SUSPECT IN COLOGNE SEX ATTACKS: “I AM SYRIAN. YOU HAVE TO TREAT ME KINDLY. MRS MERKEL INVITED ME.”

Related: The Migrant Rape Culture The Political Elite Wishes Were Fake:

It’s hard to explain the “why” behind the troubling correlation between increased Muslim immigration and sexual assault. But one explanation can be found in Islamic culture itself and the heinous way it treats victims of rape.

Many women who find themselves the victims of sexual assault can later become victims of brutal punishments handed down by Sharia courts. In 2008, a Somali girl was stoned to death after being gang raped. Her crime was for engaging in fornication, according to the Islamist court which sentenced her. Courts in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh regularly hand down multiple lashings to rape victims and do little to rapists.

Even if the law does nothing, victims can still find themselves murdered in honor killings. For instance, a Syrian woman who suffered a gang rape in her native land was later stabbed to death in October in an act to purify her shame. The murder took place, shockingly enough, in Germany.

It looks like Europe may engage in victim blaming today and victim slaying tomorrow if it doesn’t get a handle on this problem soon enough.

Which dovetails perfectly into this headline — German Interior Minister: Chatroom Comments are Just as Bad as Muslim Mass Sex Attacks on Women.

WINNER OF 2015′S WORST COLLEGE PRESIDENT OF THE YEAR: Peter Salovey of Yale. A good call, though it was a rich field this year.

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LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Toyota Wants Its Cars To Expect Its Unexpected. I love my car, but if I were to buy a new one it would be for some of the fancier semi-autonomous electronics. But not yet.

SO YESTERDAY, when I wrote about grid failures, blackouts, and generators, some readers suggested that while a home generator is nice, proper disaster-prep involves having more than one source of backup power, heat, etc. They’re right. I also recommend inverters, which you can take with you, or use at home. I’ve had posts on that here and here.

SAYS THE MAN WHO WOULD HAPPILY CONFISCATE 90 PERCENT OF TAXPAYER EARNINGS: Bernie Sanders: ‘Greed Is Not Good.’

CLAIM: Rahm Emanuel offered family five million in taxpayer hush money to keep dashcam shooting video embargoed past election:

Emanuel had maintained since McDonald’s death that he has never seen the dash-cam video, but the emails prove the mayor knew exactly what the footage showed when city lawyers negotiated a deal that would at least delay the video’s release. Attorneys for McDonald’s estate sent Platt screenshots of the video and a detailed description:

“After Laquan immediately spun to the ground, graphic puffs of smoke from ricochet shots establishes that Officer Van Dyke continued to fire his weapon for approximately 16 seconds after Mr. McDonald laid helplessly in the street.”

Emanuel’s lawyers were offering $5 million in hush money to keep this hidden just weeks before the runoff election. And the biggest part of the deal—that McDonald family attorneys agreed to keep the video to themselves until criminal proceedings were concluded—just so happened to be inked the day after Emanuel was re-elected.

Found via Iowahawk, who posits that Emanuel’s “toast” after this disclosure.  “Emanuel needs to resign,” he adds. “Even though what will follow is the express lane to Detroit.”

If only there was some other option for Chicago voters…

CUE THE JERSEY JOKES NOW: Behind a Shopping Center in New Jersey, Signs of a Mass Extinction.

HMM: Ingenious New Non-Lethal Bullet Burns Propellant Inside the Round.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Cologne New Year sex attacks: Germany’s women are angry, scared – and getting tired of excuses.

When you import people from a genuine “rape culture,” you will get more rape. And it will persist until you either expel them, or punish enough of them, harshly enough, to make them change their worldview. And, by the way, the same is true of the rape-enabling German political class.

Related: Some un-PC events in Cologne. “To me, the attacks themselves are far less surprising than the fact that a paper like the Guardian isn’t pulling its punches. In fact, the actual events are not surprising at all. The minister may call the attacks ‘a completely new dimension of crime,’ but that only reflects the minister’s ignorance of the Lara Logan story at the hands of a mob in Egypt.”

Also related: Huge influx of migrant men will lead to more sex attacks like those in Cologne, says analyst, as it’s revealed Austrian police have ALSO covered up identical gang assaults.

This is your political class, Europe. They’d rather see sexual assaults against European women, than risk anything that might make “migrants” look bad.

ADDRESSING THE ONE-SIDED POLITICIZATION OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION: How Law Schools Can Fix The One-Sided Pursuit Of ‘Social Justice’ Through Clinics. “To correct this latter problem, I have a modest proposal. On any controversial matter where clinics will be pursuing social justice, a law school should establish two clinics. Thus, if there is a clinic whose focus is on representing those charged with death penalty, there should be another to represent murder victims to help them make victim impact statements. If there is a clinic representing tenants, there should be another representing small landlords.”

This is a good idea. It’s funny but one of my former colleagues in the UT legal clinic hated doing landlord/tenant because — though she was a big lefty in general — her family had a few properties in the NYC area that they rented out, and they were always getting screwed by deadbeat tenants. This gave her a degree of compassion in that field that was less present elsewhere. Lawyers in particular should know that there are two sides to every story.

At the University of Tennessee College of Law, we follow the above advice to some degree: We have a wide range of clinics, including a Business & Trademark Law Clinic aimed at helping small businesses.

HOW FAR HAS TRUMP MOVED THE OVERTON WINDOW? THIS FAR: Tom Friedman calls for “controlling low-skilled immigration.”

HERE’S WHY HILLARY WILL BE INDICTED: Former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova predicts chaos in a few months when Attorney General Loretta Lynch declines to prosecute Hillary Clinton despite an FBI recommendation to indict the former Secretary of State. Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group interviews of congressional and government ethics insiders suggest an indictment for Hatch Act violations isn’t likely. The outlook is far more ominous for Clinton on an indictment for negligence in handling classified information.

IN THE MAIL: From Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 973.

IN THAT CASE, I’M SURPRISED OBAMA HASN’T PUSHED HARDER ON THIS: Megan McArdle: Closing Tax ‘Loopholes’ Would Choke the Middle Class.

Paying for new spending by “closing the loopholes” is a favorite rallying cry of almost everyone. But rarely are those people picturing giving up their own deductions for mortgage interest, employer-sponsored health insurance, dependent children, or retirement accounts. Why, no! Those aren’t loopholes. Those are just the basics of a decent middle-class life. Loopholes are the deductions used by other, richer people who can afford crooked lawyers.

The sad fact is, however, that almost all of the money lost to “tax expenditures” goes to you, Mr. or Ms. Middle American. It cannot be otherwise; you have most of the money. Oh, I know it doesn’t feel like you have most of the money. Didn’t you just read an article saying that the top 1 percent of Americans collect around 20 percent of national income?

Why, yes, you did. But that means the bottom 99 percent have 80 percent of national income. If we confiscated every dollar the top 1 percent made, that still wouldn’t quite cover our national expenditures. And it is not actually practical to take all of it, since the normal response to 100 percent tax rates would be to move or to stop making money.

Indeed.

IT VARIES. FOR HEALTH-INSURANCE PURPOSES, 27. FOR ABORTION, PUBERTY. FOR SEXUAL CONSENT, IT’S ONCE YOU’RE OUT OF SCHOOL. When Are You Really An Adult?

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Should The Navy Go To A Big Fleet / Small Ships Doctrine?

TODAY IN HISTORY: 17 Years Ago Bill Clinton Faced Senate For Charges Of Perjury (VIDEO).

THE HANGOVER FROM 2009 CONTINUES: Washington Post admits that, no: electric cars were NOT worth it.

Unexpectedly.

DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A BYLINE SAYS WHAT? Cruz, Rubio Charged with Race Treason by Univision’s Jorge Ramos.

Add this to his hilarious meltdown in August over Donald Trump, and it’s almost as if there’s no Republican that meets Ramos’ impossible standards.

Not to mention that Ramos’ daughter is a Hillary Clinton staffer.

KRISTEN SOLTIS ANDERSON: A depressing campaign, and an election we need.

To put this in context, during the entire slog of the 2012 election, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney sustained a brand as unfavorable as Clinton or Trump. John McCain, John Kerry and George W. Bush all enjoyed “favorables” of over 50 percent during their presidential campaigns, even though two out of the three were ultimately never elected president.

Today, only one out of four Americans think the country is on the right track. Americans continue to express deep economic anxiety, and the president’s job approval remains low, with particular disapproval for handling of foreign policy.

Given this complete rejection of the status quo, it is astonishing that there’s a chance that voters will be presented with this depressing choice: Hillary Clinton, — symbolic of dynastic elite, entrenched interests, corporate America and politics-as-usual — or someone radical like Trump, whose vision of forward progress is distinctly backward looking, as if to reclaim a bygone era by hitting rewind.

But taking America back to a different time isn’t possible, even if we wanted it to be.

Republicans may pine for the Reagan 1980s, while Democrats pine for the New Deal 1930s. But the makeup of America and the evolution of our economy means that neither is in the cards for us, nor should they be. The pace of demographic and technological change reshaping America means it is impossible to recreate the halcyon days of our own preferred ideological movements.

This sounds like a nice way of saying that we’re screwed.

TRUMP GOING BIRTHER ON CRUZ MAY BACKFIRE:

Was Trump hinting that he might mount a legal challenge to Cruz’s eligibility to serve as president? No doubt Trump considers it an option. If Cruz continues to surge in the polls and then pulls off a few early primary victories, Trump might attempt it — if only to corner media coverage for a few days to slow the Texas senator’s momentum.

But the gambit could backfire on Trump. Republicans across the board would resent Trump bringing a damaging issue like this to the fore of the campaign. Even raising it now, if only to speculate on what a court challenge could mean to the Cruz campaign, is not likely to win him many additional friends in the Republican Party.

And it was just Trump going birther — Rand Paul and even former GOP presidential nominee John McCain (who should know better) are also playing that gambit against Cruz this week, as the primaries loom larger. On the other hand, as John Nolte has been writing on his Twitter feed, getting the birther stuff out of the way somewhat mutes the media using this as a wedge — or worse, the typical DNC-MSM late-October drive-by massacre — if Cruz winds winning the nomination. He can yawn and declare the issue old hat, in much the same way that Obama was able to shake off the birther talk as November of 2008 approached. Cruz won’t have a supine media to help him as Obama did of course, but he can also have fun with a Reagan-esque “well, there you go again” if Hillary herself raises the issue, and point out that this isn’t the first time her presidential campaign helped birth a birther attack.

CALIFORNIA DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY FOLLOWING GAS LEAK THAT HAS BEEN SPEWING NOXIOUS METHANE FUMES INTO THE AIR FOR MORE THAN TWO MONTHS.

The leak has been dubbed “the biggest environmental catastrophe since the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010; and for now, there is no way to stop it.”

But Jerry Brown has a (D) after his name, which is why the network nightly news programs haven’t been running this story in a continuous loop.

JOEL KOTKIN: Where American Families Are Moving.

Much is made, and rightfully so, about the future trends of America’s demographics, notably the rise of racial minorities and singles as a growing part of our population. Yet far less attention is paid to a factor that will also shape future decades: where families are most likely to settle.

However hip and cool San Francisco, Manhattan, Boston or coastal California may seem, they are not where families are moving.

In a new study by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, we found that the best cities for middle-class families tend to be located outside the largest metropolitan areas. This was based on such factors as housing affordability, migration, income growth, commute times, and middle-income jobs. Many of our best-rated cities tend to mid-sized. The three most highly rated were Des Moines, Iowa, Madison, Wis., and Albany, N.Y., all with populations of less than 1 million. Among our top 10 metropolitan areas for families, five are larger than this, but only two—the Washington, D.C. area and Minneapolis-St. Paul—are among the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas.

Our bottom 10 includes the media’s favorite two cities, New York and Los Angeles, also the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Three other large metropolitan areas rank in the bottom 10: Miami, Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., and Las Vegas. The hipster cities, in other words, are not so amenable to the new generation of young families.

Hipsterville ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s expensive as hell. And that’s by design:

America has always had its fancy neighborhoods, often associated also with racial or ethnic exclusion. But increasingly large parts of the country, and this is true in certain cities and suburbs, are evolving into what Dartmouth University’s William Fischel has called “exclusionary regions”—too expensive for middle-class families to access.

Fischel traces much of this development to regulatory policies that restrict housing supply. In 1970, for example, housing affordability in coastal California metropolitan areas was similar to the rest of the country, as measured by the median multiple (the median house price divided by the median household income). Today, due in part to a generation of strict growth controls, home prices in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles are now three or more times higher than in some other metropolitan areas.

This has enriched the rich, at the expense of working families. Democrats supported it. Why don’t Republicans make an issue of it?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Sanders: Clinton Lacks Courage To Stand Up To Wall Street.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t stood up to Wall Street, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) contended on Wednesday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning joe.”

“Do I think Hillary Clinton or many other senators have shown the courage that is necessary to stand up the Wall Street power? The answer is no,” Sanders in a response to a question about whether Clinton had provided cover for Wall Street.

“We need a president who now has the courage to stand up to the billionaire class and Wall Street,” he said during the appearance.

When co-host Joe Scarborough interjected a question about whether Clinton has the courage to stand up to the billionaire class, Sanders responded, “Well I’m running for president because I think not.”

Well, her son-in-law runs a hedge fund.

KATHY GRIFFIN’S NEW YEAR’S EVE CO-STAR TO INTERVIEW JERRY SEINFELD’S COMEDIANS IN CARS GETTING COFFEE CO-STAR TONIGHT: “On Thursday, CNN will host a town hall with President Obama as part of his ‘final-year push to make gun control part of his legacy.’ In addition to sitting down with liberal anchor Anderson Cooper, the network says Obama will ‘take questions from the audience,’” Michelle Malkin writes. “Uh-oh. Get out your best pruning shears and trowels. In an age of micromanaged partisan stagecraft and left-wing media enablers, there is no such thing as a spontaneous question. CNN has a long history of allowing political plants to flourish in its public forums.”

Related: CNN Hosts Shocked, SHOCKED, That Anyone Might Believe Obama Wants to Take Guns.

Gee, wait ’til they discover that Piers Morgan fella who used to work for CNN.

2015, THE YEAR THE PC CHICKENS CAME HOME TO ROOST: “The big new development in 2015 is that the left’s culture war came back to attack the very institutions that hatched it,” Robert Tracinski writes at the Federalist. “There are two centuries of chickens coming home to roost, because that’s how long ago academic intellectuals began toying with the idea that ideas don’t matter and everything is just a raw power struggle.”

A struggle that eventually always devours its own. “And that brings us back to a question I started the year with, Tracinski adds. “Have we reached Peak Leftism?”

We’ll, we’ll have one answer to that in November.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: I hate to break it to feminists, but ‘white male privilege’ is a myth.

How’s this for dark irony: throughout 2015, ‘white male privilege’ was the buzzphrase on every rad tweeter and liberal hack’s lips, as they fumed against the easy, pampered lives allegedly enjoyed by human beings who had the fortune to be born with a penis and pale skin. Railing against ‘white men’ and their cushy existences has become the stock-in-trade of many feminists.

Yet towards the end of 2015 it was revealed that there’s a social group in Britain more derided and less successful than pretty much every other social group. Guess who? Yep, young white men. Especially young working-class white men. A large sector of the group that the new identity-politics mob loves to ridicule for sailing through life unmolested and unchallenged is actually having a rough time.

Consider this: 18-year-old women are 35 percent more likely to attend university than 18-year-old men; and where 37 percent of black school-leavers go to university, only 28 percent of white school-leavers do. These stats were unveiled by UCAS in December, leading its chief executive to wonder if it isn’t time to initiate ‘outreach’ projects designed to get more white blokes into college.

Also in December, a YouGov analysis of 48 surveys of public attitudes found that young white men are viewed as ‘the worst ethnic, gender [and] age group’. They are ‘the most derided ethnic group in Britain’. YouGov’s number-crunchers confessed to being surprised by ‘the lousy reputation of young white men’, who are seen as drunken, promiscuous, prone to drug-taking, work-shy and impolite (even as other surveys reveal that today’s yoof actually drink less and do fewer drugs than earlier generations did).

What’s more, young women now earn more than young men: £1,111 a year more, to be precise. Between the ages of 22 and 29, women in general — covering all races — out-earn guys; by the time women hit their thirties, however, their pay falls below men’s. Those young, opinionated new media feminists who get handsome advances to write books spluttering about ‘white male privilege’ are far more privileged than many of the white males they splutter about — especially the ones who empty their bins or sweep their roads. It’s almost Orwellian in its topsy-turviness — the most well-connected, middle-class women denouncing the alleged privileges of some of the most derided people in society.

Indeed.

AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD SOUNDS AS UNBELIEVABLE AS THE NYT: North Korea Successfully Harvests Wheat In Show Of Growing Strength.  (Yes, it is the Onion.  Though at this point, what difference does it make?)

THE FLIGHT FROM REASON: Dilbert’s Creator on Trump’s Black Magic.

I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT: Will the FBI Revolt over Indicting Hillary?

RECALL HOW CARTER GOT HIS NOBEL PRIZE: You can thank Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for North Korea’s nukes.

THEY WERE AGAINST SPECIAL INTEREST MONEY BEFORE THEY WERE FOR IT: The oddest inversion at the New York Times.

AND HE WEARS AYN RAND T-SHIRTS: So, there’s that.  From Marine Corps to ‘Star Wars’: ‘Force Awakens’ actor Adam Driver savors success.

IT WORKED FOR ME: They got bored, and wrote, and learned to do stuff like cook and play the piano and build stuff. (Though mostly I was writing or reading, not watching TV, but that’s a mater of personal style.)  I am a lazy parent and proud of it.

THEY CAN’T HAVE THEIR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO: Bill Cosby has changed the rules of the game the Clintons used to play, and Trump knows it.

BETTER LATE THAN EVER: Congress Passes Obamacare Repeal and Planned Parenthood Defunding: Finally!

IT LOOKS LIKE SOME PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR A BACK DOOR:  We may need to get off the rock.

SHUT UP OR ELSE, THEY THREATENED: Death threats made against HS student who criticized college race protests.

WITHOUT DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Facebook’s anti-Israel double standard on hate speech.

MR. PRESIDENT, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF US: Presidents aren’t supposed to just “act” anytime Congress doesn’t agree with their desires.

A PHRASE BOOK FOR TOURISTS IN HELL: Common SJW Phrases Translated into English.

ROGER SIMON: Hillary’s Watergate Looms.

THE COLOGNE SEX ASSAULTS: A Failure By Germany’s Elite.

What is apparent is that, during and since, there has been a widespread failure on the part of German authorities and elite institutions. The police failed to protect its citizens, the press dawdled in holding anyone to account (and see, too, those unanswered questions just above), and at least one politician even now seems to struggle to address the issue without suggesting that young women must somehow accommodate the possibility of assaults and “confusion.”
This all carries echoes of the Rotherham scandal, in which British authorities had for years turned a blind eye to a child abuse ring among Pakistani men in the north of England, seemingly at least in part for fear of looking racist. By the time anyone put a stop to it, an estimated 1,400 kids had been abused, often horrifically. Like the German police and politicians in this case—albeit on a much longer and larger scale—the British authorities may have put the need to appear sensitive over the need to enforce core values and basic human rights.

Western liberal elites see themselves both as feminists and as advocates for refugees, immigrants, and minorities. (As a sign at a protest in Cologne on Wednesday, photographed by Reuters, read, “Gegen Sexismus, Gegen Rassismus”—or, “Against Sexism, Against Racism.”) As principles, all of those are fine sentiments. But in the real world, Europe has just admitted large numbers of young men from cultures with aggressively different attitudes towards women. Authorities in Germany and elsewhere, as well as politicians, feminists, and other elites, are going to have to figure out, fast, how to talk and act about the clash of Western absolutes (the ability of women, dressed as they wish, to walk wherever they wish without fear is not up for debate) with immigrant cultures, or many more problems may lie ahead.

The problem is that these “elites” — not just in Germany, but throughout the West — are, for the most part, horrible human beings who must cover up their horribleness with virtue-signalling. And virtue-signalling is inconsistent with constructive action.

UPDATE: How out of touch are they? This out of touch: Germany springs to action over hate speech against migrants.

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TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Substitute teacher ‘busted for sex with her children’s 14-year-old friend after his concerned parents found condoms and raunchy Instagram messages.’

DO ANDROID WAITRESSES DREAM OF ELECTRIC SOUVLAKI? N.Y. Restaurant Owners Plead for Mercy as Gov. Cuomo Tightens Screws on Wages.

Related! Protesters Aren’t Going to Like How McDonald’s is Reacting to Their Minimum Wage Concerns.

As William Gibson once said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And Gov. Cuomo is doing his part to make this November 2014 AP photo of robot waitresses serving customers in a China’s Zhejiang province restaurant a reality in New York as well.

UNREALITY ALL THE WAY DOWN: Shaun King tries to salvage Daily News piece based on fake Ammon Bundy tweet.

RIP, FLORENCE KING: “Can a non-believing misanthrope rest in peace? I hope so.”

To be fair, that sounds like it would be far too boring an afterlife for someone like her.

UPDATE: From 2012, the American Thinker’s salute to King: “While Miss King’s political thoughts will be missed, her disgust with a world gone mad will be more so.”

CLAY AALDERS: Blade-wielding bad-ass from history: Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming “Mad-Jack” Churchill. “Upon coming to a halt onshore, the soldier jumped from the craft, hucked a grenade at the Germans, then drew a full sword and ran screaming into the fray. That maniacally fierce soldier was 35-year-old Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill, and his stunts at this battle, known as Operation Archery, were hardly the most bizarre and semi-suicidal of his life. Over the course of World War II, ‘Mad Jack,’ as he came to be known, survived multiple explosions, escaped a couple of POW camps, captured more than 40 Germans at sword point in just one raid, and in 1940 scored the last recorded longbow kill in history.”

But today’s not entirely decadent: Woman Uses Knife To Fight Off 3 Home Invaders.

WELL, WE DID IN THE 1970s, BUT WE DIDN’T LIKE IT: Can Americans Accept a Tiny Engine in a Medium Car?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Should The Navy Go To A Big Fleet / Small Ships Doctrine?

THIS JUST IN. NBC’s Parks and Recreation Was Not Popular:

In other words, Parks and Rec was not a “popular” show as the word is commonly understood (“The Big Bang Theory” is “popular”; NCIS is “popular”), but it was “popular with younger, urban, professional, mostly liberal types.” Yuppies, in other words. Parks and Rec was a show beloved by a narrow slice of yuppies, and not really anyone else.

Hence the URL of Sonny Bunch’s article at the Washington Free Beacon: “you-live-in-a-bubble-you-precious-things-you.” But why was it beloved within its tiny leftwing urban bubble?

Leslie Knope, the tinpot dictator of Pawnee who thought it was her business to tell the people what size sodas they should drink and successfully turned a vacant lot into useless park land where a job-creating burger franchise could have gone. Parks and Rec (which I enjoyed quite a bit!) was always an ad for bigger and better government. The show’s final insult was turning hardcore libertarian Ron Swanson into an employee of the federal government, closing his run with a shot of his smiling face as he worked his new gig on federal land. Some might think this outcome absurd. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Sister.*

How politically correct did TV become over the past decade? It’s so bad that even Norman Lear, who arguably did more than anyone in Hollywood to drive the industry to the left in the 1970s, can now see it.

WE KINDA FIGURED THAT ABOUT YOU, JOY. The View’s Joy Behar: I’d Vote for a Rapist as Long as They’re Liberal.

Shades of Nina Burleigh.

BUILDING BRIDGES: Lesbians touch a penis for the first time in hilarious video.

HARD-HITTING DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE WAR ON TERROR: The Washington Post squees giddily over “The subversive feminism of two Obama staffers’ Secret Service codenames:”

Secret Service code names tend toward the masculine, if for no other reason than the majority of people who need them are of the dude persuasion. President Obama is “Renegade.” President George W. Bush is “Trailblazer.”  Even many women’s names, though typically far less aggressive, skew androgynous. For example, Michelle Obama is “Renaissance,” while Laura Bush is “Tempo.”

So the decision by two top Obama staffers to go by names that sound more like twee kittens than the latest SUV models was a departure from the norm. Nancy-Ann DeParle and Alyssa Mastromonaco, who served together as deputy chiefs of staff from 2011-2013, intentionally went for the ultra-feminine when selecting their monikers: Peaches and Popsicle, respectively.

As revealed in “Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing The Way America Works,” the just-out book by Time correspondent Jay Newton-Small, the duo eschewed their male predecessors’ presumably alpha-male-appropriate code names and picked ones that poked the patriarchy. The women “delighted in watching the mostly male, macho Secret Service agents announce the arrival of Popsicle and Peaches,” Newton-Small writes.

Related: “SecNav Bans Marine Job Titles With Term ‘Man’ to Ensure Gender Neutrality.”

Meanwhile, as the White House continues to fight hard on the the language front, ISIS’ “jihadi technical college” in Raqqa is teaching eager students how to build surface-to-air missiles.

Don’t worry — I’m sure the correct gender-neutral pronouns will protect us.

NEW YOU CAN USE: How You Pronounce ‘Muslim’ Says A Lot About Your Politics:

Those on the Left pronounce these two words the way a native Arabic speaker would, as a way of signaling their sympathy for the American-Muslim population. They are indicating they identify with this population and they have their backs.

In other words, they aren’t like those nasty, Muslim-hating Republicans. They understand Islam and respect it, and they know it has nothing to do with jihad and terrorism. This pronunciation is code for “I’m not Islamaphobic.” The Left is making their opinions and politics known with the simple shift in pronunciation of these two key words.

So leftwing virtue-signaling, to coin a phrase. But then, the left has been in this habit long before BHO began uttering words like Pock-eeee-staaaahhhhn; recall how the earlier, funnier Saturday Night Live used to mock the media for endlessly drawing out words like Nicaragggggggggua and Sandooooooneeeeeeesta back in the late 1980s:

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: The Days of human driving are numbered as big bucks and partnerships flow in a race for the self driving car.

NEW BLACK PANTHERS WITH GUNS, LOTS OF THEM: “President Obama claimed he was very concerned about the wrong people having guns,” Christian Adams writes. “He wasn’t always so concerned about the wrong people having guns.”

Of course, that all depends on your definition of “the wrong people.”

THE REAL REASON AMERICANS OPPOSE GUN CONTROL: Obama, Pelosi, Boxer, and the rest have no right to strip us of our last line of defense from their incompetence.

SENIOR WRITER FOR NEWSWEEK SMEARS TED CRUZ AS HITLER, IOWA VOTERS AS NAZIS:

When called on his Godwin’s Law violation, Twitchy notes that Newsweek’s Alexander Nazaryan then deleted his tweet, of course. But I’m not sure why Nazaryan chose that particular angle, or got upset when at Twitter users questioning it, considering the magazine that employs him gave their blessings to socialism on a nationalistic scale in 2009…

At NewsBusters, Tim Graham notes that “yesterday, Nazaryan also tweeted ‘Ted Cruz is an atrocity of a human being,’” adding that “before joining Newsweek the monthly, Nazaryan was an editorial-page staffer at the New York Daily News, the NRA-are-terrorists paper, so the acorn didn’t fall far from the tree.”

SPEAKING OF NEWT, “Obama needs a Gingrich,” Kevin D. Williamson writes, in much the same way that the pro-Clinton media demonized Newt on his behalf in the mid-1990s:

If you are wondering why the president is, at the eleventh hour, using probably illegal executive fiats to start a national fight over gun control — a fight that will do nothing to reduce ordinary crime, terrorism, or mass shootings — it’s because he’s still looking for his Gingrich, and he believes that the NRA may be it. That is a grave and uncharacteristic political miscalculation for a man whose only documentable talent is for political calculation, and one suspects that his administration and his party will suffer for it between now and November.

Read the whole thing.

NEWT GINGRICH: “We are at the end of the 70 year strategy of attempting to contain the spread of nuclear weapons:”

The sobering reality is that we are at the end of the 70 year strategy of attempting to contain the spread of nuclear weapons and at the beginning of a dangerous new era of coping with the threat of nuclear weapons. The gap between the new dangers and the old thinking can be seen in the totally inadequate design of the Department of Homeland Security. As originally proposed in the Hart-Rudman Commission’s work in 2000 this department should be sized to handle simultaneous nuclear events in three different cities. Today, 15 years later, it could not adequately handle one nuclear event. Yet the spread of nuclear capability to North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere virtually guarantees weapons could be used in the near future. We now have to develop a two prong strategy which both focuses diplomatically on minimizing their spread and the danger of their use and focuses national security and homeland security assets on surviving nuclear events if diplomacy fails.

Read the whole thing.

“MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION EVER” IS ALSO THE MOST SUED FOR FOIA GAMES: An analysis of court records between 2001 and 2015 by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that a record number of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits were filed against federal agencies during 2015. The combined total of 421 in 2014 and 498 in 2015 represents a 54 percent increase over the two-year total for 2009 and 2010. Such suits are typically only filed after months of delays, dickering, threats and negotiations between federal officials and requesters seeking government documents the FOIA says are owned by taxpayers.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why half of the life you experience is over by age 7. I remember in law school, the first three weeks of my first year seemed subjectively about as long as the rest of the three years.

But as for age, I think that time is actually going faster every year — probably because of cosmic inflation — but you don’t notice that until you’re older because it takes a while to have enough years of experience to have perspective. I eagerly await my vindication by physicists.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Should The Navy Go To A Big Fleet / Small Ships Doctrine?

NEW YORK TIMES WHITEWASHES TERROR-SUPPORTERS AS ‘HIPSTER PALESTINIANS:’ Haifa Arab who publicly called for Israel’s destruction complains Times misrepresented him as a ‘cool yay hipster.’

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Panama and Mexico Help Potential Terrorists Reach the U.S. Border.

SOLAR STILL NOT COMPETITIVE WITHOUT SUBSIDIES:

Solar power installer SolarCity, the country’s largest provider of rooftop panels, has exited the Nevada market in the wake of the state’s rollback of the net metering fees paid to residential solar owners. The departure marks an escalation in the war over net metering that is roiling the industry.

One of the fastest-growing markets for residential solar, Nevada is the first state to drastically revise its policies on net metering—wherein owners of residential solar arrays are compensated for the power they send onto the utility power grid, usually at retail rates. All but a handful of states have instituted net metering. Claiming that these fees represent an unfair transfer of costs to the utilities and non-solar customers, utilities have mounted a well-funded campaign to reduce or eliminate the payments. The Nevada Public Utilities Commission concurred, calling on utilities to cut the compensation for solar providers from retail to wholesale rates.

Not surprisingly, the solar industry disagrees. Calling the net metering decision “unethical, unprecedented, and possibly unlawful,” SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive predicted that it will “destroy the rooftop solar industry in one of the states with the most sunshine.”

Seems fair to me. You’re selling power at wholesale here, not a retail. Why should you get the retail price, except as a subsidy?

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Paraplegic Man Trains for the Cyborg Olympics.

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GIVING THAT WARMING’S BEEN “PAUSED” FOR NEARLY 20 YEARS, CAN THIS REALLY BE DUE TO “CLIMATE CHANGE?” U.S. Becomes More Vulnerable to Tropical Diseases Like Zika. “Until May, Zika had never touched this hemisphere except on Easter Island, 2,200 miles off the Chilean coast. Now it circulates in 14 Latin American or Caribbean countries and Puerto Rico.”

Bring back DDT.

MELISSA BRAUNSTEIN: ‘Married At First Sight’ Explains Why Americans Can’t Commit: The millennial reality show participants who agree to arranged marriages are as burned by their parents’ divorces as everyone else. The post-1970 divorce explosion left plenty of damage in its wake.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Should The Navy Go To A Big Fleet / Small Ships Doctrine?

I REMEMBER WHEN “NO GO AREAS” WERE JUST A PARANOID RIGHT-WING FANTASY: Teenage victim of Cologne ‘African and Arab’ sex mob reveals how she and her friends were surrounded by 30 men and groped as officials admit the city is a ‘no-go’ area for women.

THE OBAMA ERA IN ONE SENTENCE: “We have a Democrat who is allowed by the press to fail quietly, discreetly, and off center stage.”

GERMAN WOMEN, WELCOME TO SHARIA: Germany shocked by Cologne New Year (Muslim) gang assaults on women.

The mayor of Cologne has summoned police for crisis talks after about 80 women reported sexual assaults and muggings by men on New Year’s Eve.

The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.

City police chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely new dimension of crime”. The men were of Arab or North African appearance, he said.

Women were also targeted in Hamburg. . . .

What is particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organised. Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.

Police in Hamburg are now reporting similar incidents on New Year’s Eve in the party area of St Pauli. One politician says this is just the tip of the iceberg.

And there are real concerns about what will happen in February when the drunken street-parties of carnival season kick off.

And this gem from the New York Slimes Times:

Calls came from the Bavarian Christian Social Union on Tuesday to deport any asylum-seekers found to be among the perpetrators in Cologne, a sentiment echoed by the left-leaning Süddeutsche-Zeitung in a commentary that noted that German law provides for such action.

Yet the commentary, by Heribert Prantl, also warned about the risks of the debate’s taking on a poisonous tone that would only make integration of the many young refugees and immigrants legitimately in the country that much more difficult.

“The young men who come to Germany must begin working as quickly as possible,” he wrote. “Work socializes. It is about our national peace, which is threatened by the excesses in Cologne and the excesses in the Internet.”

Yeah, I’m sure that’s it: Give these men a job–and/or rich taxpayer-funded benefits–and all of this violence and sexism will magically disappear. I mean, it’s not like Islam considers women to be objects or anything. And a sovereign nation can’t deny entry to non-citizens because of such dangerous beliefs or kick them out; that would be a violation of their “human rights.” 

IN THE MAIL: From John Ringo, Strands of Sorrow (Black Tide Rising)

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 972.

ROGER KIMBALL: Epiphany: What was Cruz or Rubio is Now Cruz or Trump.

DON SURBER: FBI Headed For A Showdown Over Hillary. Money quote, from Joseph DiGenova: “I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an attorney general. It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable.” Well, stay tuned.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Libertarian public-interest lawyer Clint Bolick nominated to Arizona Supreme Court.

WISCONSIN’S SECRET WAR: Bad Santa: John Doe prosecutor delivers letters to the people he spied on.

He walked into work Tuesday morning to find he had received an “unbelievable” notice.

Opening the manila envelope, the Wisconsin conservative learned that government agents had secretly seized his emails – professional and personal – sent and received over a two-year period beginning Jan. 1, 2009.

He found out he had, without his knowledge, been dragged into Wisconsin’s notorious John Doe investigation, one of perhaps dozens of individuals who in recent days have received similar notices from former John Doe special prosecutor Francis D. Schmitz.

Some, like the conservative who spoke to Wisconsin Watchdog on Tuesday, had no idea they had been under surveillance in a massive, politically driven spy operation.

“Just unbelievable,” said the conservative, who asked not to be identified. He remains active in Wisconsin politics. “It feels like a different country. It feels like something that shouldn’t be done in the United States of America.”

It’s increasingly the Democrats’ dream, though.

IT’S A POOR REFLECTION ON THE TAX SYSTEM THAT IT LENDS ITSELF TO THIS: How I Fell Face First Into An Epic IRS Scam.

Related: Why We Fear The IRS:

What’s interesting about this scam is that it’s a departure from classic confidence schemes. Think about something like the Nigerian e-mail scams, and how they draw their victims in: greed for a lucrative finder’s fee in exchange for doing something that sounds maybe a little bit shady, but maybe sort of noble too. The victim is then strung along by playing to the greed, and kept from talking to others who might point out the scam by because they think they are complicit in something legally questionable.

The IRS scam, on the other hand, works entirely by fear. It takes people who haven’t done anything wrong, and makes them afraid that they have. That’s a pretty hefty achievement. Imagine trying to extort money from someone by, say, claiming that they had murdered someone. You might elicit laughter, or bewilderment, but you’d rarely elicit much cash.

Which raises the obvious question: How did we get into a situation where it’s so easy for people to believe that the IRS is about to arrest them for a crime they weren’t even aware of having committed?

You guessed it: The IRS is incredibly powerful, and the tax code is incredibly opaque.

It’s a scam in itself.

ONLY 13 PERCENT OF VA’S TOP 300 HOSPITAL EXECS ARE VETERANS: Wait a minute! The Veterans Preference Act became law in 1944 and ever since then returning veterans are supposed to have a leg up for good government jobs, right? So why are there so few veterans running the key facilities of the agency whose sole reason for being is caring for veterans?

Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group analyzed the bios and talked to highly educated, skilled veterans who were repeatedly rejected by VA. How can this be? I don’t know, maybe the first priority of the career bureaucrats running VA is protecting themselves rather caring for veterans???

YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO THE STATE: Federal government tells parents they are inferior.

In a draft policy statement jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Education, federal bureaucrats have — on their own initiative — subordinated parents to a secondary role in the rearing of their children. While the draft is neither finalized nor binding (yet), it serves as a clear shot across the bow of every freedom-loving parent who naively believes that his parenting principles, priorities and practices will be protected and respected by government.

The entire purpose of the 18-page statement is to explain, promote and bureaucratically implement what the departments call “family engagement.” This term sounds like something every good parent would inherently want, but here’s how the government defines it: “the systematic inclusion of families as partners in children’s development, learning and wellness.”

That’s right: the government is going to include you, the parent, as a partner in rearing your child. Are we supposed to thank it for this privilege?

Thank, tar-and-feather, it’s up to you.

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QUESTION FOR HILLARY, AND HER ANSWER: “Somebody’s lying. Who is it?” Interview with Hillary Clinton About Benghazi.

JONATHAN TOBIN: Hey, why does nobody want to talk about how every place that has Muslim immigration experiences an explosion of rape? “Western journalists may have reported the epidemic of rape that took place during mass protests in Cairo’s Tahir Square as Egypt lurched from the Arab Spring to Muslim Brotherhood tyranny and now to the return of a military government. That was especially true since some of their own, including a prominent CBS correspondent, were among the victims. What happens in Egypt can be dismissed as exotica even if it is horrifying. But when Western societies find themselves dealing with similar instances of sexual assault on this scale, it is time to realize that integrating large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East can bring it with problems that are not merely a function of poverty, prejudice or a lack of a welcoming spirit on the part of the host countries.”

OUCH: AP fact check: Obama gun-control actions wouldn’t have stopped any mass shooting.

DAVID SOLWAY ON ISLAMIC SCHOOL PROJECTS:

What we are observing are the effects of a macropolitical strategy, reinforced not only by curricular structures and testing practices, but by the ostensibly innocent maneuvers that feature on the mirco-tier of educational procedures. The nexus between sectarian politics and partisan education is now firmly entrenched in the American cultural mindscape, and we can see how this plays out on the level of primary and high school “learning projects.” We have read accounts of elementary and high school students pledging allegiance in Arabic, observing Muslim holy days, being drilled in Islamic vocabulary, prayers and culture, being taught the five pillars of Islam and world history from an Islamic perspective, reciting the Shahada (“There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah”) and being taken on field trips to mosques (but not to churches, synagogues or Hindu temples).

A recent controversy illustrating this tendency involves high school students in Blaine, Minnesota, instructed to perform a song in their Christmas concert that includes the Arabic phrase Allahu Akbar, which CBS considerately explains in its report on the event “means God is Great.” No, not quite. As Carol Brown comments in American Thinker, it means “Allah is supreme. As in Islamic supremacy.” It is also the cry uttered by legions of jihadists as they commit their acts of terror, slaughtering innocents at will. But students, to the detriment of all of us, are not informed about the implications of the phrase.

Read the whole thing.

ANGELO CODEVILLA: Romancing the Sunni: A US policy tragedy in three acts; Act I.

Here’s Act II.

And here’s Act III.

AUSTIN BAY: ISIL’s Ministry of Rape and Enslavement: Take note alienated young Muslim men who can’t get chicks: for victorious warriors, slaves are Caliph-approved rewards.

RANDY BARNETT: The Significance Of Lysander Spooner. “Spooner’s approach to constitutional interpretation, construction, and legitimacy is as fresh today as it was in 1845. Indeed, it is more sophisticated and persuasive than the theorizing of most contemporary legal academics.”

CBS HYPES EARTH’S ‘CHRONIC FEVER’ IN EXTREME WEATHER SEGMENT: “Even when NASA states a weather pattern has not been caused by climate change, the media still can’t help bringing it up.”

Although perhaps things are getting worse, if CBS is saying that the earth has a “fever.”* I can remember when CBS said it merely had a cold:

* Does it need more cowbell? No, that’s NBC’s shtick.

HILLARY CLINTON WILL NOT SAY WHAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A DEMOCRAT AND A SOCIALIST IS, when asked by Chris Matthews.

She knows — of course she knows — but the truth would be far too uncomfortable for her to admit.

RICHARD POSNER: How To Fix Law School.

The first year of law school, usually so different from the student’s previous educational experiences, is bound to make a lasting, indeed a lifelong, impression.The first-year program at most law schools is demanding, though less than it used to be; current tuition levels tend to induce law schools to treat students more as customers than as plebes. I felt changed after my first year (1959–1960) as a student at the Harvard Law School—I felt that I had become more intelligent.The basic training was in learning how to extract holdings from judicial opinions in common law fields and how to apply those holdings to novel factual situations—in other words how to determine the scope and meaning of a legal doctrine.The courses were very difficult because the legal vocabulary was unfamiliar; the professors asked incessant, difficult questions, usually cold calling; the casebooks had very little explanatory material; and we were told not to waste our time reading secondary materials—and most of us were docile and so obeyed.That first year of Harvard Law School was active learning at its best.

We learned to be careful and imaginative readers; we learned that American law is malleable and relatedly that notions of public policy, and sheer common sense, were legitimate and important considerations in interpreting and applying legal doctrines.There were no references to systematic bodies of thought outside law, however, and statutes were rarely encountered and the Constitution never.The canvas broadened in the second and third years. But the courses in those years had much less impact on me, in part because the school tended to stack its best teachers in the first year, in part because a certain freshness had worn off, and in part because I devoted most of my time in my second and third years to the law review, which I found more interesting than most of the second- and third-year courses. But as I think back on those years I realize that another factor was that the common law really is the most commonsensical, intelligible, politically neutral body of American law, compared to which most of constitutional law, and most statutory law, are a muddle.

True.