘in emails, letters, tweets, phone calls — you name it’. The publishing house should be made to ‘answer for the harm it condones through [this] decision’, it said, as if S&S were making landmines rather than bits of paper with words on them. Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters actress subjected to vile racist abuse by alt-right morons on Twitter, said S&S is helping the alt-right to ‘spread their hate’. S&S-published author Karen Hunter said she was rethinking her relationship with the publishing house.
Most perversely, the Chicago Review of Books said it would not review any S&S books through the whole of 2017, in protest against what its editor, Adam Morgan, calls the ‘deadly consequences’ of Milo-style ‘hate speech’. Morgan says rhetoric like Milo’s, whether on race or transgenderism, has ‘real-world consequences’ — it nurtures violence. ‘It arguably encourages people such as Omar Mateen [the Florida nightclub shooter] and Dylann Roof [the Charleston Church shooter] to think of entire groups of people as less than human,’ he says. In short, publish Milo’s book and people will die. This is bonkers, and indistinguishable from the fuming of pointy-hatted policers of heresy in the past, who likewise feared that certain ideas, certain words, might warp minds and destroy souls.
Ultimately, this is about status anxiety. If they can’t silence and marginalize people, what have they got left?
But they’re not doing a very good job of silencing and marginalizing Milo.
TAXPAYER-FUNDED MARGINALIZATION: Young Americans for Freedom Labeled ‘Hate Group’ at UW Madison.
UPDATE: Ann Althouse points out that it’s students calling it a hate group, and petitioning the University.
DUDE, TRUMP HAS NOT YET BEGUN TO AGGRIEVE: Schumer Aggrieved At Being Called A Clown By Trump.
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EMPLOYMENT: Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs.
Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Henry Higgins demands to know in “My Fair Lady.” These days, labor economists are asking the opposite question: Why can’t a man be more like a woman?
The decline of traditionally male blue-collar work like manufacturing has left many men adrift. There are growth industries, such as health care, where some of these men could get work. But they don’t seem to be taking advantages of the splendid opportunities to become home health care aides or day care workers. In part that’s because many of these jobs don’t start out paying as well as the manufacturing jobs these men have lost or had hoped to gain. But in part it seems to be because the work isn’t … well … manly enough.
“It’s not a skill mismatch, but an identity mismatch,” economist Lawrence Katz told the New York Times. “It’s not that they couldn’t become a health worker, it’s that people have backward views of what their identity is.”
This seems unnecessarily dismissive. If Katz lost his job as an economist, and had to take one changing the diapers of elderly patients, I’ve no doubt that he would find this emotionally difficult, but I wouldn’t say that this is because his preferences for his current occupation are “backward.” The patient-care work is necessary, and should be honored. It’s also, let’s be honest, much less pleasant than sitting in an office and writing about what other people should do with their working lives.
Moreover, people invest a lot in building up a professional identity, which helps make the work more bearable (and, by giving people pride in what they do, probably ensures that the work is better done). Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional.
Plus:
I wish I had a better idea what Plan B was. But the solution that economists and policy wonks have been pushing for decades — more education and transition into service work — is manifestly not working for a lot of people. Indeed, it sounds a lot like professional identity politics: The experts say that the solution to all problems is for everyone to be more like them.
Some related thoughts here.
APPARENTLY, EVERYBODY IS MAD AT DEBLASIO FOR BUMBLING SNOW-REMOVAL TODAY, NOT JUST PEOPLE IN STATEN ISLAND. I heard from a friend in Manhattan today that everyone is steaming, and that her Uber driver said he’d only seen one or two plows all day. Just making things easier for Hillary, I guess!
UPDATE: In the comments: “I’m sure it has something to do with Russian hacking.”
I’M POSTING THIS ED MORRISSEY COLUMN AGAIN BECAUSE EVERYONE SHOULD READ IT: Seven Tests That Can Keep Republicans from Screwing Up.
MEANWHILE, WOMEN ON AMERICAN CAMPUSES, THE BENEFICIARIES OF 50 YEARS OF FEMINISM, DEMAND “SAFE SPACES.” Female Kurdish fighters announce new training academies for Arab women to take on Isis in Syria.
2016 saw women’s participation in the fight greatly expand, Ms Abdullah said, with the formation of several new military councils designed to encourage the participation of freed Arab and Yazidi women across both Syria and Iraq.
In Manbij in particular, female residents were so inspired by the female YPJ soldiers who helped liberate them they have created their own all-female battalion to retake the neighbouring town of al-Bab.
Two units have now completed training for battle inside the umbrella Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) coalition, Ms Abdullah said, and both a military training academy and college-style institution were being set up for 2017.
“Arab people were the predominant residents of the liberated areas. They were impressed when they saw that women participated in military affairs and played a leading role in clashes. This had important consequences…. From Shaddadi to Manbij, many women have joined us,” she said.
Good.
WHEN THE MOON IS IN THE SEVENTH HOUSE, AND JUPITER ALIGNS WITH MARS:
Starting January 7th and going through February 6th, 2017, all of the major planets will be moving direct (forward). Ancients saw this as a time of great fortune and a very opportune time.
This is the dawning of the Age of Trumpquarius. . . .
DAN HENNINGER OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Trump: FDR for Black Americans?
But of course. It’s not a coincidence that Milo Yiannopoulos, one of his earliest and most enthusiastic supporters, wrote that “Trump Would Be the Real First Black President” a year and a half ago.
In the 1970s, Tom Wolfe introduced into the American vernacular “Muggeridge’s Law,” named after the veteran British columnist, and stated that “We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.”
There needs to be a corollary for the age of social media and dysfunctional Beltway politics: It’s only a matter of time before today’s most insane trolling boast becomes tomorrow’s reality.
No word yet what 2009’s wannabe-FDR thinks about the notion of his successor donning the jaunty cigarette holder and fedora, however.
SCOTT ADAMS: Is The Onion Advising Democrats Now? I’m going with “yes.” Love the photo.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY? New Republican Congresswoman, Puerto Rico’s First, Ignored By Univision.
TIM CARNEY: Democrats Refuse To Accept The Election Outcome — Again.
The last time Congressional Democrats peaceably accepted a GOP victory in the Electoral College was 1988. In 2000, 2004 and 2016, Democrats in Congress objected, tried to object, and generally disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College vote. They did so with no substantive grounds, instead just for the political theater of it. . . .
This is part of a pattern of a specific species of political norm-smashing where Democrats seem to be leading the way: Refusing to concede when they lose.
Mike Dukakis was the last Democratic presidential nominee to concede on Election Night. Liberal protestors in many states shouted and protested the Electoral College votes last month, without any valid grounds for objection. . . .
When Democrats lose they are a lot slower to concede, it seems. Maybe it’s a deliberate strategy. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe I’m wrong in perceiving this pattern. But I expect this practice to spread, which won’t be good for politics.
They don’t care. They’re spoiled children.
EVERYONE IS MOVING TO TEXAS, ACCORDING TO NEW REPORT: “While we’re talking about bumper stickers, the ones that say, ‘Don’t California my Texas’ also may get more popular. The number one state these new Texans are arriving from? You guessed it: California.”
Man, those effete fedora-wearing sushi-loving prog-rock former Californians better not ruin my state.
