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The Hill has an important warning for the GOP. The next election cycle will find many more Republicans than Dems defending seats. A list of 10 most vulnerable, on both sides, is provided.

Senate Republicans will have to work hard to retain their recently won majority as they face a tough 2016 electoral map.

They have 24 seats up compared to Democrats’ 10, including seven in states President Obama carried twice. Democrats won’t have any red-state senators facing reelection and could be buoyed by a favorable presidential-year electorate.

Republicans do have some margin for error after their sweeping 2014 win netted them nine seats for a 54-seat Senate majority. Democrats won’t have it easy either, with Senate Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) facing a strong challenge.

But Democrats are cautiously optimistic they can win back control just two years after losing it — and Republicans admit that they have a fight on their hands.

“It’ll be tough but it’s definitely not impossible. We only need four seats if we win the White House and we start off with four very vulnerable Republicans,” said one national Democratic strategist.

“There are just some hardcore blue presidential states,” said a national Republican strategist.

Here are 10 senators in danger of losing in 2016. …

Of course, we have to depend on the Supreme Court to rein in the lawless president. Victor Davis Hanson writes on the one man revolution.

Until now there were two types of peaceful American change. One was a president, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, working with Congress to alter American life from the top down by passing a new agenda. The other was popular-reform pressure, as happened in the 1890s or 1960s, to change public opinion and force government to make new laws or change existing ones.

Barack Obama has introduced a quite different, third sort of revolution. He seeks to enact change that both the majority of Americans and their representatives oppose. And he tries to do it by bypassing Congress through executive orders and presidential memoranda of dubious legality.

Take so-called climate change. Even when Obama enjoyed a Democrat-controlled Congress, he could not ram through unpopular cap-and-trade legislation. Now he promises to reduce carbon emissions through executive orders. He just signed a climate-change “accord” with China, bypassing the U.S. Senate, which by law must approve treaties with foreign powers.

Polls show that a majority of Americans oppose amnesties and want immigration laws enforced. The 2014 midterm elections were a reminder of those realities. No matter. Obama just did what for six years he warned was illegal: bypass immigration law and grant millions exemptions from enforcement through what he once called “a pen and a phone.” …

USA Today OpEd by Cornell law prof William Jacobson highlights three areas of presidential lawlessness.

… Three areas of the Obama administration going it alone stand out: Immigration, Obamacare and the environment. Immigration is perhaps the most dramatic example.

Legalizing and eventually providing a path to citizenship for the estimated 10-12 million illegal immigrants is a top administration priority. But that priority hit a roadblock in the form of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and soon, Senate. Out of frustration, Obama has taken unilateral action to evade the immigration laws.

Prior to 2014, the administration already had imposed non-repatriation policies at the border, and established the “mini-dream” policy, precluding deportation of people who were brought to the country illegally as minors and met certain other criteria. These policies, however, only applied to a relatively small portion of the total illegal immigrant population. So more was needed, and that “more” would not be coming from Congress.

Accordingly, soon after the 2014 midterm elections, Obama announced executive action to extend legalization for up to 5 million more immigrants, focusing on those who were in the country illegally but whose children were U.S. citizens by virtue of their birth here. Nearly two dozen times in the past Obama had stated publicly that he could not constitutionally undertake such actions, but he did it anyway. …

For the most part, the media and the academy have been cheer leaders for the president as law breaker. Prof Jacobson, above, is an example of one who has not been corrupted. And now comes Laurence Tribe, once a law professor of the president, who claims in a WSJ OpEd the EPA is using unconstitutional edicts to control coal used in electric generating plants.

As a law professor, I taught the nation’s first environmental law class 45 years ago. As a lawyer, I have supported countless environmental causes. And as a father and grandfather, I want to leave the Earth in better shape than when I arrived.

Nonetheless, I recently filed comments with the Environmental Protection Agency urging the agency to withdraw its Clean Power Plan, a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means.

Although my comments opposing the EPA’s proposal were joined by a major coal producer, they reflect my professional conclusions as an independent legal scholar. I say only what I believe, whether I do so pro bono, or in this case having been retained by others. After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority.

The Clean Power Plan would set a carbon dioxide emission target for every state, and the EPA would command each state, within roughly a year, to come up with a package of laws to meet that target. If the agency approves the package, the state would then have to impose those laws on electric utilities and the public. …

Byron York outlines what the GOP congress could do to stop unilateral presidential actions. It’s not enough. We need the Supreme Court to issue forceful unambiguous decisions.

Give Barack Obama credit for keeping his promise. “This is going to be a year of action,” the president pledged last January. And indeed, with a series of unilateral executive actions in the last few months of the year, he made it so.

Now, as a new year arrives, the job for the new Republican majority on Capitol Hill is to keep Obama in check as he strives to bypass lawmakers and make 2015 another year of (unilateral) action.

Obama’s original promise was entirely understandable. He entered 2013 fresh from a solid re-election victory, determined to score legislative wins on gun control, immigration, spending, and other knotty issues. It all ended in disappointment. As 2014 dawned, Obama promised — to Republicans, threatened — to take a new path.

He did, by using executive fiat to confer quasi-legal status on millions of illegal immigrants, to reshape relations with Cuba, and to make a climate deal with China, among other actions. As 2015 arrives, Obama and his Democratic supporters are drawing one key lesson from the experience: take executive action, make it broad and far-reaching, and do it sooner rather than later. …

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American Thinker posts on Sarah Palin’s year of achievement. Beyond her success backing candidates in the 2014 election, there are her impressive foreign policy chops.

… Governor Palin endorsed 22 candidates for various offices during the midterm finals, including senators, governors, lieutenant governors, congressmen, and attorneys general.  Of those so endorsed, an incredible 20 were elected – contrasted with, for example, Hillary Clinton’s record of 8 wins out 24 endorsed candidates. …

… After Russian president Putin invaded the Ukraine and annexed the Crimea, video surfaced of Governor Palin’s 2008 speech where she predicted exactly that occurrence should then presidential candidate Barack Obama be elected.  Palin sounded a deserved note of triumphalism in March:

“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” Palin posted on Facebook, saying she said “told-ya-so” in the case of her “accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine.”

“Here’s what this ‘stupid’ ‘insipid woman’ predicted back in 2008,” Palin said.  “After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.” …

John Fund and Hans Van Spakovsky write on the president and attorney general who inflame race relations.

Attorney General Eric Holder insisted to MSNBC earlier this month that “we are in a better place than we were before” in race relations since Barack Obama was elected president.

The president doubled down in an interview with NPR last week. Asked if race relations were worse since he took office, he said, “No, I actually think that it’s probably in its day-to-day interactions less racially divided.”

But that’s not what the American people see. A PewResearchCenter poll found that only 40% of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling race relations. Black approval is down to 57%, while approval among whites is down to 33%.

More young people under age 30, the age group who were most enthusiastic about electing the nation’s first African-American president, now disapprove of his performance on racial issues than approve. And Eric Holder has one of the lowest approval ratings of any public official.

Law-enforcement officials are appalled at the way the Obama administration exploited tragedies in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City to appeal to its political base. David Clarke, a Democrat who is the African-American sheriff of Milwaukee, doesn’t mince his words.

“The thing that disappoints me the most is some very powerful people in this country — the president of the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York — have created a pathway that contributes to an unjustifiable hatred of law enforcement officers across the country,” he told WMAL radio in Washington, DC. “They trashed an entire profession with a broad brush because it was politically expedient for them to do so.” …

Jonathan Tobin posts on the increased use of executive memoranda. 

When conservatives protested President Obama’s attempt to go around the Constitution and rule by executive orders rather than with the consent of Congress, his defenders had a ready answer. While they insisted that Obama’s fiat granting amnesty to five million illegal immigrants did not exceed his authority, they also countered by saying that the president had actually issued far fewer such executive orders than that of President Bush. But, as USA Today noted last week, focusing only on executive orders while ignoring the far more numerous executive memoranda issued by this administration that have the same effect as law, the press and the public have vastly underestimated the extent of how far he has stretched the boundaries of executive power. If anything, this president’s effort to create a one-man government may have gone farther than we thought.

As of last week, Obama had issued 198 executive memoranda alongside 195 executive orders. That’s 33 percent more than Bush issued in his full eight years in office and 45 percent more than Bill Clinton. That blows a huge hole in the defense of Obama’s use of executive orders. Seen in this light, rather, as he and his media cheering section have contended, Obama has far exceeded the resort to unilateral measures of not only his immediate predecessor, but every one before that as well. …

Jennifer Rubin says politicians who take sides against police will pay a price.

… Pols who dabble in anti-police invective and join the mantra that “the system is rigged against you” find themselves exacerbating frayed nerves, increasing polarization and losing control of their own message. It might be politically appealing to throw red-meat rhetoric to one’s base and play to the fawning liberal punditocracy, but it comes at a price. As William Galston put it, when de Blasio brought up his son, “If he had been a private citizen, his candor would have been beyond reproach. But the question is not only whether what Mr. de Blasio said is true, but also whether it was appropriate for him to say it. As mayor of the country’s largest and most complex city, he has a responsibility to weigh the impact of his words on all New Yorkers, not just those who agree with him.”

That admonition — to think first and figure out how to calm, not increase, tensions — would seem like fundamental common sense, but the desire to play to the crowd or advance an agenda that may or may not fit the facts is too tempting for many pols. And it is not just Democrats who have behaved badly. …

And even the NY Times can’t save Bill De Blasio says Jonathan Tobin. 

It’s been an awful week for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The man who was elected in 2013 on a platform of cop bashing has faced the fury of the police and the public after the murder of two members of the force exposed the ugly face of the post-Ferguson/Eric Garner protests. Like most politicians backed into a corner, de Blasio has lashed out at the media while proving unable to either make peace with the cops or to control his leftist allies who continue to conduct anti-police demonstrations. But de Blasio is not completely without friends. He still has the New York Times, which weighed in today with an embarrassing piece of flummery intended to reassure New Yorkers that everything was OK because the mayor was “calm.” If that’s the best they can do, de Blasio may be in even more trouble than his critics thought.

The conceit of the piece is that de Blasio’s personal approach to the crisis that has threatened to tear the city apart while the rank and file of the NYPD are openly displaying their contempt and anger at the mayor is so deft that he is overcoming all obstacles. But even a casual reader can tell that the only people saying such things are close de Blasio allies whose comments are then slavishly taken down and published by the Times. …

Now for the important stuff. According to Calaveras Enterprise, beer can improve your thinking ability. 

There is newfound reason to indulge in a pint or two of your favorite beer, and it’s not just to catch up and share a few laughs with friends. New research has shown that a chemical compound in beer may be able to improve cognitive function. The beverage once thought to obliterate brain cells when consumed in abundance may actually have the opposite effect and boost brain power.

No one should run out and start imbibing just yet, however. The study that ran in Behavioral Brain Research in October 2014 was preliminary and only conducted on lab mice. During the study, scientists discovered that xanthohumol, a type of flavonoid found in beer, seemed to improve brain function in the young mice given xanthohumol doses. The cognitive flexibility of the mice was tested with a specially designed maze, and younger mice showed signs of intellectual improvement. Older mice showed no improvements. Researchers believe xanthohumol and other flavonoids, such as those found in red wine, blueberries and dark chocolate, may play a role in helping a person form memories. …

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Scott Johnson with a meditation on the ungrounded Peggy Noonan.

Peggy Noonan joined the crowd that turned on George W. Bush in what I thought was (in Noonan’s case) a grossly unfair manner in 2008. I wrote critically about one of Noonan’s weekly Wall Street Journal columns in which she identified with the public disapproval of Bush that April in “Season of the witch.”

Having turned on George W. Bush, Noonan moved on to support the election of Barack Obama later that year. Noonan all but endorsed Obama in her 2008 column “Obama and the runaway train.” The anti-Bush and pro-Obama columns fit neatly together. She wrote of Obama just before the election:

“He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.”

In a sense, Obama delivered, but in another sense Noonan got everything wrong. Obama has changed the direction and tone of American foreign policy, alright, yet the change hasn’t yielded the results Noonan anticipated.

Noonan has now turned on Obama. …

Same treatment for another who should have known better. Scott Johnson on David Brooks.

… But what are we to make of Brooks? In his day job, he is one of the regular columnists accorded prime journalistic real estate on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Brooks came to the Times from a conservative milieu. Life at the Times has domesticated him. Gabriel Sherman recounts in his 2009 NewRepublic piece on Brooks:

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Brooks’s 2006 column is accessible online here; P.J Gladnick excerpts the highlights of Sherman’s 2009 New Republic article here. Sherman documents Brooks’s continuing infatuation with Obama as of 2009. Sherman quotes Brooks conceding his shift on the political spectrum and Obama’s assessment of himself as “a Burkean,” which Brooks took at face value. And they say journalists are cynics.

Now those of us who aren’t as smart as Brooks had no problem pegging Obama’s place on the political spectrum, and it wasn’t a terribly difficult task. We didn’t find him to be “a Burkean.” We thought he was a left-wing ideologue who would do great damage to the United States at home and around the world, and I believe he has done so. Steve says that Brooks has gone silent on Obama, but, if so, he needs to open up. The man is a political columnist, after all, not a spiritual adviser. …

Matthew Continetti profiles film maker John Milius.

… there may be no better moment than now to reflect on the life and work of John Milius, the Romantic genius whose influence spans the films he wrote, the films he directed, and the films such as American Graffiti (1973) and The Big Lebowski  (1998) whose characters he inspired. The documentary Milius (2013) is available for free on Amazon Prime. It is the best place to start for someone eager to learn more about Hollywood’s most notorious conservative, a natural storyteller attracted to, as his daughter puts it, “the extreme man who knows no fear.” 

Born in 1944 to a Jewish family in St. Louis, Milius’ childhood heroes were Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and Chuck Yeager. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven years old. Milius was a troublemaker, a raconteur, a tall and hefty teenager who surfed and shot and dreamed of a military career. But he couldn’t enlist: asthma. “It was totally demoralizing,” he once said.

Milius’ inability to fight in Vietnam led to a profound crisis of identity. What to do? One day he wandered into a retrospective of the films of Akira Kurosawa. He found his calling somewhere in the images of armored samurai enforcing ancient codes of honor. He enrolled in the film school at the University of Southern California. It was, he said, “the West Point of Hollywood.”

Milius was among the early graduates of film programs at USC (George Lucas), UCLA (Francis Ford Coppola), and NYU (Martin Scorsese) who established the contemporary movie experience. They were joined early on by Steven Spielberg, who had been rejected from USC twice but won a job at Universal television nonetheless. The group socialized, promoted, and collaborated with each other.

Milius was known for his writing ability, his girth, his bravado, his hijinks, his politics. He was skeptical of government and defended the Second Amendment and supported the war in Vietnam. He mocked the counterculture that was on its way to becoming the dominant culture. The hero of the student revolutionaries was Ché Guevara. Milius’ was Theodore Roosevelt.

These were not the dominant opinions in Hollywood. Hippies often wore buttons emblazoned with peace signs and the slogan, “Nirvana Now.” Milius changed the peace sign into the silhouette of a B-52 and replaced the slogan with “Apocalypse Now.” …

Kevin Williamson with another example of an out-of-control government. This time NSA employees who spy on significant others. One commenter on Instapundit says; “The government is in open rebellion against its people.” 

A private investigator once explained to me why he always turned down husband-and-wife cases: If your marriage has gone so sour that the best course of action you can think of is hiring a guy to spy on your spouse, then you don’t need an investigator — you need a minister, a therapist, or a good divorce lawyer. That has always seemed eminently sensible to me.

So how screwed up does your relationship have to be that getting the NSA involved sounds like a good idea?

Thanks to a Christmas Eve document dump, we learn that agents of the National Security Agency, the spookiest spooks in all our vast spookocracy, are a bunch of stalkers, using the effectively boundless surveillance powers of their organization to spy on husbands and wives, overseas girlfriends, and sundry romantic partners. And that’s our government at work: While the guys who are supposed to be keeping an eye on Gordon Gekko are keeping their eyes on marathon porn sessions instead, the guys who are supposed to be putting a hurt on Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad are trying to figure out whether their girlfriends are browsing Tinder. One curious analyst targeted the numbers in her husband’s telephone directory. Another spied on his wife, who was stationed overseas.

As usual, basically nothing happened to the wrongdoers — working for the government means facing no real consequences for real crimes. …

Here’s one bit of snooping we’ll all like. WaPo reports DNA testing solves a messy problem. 

Joe Gillmer had a problem. A big, stinky, sole-troubling problem plaguing Midtown Alexandria Station condos, where he serves as board vice president.

How to put this gently? Dog, er, waste in the vestibule, in the elevator (yes, really), and — this particularly incensed Gillmer — in the garage beside handicapped parking, making life difficult for residents with physical challenges.

“What were we going to do?” Gillmer says. “Put up 13 cameras for $100,000 with the slim chance of catching the guy?”

Instead, the condo association hired a service called PooPrints to match evidence from the crime scene to registered DNA taken from all condo dogs. 

Yes, yes, Gillmer has heard all the jokes: “CSI: Manure,” you name it. “I got a lot of criticism,” he recalls. “They called me the ‘Czar of Poop.’ ” …

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Roger Simon, who was on the left and then found the error of his ways, posts on where he has experienced the most racism.

… The left is vastly more racist than the right.  It’s not even close.  Since I was publicly identified with the right, roughly from when I started blogging in 2003 (although it was actually several years earlier in private), I have personally witnessed not a single incident of racism from anyone who could be considered a right winger and heard only one racial slur — and that was from a Frenchman.   In the seven years I was CEO of PJ Media, I came to know or meet literally dozens of people who identified with the Tea Party.  I did not hear one word of  anything close to racism from any of them even once.  Not one, ever.  This despite their being accused of racism constantly.

The left, on the other hand, is filled with racism of all sorts, much, but not all, of it projected.  I used to hear racist comments all the time during the seventies and eighties when almost all my friends were leftist or liberals.  During that time black racism was pretty much continuously on the rise, aided and abetted by whites.

It had been going on for a while.  I first encountered  black racism from the person of none other than Julian Bond (later the president of the NAACP), who treated me, a civil rights worker involved in voter registration, in a racist, anti-white manner in the SNCC offices in Atlanta in 1966.  Stokely Carmichael treated me that way also. That was at the beginning of the Black Power movement and I excused  it then as “a phase” that had to be gone through.  I was mistaken and naive.  It was racism pure and simple.  I, and others, never confronted or named it then.

Now we live in culture where there is considerably more black racism  than white racism.  Someone like Al Sharpton, clearly the equivalent of David Duke, is far more powerful than Duke ever was.  No one pays attention to the execrable Duke, as they shouldn’t.  But they shouldn’t pay attention to Sharpton either.

But he’s only a  part of the problem. …

Charles Cooke says now, all of a sudden, liberals are learning you should not collectivize guilt. Joan Walsh’s hypocrisy is on display; Eugene Robinson’s too.

… Consider, if you will, the recent behavior of Salon’s Joan Walsh, who yesterday suggested in earnest that the conservative-led condemnation of the “climate” that supposedly provoked the shootings in New York City represented the unconscionable “politicization” of murder. “To blame the peaceful movement against police brutality that’s emerged nationwide,” Walsh wrote, is “the worst in demagoguery.” “Right wingers,” she added, “are using a terrible tragedy to make sure that no one can find middle ground.” Prima facie, I concur with Walsh, of course. But what, we might ask, has finally led her to this conclusion? After the shooting of Gabby Giffords in 2011, Walsh fretted dramatically about “the rhetoric of violence”; asked aloud, “Will any prominent conservatives denounce ‘reload’ and ‘crosshairs’ imagery?”; inquired dishonestly, “Is it really controversial to suggest that the overheated anti-government rhetoric of the last two years, with its often violent imagery, ought to be toned down?”; described Sarah Palin’s pretty standard political-campaign map as “unconscionable”; hoped that Republicans would find it in their hearts to “listen to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who denounced ‘the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about the government’ at a Saturday night press conference”; played a remarkably dishonest game of “But Anyway . . . ,” repeatedly noting that there was “no evidence” that Jared Loughner had reacted to any right-wing rhetoric before insinuating in the next breath that he must have; and, when her well was running dry, went so far as to suggest without any attestation at all that the shooter was a registered Republican.

Later, talking characteristically out of both sides of her mouth, Walsh proposed that “even if Tuscon exists in a vacuum,” it would still be the case that the “Tea Party’s violent rhetoric is dangerous.” Naturally, these accusations were part of a trend. Two years earlier, Walsh had cynically blamed conservative talk-radio for a shooting at the NationalHolocaustMuseum in Washington, D.C. The perpetrator turned out to be a neo-Nazi. …

… Walsh is alone only in the sheer scale of her audacity. In a column bluntly titled, “protesters aren’t to blame for NYPD officers’ execution,” the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson yesterday confirmed his own evolution on the question of what constitutes verbal instigation. “It is absurd to have to say this,” Robinson lamented, “but New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, activist Al Sharpton and President Obama are in no way responsible for the coldblooded assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn on Saturday. Nor do the tens of thousands of Americans who have demonstrated against police brutality in recent weeks bear any measure of blame.” Rather, Robinson proposed, “a disturbed career criminal named Ismaaiyl Brinsley committed this unspeakable atrocity by himself, amid a spree of insane mayhem.” “Reasonable people,” Robinson explained, “understand this, of course.” “But,” he sighed knowingly, “we live in unreasonable times.” …

…  “Delusional right-wing crazy talk,” Robinson suggested in 2012, “is a special kind of poison that cannot be safely ignored.” Lest he be misunderstood, he spelled it out for all to see: “I’m saying that the extreme language we hear from the far right is qualitatively different from the extreme language we hear from the far left — and far more damaging to the ties that bind us as a nation.” …

NY Post reports on calls for violence from CUNY grad students newspaper.

A disturbing editorial in a CUNY grad-student newspaper calls for rioters protesting the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown to arm themselves and wage violent war with cops.

“The time for peace has passed,” says a revolutionary editorial titled “In Support of Violence” that was penned by editor-in-chief Gordon Barnes in the Dec. 3 issue of The Advocate.

‘“The problem with the protesters’ violence in Ferguson is that it is unorganized. If the violence was to be organized, and the protesters armed — more so than the few that sparingly are — then the brunt of social pressures would not be laid onto middling proprietors [of looted small businesses], but unto those deserving the most virulent response of an enraged populace,” Barnes writes in the CUNY Grad Center’s publication.

“The acts of looting, destruction of property and violence directed towards state representatives is not only warranted, it is necessary,” says Barnes, a doctoral student in history who once studied in Cuba. …

Noemie Emery says it’s been a bad year for liberal story-tellers.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the liberals’ narrative outlook on life. One after another of their favorite genres has blown up in their faces as they have been caught telling and promoting stories that were too good to be true.

There was the gender-based theme, as the Rolling Stone tale of the horrendous gang rape at the University of Virginia went the way of the Duke lacrosse story — an elaborate hoax put on by the self-styled victim with no connection whatever to fact. A feminist student complained that “to let fact-checking define the narrative” would be a “mistake.” But a narrative without facts is simply a fiction and a lie that does damage to innocent people. …

… There was no fact-checking around Ferguson, Mo., in August, because the story itself was so good. A 300-pound thief who picked a fight with a cop was turned into a “child” who was cruelly gunned down by a Bull Connor cutout. …

You think it’s just the IRS that’s stonewalling investigators? Kevin Williamson writes that the federal government is starting to look like a criminal enterprise all the way down.

… Earlier this year, 47 inspectors general — the officials charged with fighting corruption, waste, and wrongdoing in federal agencies — sent a letter to Issa’s committee complaining that organizations ranging from the EPA to the Justice Department were impeding their investigations by withholding information — despite the fact that federal law specifically forbids withholding that information. These are not a bunch of Republican operatives trying to score a few political points: Those 47 inspectors general comprise more than half of all such officials, and many who signed the letter were appointed by President Barack Obama. Their complaint is that the federal agencies treat them more or less like they do . . . members of Congress: thwarting them, withholding documents, obstruction investigations.

Michael Horowitz, the inspector general for the Justice Department, came to the Oversight Committee practically begging them for a means by which the DOJ – the federal law-enforcement department — might be forced to follow the laws that it is supposed to be enforcing. “It is very clear to me,” he testified, “just as it is to the Inspectors General community, that the Inspector General Act of 1978 entitles inspectors general to access all documents and records within the agency’s possession. Each of us firmly believes that Congress meant what it said in Section 6(a) of the IG Act: that Inspectors General must be given complete, timely, and unfiltered access to agency records.” But under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, the DOJ did no such thing. Horowitz notes that the DOJ specifically tried to withhold information related to the investigation of Operation Fast and Furious. …

Joe Nocera has more on fracking and the falling price of oil.

… “The worst thing from the Saudi point of view would be to announce a production cut, and the prices keep falling,” said Jason Bordoff, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at ColumbiaUniversity. It doesn’t want to be seen as the emperor with no clothes.

And then, of course, there is the effect of the shale revolution in the United States, where oil production has nearly doubled, to nine million barrels a day from five million a day, in the space of six years. The conventional wisdom holds that the Saudis “fear” the influx of shale oil onto the market — as The Wall Street Journal put it on Monday — and that they want to see the price go down in order to drive out some of that shale production.

But the Saudis don’t really fear shale oil. “I’ve heard officials in Saudi Arabia call shale a blessing,” said Robert McNally, the founder and president of The Rapidan Group, who is also affiliated with the Center on Global Energy Policy. “Shale oil is light,” he added. “Saudi oil is medium and heavy, and their real competitors are the Iraqis and the Iranians.” The Saudis can adjust to shale oil more easily than many other countries.

In effect, shale has the potential to play the role of the “swing supplier,” which is the role the Saudis used to play. At a certain price, it will be uneconomical to drill for shale oil, at which point the price will stabilize. But the shale revolution is still too new for anybody to know what that price is. In a sense, what is going on now is an effort to discover how low oil has to go before shale production declines and the floor is found for the price of oil. …

Just in time for the holidays, The Wall Street Journal has some good news about auto fatalities.

Deaths in car crashes have fallen by about a quarter in the last decade, new federal data released on Friday show, as safety features built into the latest models have powered a drop in fatalities even as auto-safety recalls have surged.

The fall in deaths in newer cars has been especially sharp, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data shows. The number of fatalities in the latest model released each year has fallen by nearly two-thirds in the past decade. In 2013, new cars had a lower fatality rate than cars fresh off the line did just a few years earlier.

Overall, auto deaths fell 3.1% last year over the prior year and the number of people injured in auto crashes fell 2.1%, according to figures released Friday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Safety improvements, in particular electronic stability control systems that make vehicles less likely to flip, are responsible for at least part of the drop in deaths, according to auto-safety and industry experts. …

For a Christmas special we have a link to a video about ship-breakers in Bangladesh. Click here to be happy you’re not there.

For another special, here’s the Air Force Band flash mobbing at the Smithsonian.

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Heather Mac Donald lets it all hang out in a piece in City Journal titled “The Big Lie of the Anti-Cop Left Turns Lethal.”

Since last summer, a lie has overtaken significant parts of the country, resulting in growing mass hysteria. That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today. Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that the black underclass doesn’t exist; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and whites—leaving disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods unexplained without reference to racism. The poisonous effect of those lies has now manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers.

The highest reaches of American society promulgated these untruths and participated in the mass hysteria. Following a grand jury’s decision not to indict a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer for fatally shooting 18-year-old Michael Brown in August (Brown had attacked the officer and tried to grab his gun), President Barack Obama announced that blacks were right to believe that the criminal-justice system was often stacked against them. Obama has travelled around the country since then buttressing that message. Eric Holder escalated a long running theme of his tenure as U.S. Attorney General—that the police routinely engaged in racial profiling and needed federal intervention to police properly.

University presidents rushed to show their fealty to the lie. …

… The only good that can come out of this wrenching attack on civilization would be the delegitimation of the lie-based protest movement. Whether that will happen is uncertain. The New York Times has denounced as “inflammatory” the statement from the head of the officer’s union that there is “blood on the hands that starts on the steps of City Hall”—this from a paper that promotes the idea that police officers routinely kill blacks. The elites’ investment in black victimology is probably too great to hope for an injection of truth into the dangerously counterfactual discourse about race, crime, and policing.

Paul Mirengoff has a book recommendation germane to events in New York and the country.

To Scott’s lists of recommended books for the Christmas season, I would like to add Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Levin, probably my favorite current analyst of politics and policy, describes the philosophical clash between Burke and Paine and explains how it forms the root of the current political divide in America.

Levin’s discussion of Burke also has relevance, I think, to recent events in Ferguson and New York City. Virulent anti-police, anti-order sentiment has reared its head in ways not seen since the early 1970s, when society seemed to be unraveling. And unlike in the 1970s, top level public officials — President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Mayor de Blasio — have contributed to this sentiment through irresponsible public proclamations. …

Turning back to DC, Matthew Continetti writes on the president who is a friend to tyrants, dictators, and enemies of our country.

… If there was a theme to 2014, it was Obama’s persistence in bailing out dictators and theocrats from political scrapes and economic hardships, his tenacity in pursuit of engagement with America’s adversaries no matter the cost to our strength, principles, credibility, or alliances.

In this president the thugs in Havana and Caracas, Damascus and Tehran, Moscow and Naypyidaw and Beijing have no better friend. For these bullies, these evildoers, these millenarians and sectarians, Barack Obama is more than a dupe. He is an insurance policy.

Cuba is but the latest example of this president’s failing to exercise leverage in the pursuit of American strength and security and prestige. Here are the Castro brothers, decrepit and spent, their revolution a joke, their economy in peril thanks to the collapse in oil prices brought on by a strong dollar and increased U.S. supply.

The China option—foreign direct investment from America—is Raul and Fidel’s only play to sustain power over the society they have impoverished. And Obama says yes, yes to everything: an embassy, an ambassador, diplomatic relations, travel and exchange, status among nations, removal from the list of state sponsors of terror, and a serious opportunity to lessen the embargo that has kept the dictators caged for decades.

In return, the Castro brothers give up … well, what? Alan Gross, a political prisoner and persecuted religious minority who shouldn’t have been imprisoned in the first place? A second man who has been in captivity for decades? Thin gruel.

No promise of elections, no declaration of religious freedom, no demilitarization, no opening up of Cuban prisons to international inspection. Not even a pledge that salaries from U.S. companies operating in Cuba at indentured-servitude rates—the minimum wage is $19 a month—will be paid directly to employees rather than passed through the bloated, corrupt, suffocating state. …

Regarding the North Korean cyber attack on Sony, Max Boot despairs of any chance forceful actions will come from our government.

… I know it’s probably expecting too much from this president, but it would be nice if just once he would act decisively instead of talking a good game and setting red lines that can be crossed with impunity. What would constitute decisive action in this case? The obvious proportional response–attack North Korea’s computer networks–isn’t very satisfying for a couple of reasons. First North Korea simply doesn’t have a lot of computer networks; it is one of the most disconnected countries on earth. Second, as someone in the government has (unwisely) leaked to the Wall Street Journal, what few networks it has are monitored for intelligence by the US. …

John Fund reminds us there is something important going on in Vermont – the affordable care act is collapsing.

The one state that not only embraced Obamacare but insisted on going beyond it to a full single-payer system was Vermont, the haven of hippies and expatriate New Yorkers, which has become one of the most liberal states in the nation. In 2011, it adopted a form of neighboring Canada’s government-financed health care and promised to implement it by 2017. (And Jonathan Gruber was a key architect of this plan as well as of Obamacare.) This week, however, Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, admitted the state couldn’t afford the plan’s $2 billion price tag and consequent sky-high taxes, and pulled the plug. The lessons for Obamacare are obvious and profound. …

And, let’s not forget about cratering oil prices. The Wall Street Journal reports on why the Saudis decided to let the price drop.

In early October, Saudi Arabia’s representative to OPEC surprised attendees at a New York seminar by revealing his government was content to let global energy prices slide.

Nasser al-Dossary ’s message broke from decades of Saudi orthodoxy that sought to keep prices high by limiting global oil production, said people familiar with the session. That set the stage for Saudi Arabia’s oil mandarins to send crude prices tumbling late last month after persuading other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to keep production steady.

Hard-hit countries like Iran, Russia and Venezuela suspected the move was a coordinated effort between the oil kingdom and its longtime ally, the U.S., to weaken their foes’ economies and geopolitical standing.

But the story of Saudi Arabia’s new oil strategy, pieced together through interviews with senior Middle Eastern, American and European officials, isn’t one of an old alliance. It is a story of a budding rivalry, driven by what Saudi Arabia views as a threat posed by American energy firms, these officials said.

Mr. Dossary’s October message signaled a direct challenge to North American energy firms that the Arab monarchy believes have fueled a supply glut by using new shale-oil technologies, said the people familiar with the session. …

… Still, some oil-industry executives said, Riyadh and Mr. Naimi may underestimate how technology and the shale-oil boom have fundamentally altered energy markets. Many U.S. companies, they said, can make money or break even with oil below $40.

The move has also exposed cracks inside the Saudi ruling circle. In October, as the oil-price slide accelerated, billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a nephew to King Abdullah, castigated Mr. Naimi in an open letter for appearing to shrug off price declines. Belittling the impact, he wrote, “is a catastrophe that cannot go unmentioned.”

At about that time, Mr. Naimi’s deputy, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, another nephew of the king, worried to colleagues that the kingdom’s budget couldn’t bear lower prices long, said people familiar with the matter. The offices of Prince Abdulaziz and Prince al-Waleed didn’t respond to inquiries. …

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Yes, we’re still covering what the fool is up to. Jennifer Rubin posts on the Cuba betrayal.

There are many reasons to condemn President Obama’s decision to sell out the Cuban people. It is perfectly consistent with Obama’s disdain for human rights, addiction to coddling dictatorships and contempt for Congress.

The Post’s editorial board points out that “the accelerating economic collapse of Venezuela meant that the huge subsidies that have kept the Castros afloat for the past decade were in peril. A growing number of Cubans were demanding basic human rights, such as freedom of speech and assembly. On Wednesday, the Castros suddenly obtained a comprehensive bailout — from the Obama administration.”

Indeed, just when we have the most leverage — be it economic sanctions against Russia (Sen. John McCain likes to call it “a gas station masquerading as a country”), Iran or Cuba — Obama prefers capitulation. Marketing the policy shift as a tactical move to improve human rights insults our intelligence. (“Mr. Obama says normalizing relations will allow the United States to be more effective in promoting political change in Cuba. That is contrary to U.S. experience with Communist regimes such as Vietnam, where normalization has led to no improvements on human rights in two decades. Moreover, nothing in Mr. Obama’s record of lukewarm and inconstant support for democratic change across the globe can give [dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez] and her fellow freedom fighters confidence in this promise.”) …

Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor posts on subjects covered in the president’s recent presser.

… Come to think of it, I think that Obama’s real reason for opposing Keystone XL is that the Venezuelans would be the biggest losers. I am pretty sure he has much more of an affinity with Chavistas than Canucks.

Which brings me to the other issue: Cuba.

I am ambivalent about the embargo, or the lack of diplomatic recognition. I can argue either side. But there are many things about this initiative that make me uneasy.

For one thing, Cuba is in dire straits. This is where Venezuela comes in. The Bolivarian paradise has been carrying the Castros’ shambolic regime for years, but is now itself on the verge of economic collapse. Default is imminent, and at the current level of oil prices economic collapse is a real possibility. Venezuela is already cutting back support to the Cuban regime, and will cut it back further. Given that, the Castros are desperate, and Obama could have extracted a much better deal. A deal that would have given some benefit to the Cuban people, rather than bailing out the regime and allowing to continue its repression and depredations.

Obama’s rhetoric was also offensive, and at times historically ignorant. He characterized the embargo as a “failed policy.” Pretty rich for a serial failure to insult 9 previous presidents and 26 Congresses. He could have made an affirmative case for a new policy, and recognized the reasons for the previous policy, without such condescension.

Moreover, he made mention of the need to move beyond “the legacy of colonialism and communism.” Communism isn’t a legacy in Cuba: it is a daily reality. Insofar as colonialism is concerned, is Obama referring to Spain? Because he sure as hell can’t be referring to the US: Cuba was never an American colony. …

… I could go on, but I’ll close with one point. People have compared this to Nixon’s opening of China. Superficially, this is plausible. But there is a major difference.

Nixon could go to China because his stalwart anti-Communist credentials (which had won him the intense enmity of the left) made it credible that Nixon was acting in the interests of the US, rather than indulging his ideological preferences: if a McGovern or a Henry Wallace had attempted the same there would have been justifiable suspicions of their motives and the benefits to the US. In contrast, Che is worshipped as a hero rather than condemned as a psychopathic murderer in Obama’s political circles. His administration has taken a very benign approach to leftist Latin American regimes, including Venezuela and Nicaragua. This raises doubts about what his Cuba initiative will entail, and whether it will advance American interests or benefit the long-suffering and repressed Cuban people.

So to summarize Obama’s last press conference: he slammed a long-time ally and sucked up to a long-time enemy. Which pretty much summarizes his foreign policy, generally.

Jennifer Rubin thinks it’s cool to see Hollywood thrown under the bus.

Hollywood execs should have seen this coming. For six years, the world has seen how President Obama betrays and belittles friends of the United States while extending the hand of friendship and acceding to the demands of dictators from Moscow to Havana. It was only a matter of time, then, before the president threw the Hollywood elite — who raised money by the boatload for him, gloried his presidency, swooned at his speeches, populated his parties and ignored his blunders — under the bus. Had the glitterati vilified him instead, raised money for the GOP and snubbed White House state dinners, he might have treated them better. Instead, his best friends are treated like America’s best friend, Israel.

With Obama, it invariably means blaming the victim. In the case of Israel, he blames the Jewish state for the death of peace talks, condemns it for civilian deaths which the IDF strenuously tried to minimize in the Gaza war and excoriates the government for every new building complex. In the case of Hollywood, Obama blames the film studio for being bullied by North Korean threats.

At his Friday news conference, Obama declared Sony Pictures Entertainment “made a mistake” pulling the film. He lectured the beleaguered studio: …

… Next time the Hollywood elites might be a little more circumspect about whom they anoint as the next political messiah. And they might begin to take national security seriously. They might consider how precarious is their own safety (financial and otherwise) without a decisive commander in chief, a well-funded military and an adept intelligence community. When it is about them, by gosh, it might be time to get serious.

Jonathan Tobin is looking at other areas where the president can try to act extra-legally; before the Supremes start putting him in his place. 

… Looking ahead to other possible presidential actions, if he makes enough concessions and the Iranians are feeling generous, Obama may get a nuclear deal with the Islamist state. That, too, will be interpreted as a sign of life in what would otherwise be considered a lame duck presidency.

But none of this will change the fact that Obama’s ideological fixation with outreach to tyrants has not made the world better or increased America’s security or influence. To the contrary, with ISIS on the rise in the Middle East, Iran successfully challenging for regional hegemony via its successes in Syria, its alliance with Hamas and its intimidation of moderate Arab nations, and likely to gain U.S. acquiescence to it becoming a nuclear threshold state, Obama is leaving the world a more dangerous place than when he entered the White House. Nor will his Cuban gambit make the island a more democratic or free place.

On domestic policy, his admirers cite his immigration executive orders as a sign that he can govern despite the opposition of Congress. But by acting in this extralegal fashion, Obama has actually doomed for the foreseeable future any chance of working out a compromise with Republicans to pass some kind of immigration reform. Flexing his muscles in this fashion and showing his contempt for the law has convinced even many moderate Republicans that he can’t be trusted to enforce any legislation that he doesn’t like or benefit from. Nor will the problems that he postponed in the implementation of ObamaCare but which will begin to be felt in 2015 do much to bolster confidence in his judgment or the wisdom of his efforts. …

David Harsanyi calls it the president’s “imaginary winning streak.”

… Would the media describe a string of Republican victories won exclusively through executive action a “winning streak”? Today, somehow, even after a historic repudiation of his policies, Obama is not only reinvigorated and freed from the constraints of annoying process, but according to some in the media, he has been “politically triumphant.” There are two ways to explain this phenomena: Some folks are engaged in a lot of wishful thinking or we’ve severely downgraded the meaning of winning. Then again, maybe it’s a little of both.

Andrew Malcolm with some quotes he says prove the prez needs a vacation.

** “I’m being absolutely sincere when I say I want to work with this new (Republican) Congress to get things done.” ROTFL (Rolling on the floor laughing) Beware of politicians who say “Frankly,” “To be perfectly honest” and “I’m being absolutely sincere.” They aren’t.

** “Like the rest of America, black America in the aggregate is better off now than it was when I came into office.” That’s breaking news for all the unemployed African Americans. November unemployment nationally was 5.8%. For blacks, it was more than twice that, 11.9%.

** “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like, or news reports that they don’t like.”

Wait, wasn’t it Obama and then-Secy. of State Hillary Clinton who had the maker of that obscure YouTube anti-Islam video arrested and jailed as the phony fall guy for the Benghazi massacre in 2012? And sought to have the video taken down?

All of which leads Jennifer Rubin to conclude the Dems are in more trouble than they think.

… Among registered voters, his approval is near an all-time low (39 percent), while his handling of issue like the economy (42/55), immigration (35/58 percent) and international affairs (36/58) score miserably with voters. The Post’s pollsters provided me with a look at how those numbers for registered voters look over time. Graphically, his presidency looks like a lesser-than symbol (<) with his handling of issues, the gap between disapproval and approval, rising over time and disapproval increasing, particularly in the second term. The last time Obama was in positive territory on the economy, for example, was the tail end of 2012. In short, the longer voters know him, the less they like what he is doing. It seems hard to imagine he could get into positive territory on these top issues with registered voters.

That is not only bad news for Democrats who have tied themselves to his mast but for the next Democratic presidential nominee. Looking over at the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, we find, “A whopping 71 percent of American voters want the next president to take a different approach than President Barack Obama’s; [Hillary] Clinton served as his first-term secretary of state. And by 40 percent to 38 percent, voters prefer a Republican to win the White House in 2016 instead of a Democrat.” …

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George Friedman of Stratfor was in Russia recently and his observations start some items on Russia.

I thought the economic problems of Russia would be foremost on people’s minds. The plunge of the ruble, the decline in oil prices, a general slowdown in the economy and the effect of Western sanctions all appear in the West to be hammering the Russian economy. Yet this was not the conversation I was having. The decline in the ruble has affected foreign travel plans, but the public has only recently begun feeling the real impact of these factors, particularly through inflation.

But there was another reason given for the relative calm over the financial situation, and it came not only from government officials but also from private individuals and should be considered very seriously. The Russians pointed out that economic shambles was the norm for Russia, and prosperity the exception. There is always the expectation that prosperity will end and the normal constrictions of Russian poverty return.

The Russians suffered terribly during the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin but also under previous governments stretching back to the czars. In spite of this, several pointed out, they had won the wars they needed to win and had managed to live lives worth living. The golden age of the previous 10 years was coming to an end. That was to be expected, and it would be endured. The government officials meant this as a warning, and I do not think it was a bluff. The pivot of the conversation was about sanctions, and the intent was to show that they would not cause Russia to change its policy toward Ukraine.

Russians’ strength is that they can endure things that would break other nations. It was also pointed out that they tend to support the government regardless of competence when Russia feels threatened. Therefore, the Russians argued, no one should expect that sanctions, no matter how harsh, would cause Moscow to capitulate. Instead the Russians would respond with their own sanctions, which were not specified but which I assume would mean seizing the assets of Western companies in Russia and curtailing agricultural imports from Europe. There was no talk of cutting off natural gas supplies to Europe.

If this is so, then the Americans and Europeans are deluding themselves on the effects of sanctions. …

… There was much more toughness on Ukraine. There is acceptance that events in Ukraine were a reversal for Russia and resentment that the Obama administration mounted what Russians regard as a propaganda campaign to try to make it appear that Russia was the aggressor. Two points were regularly made. The first was that Crimea was historically part of Russia and that it was already dominated by the Russian military under treaty. There was no invasion but merely the assertion of reality. Second, there was heated insistence that eastern Ukraine is populated by Russians and that as in other countries, those Russians must be given a high degree of autonomy. One scholar pointed to the Canadian model and Quebec to show that the West normally has no problem with regional autonomy for ethnically different regions but is shocked that the Russians might want to practice a form of regionalism commonplace in the West. …

… I came away with two senses. One was that Putin was more secure than I thought. In the scheme of things, that does not mean much. Presidents come and go. But it is a reminder that things that would bring down a Western leader may leave a Russian leader untouched. Second, the Russians do not plan a campaign of aggression. Here I am more troubled – not because they want to invade anyone, but because nations frequently are not aware of what is about to happen, and they might react in ways that will surprise them. That is the most dangerous thing about the situation. It is not what is intended, which seems genuinely benign. What is dangerous is the action that is unanticipated, both by others and by Russia.

At the same time, my general analysis remains intact. Whatever Russia might do elsewhere, Ukraine is of fundamental strategic importance to Russia. Even if the east received a degree of autonomy, Russia would remain deeply concerned about the relationship of the rest of Ukraine to the West. As difficult as this is for Westerners to fathom, Russian history is a tale of buffers. Buffer states save Russia from Western invaders. Russia wants an arrangement that leaves Ukraine at least neutral. …

… The United States and Europe have trouble understanding Russia’s fears. Russia has trouble understanding particularly American fears. The fears of both are real and legitimate. This is not a matter of misunderstanding between countries but of incompatible imperatives. All of the good will in the world – and there is precious little of that – cannot solve the problem of two major countries that are compelled to protect their interests and in doing so must make the other feel threatened. I learned much in my visit. I did not learn how to solve this problem, save that at the very least each must understand the fears of the other, even if they can’t calm them.

John Fund posts on Putin’s presser.

Vladimir Putin was his usual overbearing self today at his annual three-hour news conference in Moscow, swatting away questions he didn’t like and hyperventilating against the West to excuse his economic failures. However, there was a tense moment when a prominent anti-Putin activist and television journalist, Ksenia Sobchak, asked the Russian president whether he was fomenting hatred against others among Russians using state television propaganda. She specifically asked him why the state media hasn’t retracted a July story it ran falsely accusing the Ukrainian military of torturing and crucifying a three-year-old Russian boy in a public square. 

“Why did you give her the floor?” Putin snapped at the moderator. He then proceeded to ignore the question. …

… On the issue of his control of the Russian media, Putin denied any “campaign” was being conducted against his opponents in the Russian media. Instead he turned the question around, claiming the West was persecuting allies of Russia. His prime local example was Latvia’s ban on some pro-Kremlin pop stars who often use offensive lyrics. He then attacked the U.S. for “legalizing” torture of its opponents after the 9/11 attacks.

Never let it be said that Vladimir Putin’s favorite defense isn’t a strong offense.

Huffington Post with an article on Russia written in the expectation the current troubles will bring hardship for the government. Expectations George Friedman in the first item above, thinks are overblown.

Russian consumers flocked to the stores Wednesday, frantically buying a range of big-ticket items to pre-empt the price rises kicked off by the staggering fall in the value of the ruble in recent days.

As the Russian authorities announced a series of measures to ease the pressure on the ruble, which slid 15 percent in the previous two days and raised fears of a bank run, many Russians were buying cars and home appliances — in some cases in record numbers — before prices for these imported goods shoot higher.

The Swedish furniture giant IKEA already warned Russian consumers that its prices will rise Thursday, which resulted in weekend-like crowds at a Moscow store on a Wednesday afternoon. …

… Should the current attempts to shore up the ruble fail, then the Russian authorities could be imposing capital controls.

However, Russia’s Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev has denied the government is considering doing so. While easing pressure on the ruble, the move would shatter Russia’s already tarnished reputation to investors.

Russian officials, meanwhile, have sought to project a message of confidence on state television, dwelling on the advantages of ruble devaluation, such as a boost to domestic manufacturing.

There are fears that the ruble could come under further pressure this week as President Barack Obama is expected to sign legislation authorizing new economic sanctions against Russia.

Whatever happens with the ruble, the Russian economy is set to shrink next year by 0.8 percent, even if oil prices stay above $80 per barrel. If oil prices stay at the current level of around $60, the Central Bank said the Russian economy could contract by nearly 5 percent. …

Megan McArdle posts on what different oil producing countries can expect if the price continues to sag.

… Outside the Middle East, Venezuela is already well into a long economic crisis. The Hugo Chavez regime diverted investment funds from the state-owned oil company into social spending, which caused production to decline. That was a workable trade-off when prices were rising, but now that they’re falling fast, so is Venezuela’s economy, along with political stability.

Last week, I noted that this meant the risk of serious geopolitical repercussions. (The last time oil prices experienced this kind of run-up and decline, the Soviet Union fell.) In the modern global economy, it also means the risk of financial crisis, as problems in Russia and other oil-rich nations reverberate outward through our tightly interlaced networks of finance and trade. China is already fragile, the euro zone is struggling to hold everything together, and while U.S. growth finally seems to be back on track, we will not be immune if the rest of the world is reeling.

Bershidsky suggests that capital controls may well be next for Russia, though the central bank governor denies that they are being considered. Whatever Russia does next, we’d better hope it works. Because if not, the rest of us may be using our newly cheaper gasoline to fuel up for a very bumpy ride.

The Why File reports on the return of large carnivores to Europe. And they aren’t talking about the Russians.

A surprising new study shows that four big carnivores (brown bear, lynx, wolverine and wolf) are doing quite nicely in Europe, thank you very much, even without the wilderness protection that benefits some large predators in the United States.

“We find that in Europe we have twice as many wolves as in the lower 48 (American) states, on half the land area, with two times the human population density,” says Guillaume Chapron of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, the corresponding author of the new study.

In Europe, as in North America, large carnivores face ingrained hostility. It’s not just their ferocity, but also their need for a large range and lots of meat that makes them natural competitors. …

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Sultan Knish writes on post-truth America.

Next month Americans will experience the fifteenth anniversary of the time that the President of the United States shook his finger at the country and informed it, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.”

Bill Clinton was lying. But the lie was more significant than the thing that he was lying about.

When the lie came crashing down, Clinton and his defenders deconstructed the English language, questioning the meaning of every word in his sentence rather than admit that the lie was a lie.

Given a choice between telling the truth or challenging the definitions of such words as “sex” and “is”, they decided to burn their dictionary.

Clinton’s antics set the stage for a current administration which can never be caught in a lie because it’s lying all the time. Obama and his people don’t just lie, they lie about the lies and then they lie about those lies. Bringing them in to testify just clogs the filters with an extra layer of lies. …

… Obama doesn’t simply lie. He exists in a truth-free zone. He doesn’t stumble with any construction as clumsy as Kerry’s “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” He does not start with truthful facts. His starting point is in an imaginary territory. It ends in an imaginary territory. If the two imaginary territories are different, it scarcely matters because neither place was ever real.

When he came into office Obama insisted that we had to pivot to fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan even though it was no longer in Afghanistan. He went on claiming victory over an enemy that didn’t exist while dismissing ISIS as a jayvee team even when it was capturing entire cities in Iraq.

These weren’t mere lies. This was a foreign policy being conducted in an imaginary territory. It was Wag the Dog being played out in real life. But then again what is real around Obama anyway?

Bill Clinton lied. Obama tells stories. None of these stories have anything to do with reality. Lena Dunham’s biography is a peek into a disordered mind that is incapable of grasping the concept of truth. In her world there are no facts, only stories that elicit emotional reactions. Obama’s entire career rests on the same technique of telling stories for emotional effect without any regard for reality.

ObamaCare was an ugly collectivist bureaucratic dinosaur clothed in imaginary stories. The stories about it, about the economy, about the war are still being told. Added to it are new stories about racism. The stories are passionate, compelling and appealing. They are also completely unreal.

Progressives don’t only live in a post-American world; they live in a post-Truth world. A world without facts and without truth is one in which the America that was cannot exist. …

Speaking of a post-truth world, K. C. Johnson of Duke lacrosse fame has a look at what he calls “UVA’s troubled campus culture.”

James Ceaser recently became the first UVA professor to publicly speak out regarding the deeply unhealthy climate on his campus, exposed by the publication of the now-discredited Rolling Stone article alleging multiple gang rapes at the school. (The sole source for each of these allegations appears to have been “Jackie.”) Ceaser lamented how few people on campus appeared to care about the truth, and instead bowed to the passions of the mob. Events on campus have suggested, Ceaser perceptively observed, that “far from being an end in itself, the truth on our college campuses is now treated as a mere instrument of combat. It is wielded with feigned righteousness when it promotes a preferred cause and then abandoned when it produces the opposite result. In the end, this is the sad message that universities now convey.”

Over the last several weeks, Ceaser has been a voice in the Charlottesville wilderness. The actions of President Teresa Sullivan’s administration—joined by an array of professors and, most disturbingly, by the student newspaper—have provided an almost textbook example of a campus culture gone awry, with a massive rush to judgment compounded by an inability to admit error. …

And continuing this thread, Ann Coulter wrote a column saying one in five people who write for Rolling Stone are morons.

In response to the total implosion of Rolling Stone’s preposterous story about a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia, the media have reverted to their Soviet-style reporting. They’re not even saying: We’re choosing not to talk about UVA because it’s a side show. It’s more like: UVA? That’s a school?

Not only did the UVA gang rape turn out to be a hoax, but then President Obama’s own Department of Justice completed a six-year study on college rape, and it turns out that instead of 1-in-5 college coeds being raped, the figure is 0.03-in-5.

Less than 1 percent of college students are the victim of a sexual assault — 0.6 percent to be exact — not to be confused with the 20 percent, or “one in five,” claimed by feminists and President Obama.

But neither the DOJ report, nor the UVA rape hoax have dissuaded Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill from pushing their idea that the nation is in the grip of a college rape epidemic.

This week, Gillibrand dismissed the UVA outrage, saying, “Clearly, we don’t know the facts of what did or did not happen in this case.”

Actually, we know quite well what happened in this case. A disturbed young woman invented a fake boyfriend and a fake gang-rape to get attention, and an incompetent journalist acted as her transcriber. It was a total hoax — just like the Duke lacrosse case, the Jamie Leigh Jones case, the Tawana Brawley case, and every other claim of white men committing gang-rape. …

The Washington Post had an interesting article on the finance industry and how it has become a “black hole” for generations of the best and brightest.

The thing Deborah Jackson remembers from her first interviews at Goldman Sachs is the slogan. It was stamped on the glass doors of the offices in the investment bank’s headquarters just off Wall Street, the lure of the place in two words, eight syllables: “Uncommon capability.”

Jackson joined Goldman in 1980, fresh from business school and steeped in the workings of government and finance. She found crackerjack colleagues and more business than she could handle. She worked in municipal finance, lending money to local governments, hospitals and nonprofits around the country. She flew first class to scout potential deals — “The issue was, can you really be productive if you’re in a tiny seat in the back?” — and when the time came to seal one, she’d welcome clients and their attorneys to Manhattan’s best restaurants.

The clients would bring their spouses and go to shows. Everyone drank good wine. Her favorite place, in the heyday, was the 21 Club, which felt like an Old World library and went heavy on red meat. More than the perks, Jackson loved the work — the shared struggle of smart people trying to help the country, even as they banked big money. “It was all about solving problems,” she said.

Years later, she would come to see it differently, growing disenchanted with an industry she didn’t think was fixing much anymore.

Economic research suggests she was onto something. Wall Street is bigger and richer than ever, the research shows, and the economy and the middle class are worse off for it. …

… It’s not that finance is inherently bad — on the contrary, a well-functioning financial system is critical to a market economy. The problem is, America’s financial system has grown much larger than it should have, based on how well the industry performs.

To understand how and why that is, think of money as water and the financial system as a series of pipes. Ideally, the pipes deliver the water from people who have stockpiled it (investors) to people who want to put it to productive use (entrepreneurs, executives, home buyers, etc.).

Over the past half-century, America’s financial industry built a whole bunch of new pipes. The sector grew six times as fast as the economy overall during the past three decades. Other advanced countries didn’t see anywhere close to that growth in their financial sectors.

Some of America’s growth was driven by Washington. Lawmakers kept encouraging financial innovation, which built a market for smarter investment bankers. They did that by changing the tax code to encourage businesses to hire financial whizzes who could spin ordinary income into certain, preferred types of investment income, and by loosening restrictions on the kinds of financial activities that the titans of Wall Street could engage in.

Extra pipes attracted better plumbers — the more the finance industry grew, the more it tugged at highly educated workers. …

Kevin Williamson on the sad condition of New York City jails.

In April I wrote about the case of Jerome Murdough, 56, a homeless ex-Marine who was remanded to RikersIsland for attempting to shelter in the stairwell of a Harlem housing project. Murdough was mentally ill, with multiple psychiatric diagnoses and what his mother referred to as “beer problems.” His bail was set bizarrely high for a homeless vagrant — $2,500 — and his mental condition necessitated oversight, with jail authorities ordering that he be checked every 15 minutes. He wasn’t. And neither was his jail cell’s heating system, which malfunctioned, and the abandoned homeless man was baked to death in captivity.

Naturally, nobody did anything wrong. Or so they said.

Thirty-five-year-old Carol Lackner is not a homeless ex-Marine, is not locked up at Rikers Island, and, unlike Murdough, has not had demanded of her bail amounting to more money than she ever is likely to see — or even the $2,500 that kept Murdough behind bars. She was released with no bail at all last week after being charged with falsifying records, filing false reports, and official misconduct. She was supposed to be watching over Murdough, but she neglected her duties, abandoned her post, and, according to prosecutors, lied about it. These are serious crimes. She was offered an indefensible plea deal — a mere misdemeanor — on the condition that she also resign from the New York Department of Corrections. She refused. …

… If Carol Lackner did in fact falsify reports and lie about leaving Jerome Murdough to be baked alive, she should never have been offered a misdemeanor deal, nor should she get away with whatever relatively light punishment she will endure if convicted on her current charges. We can tolerate many things from those invested with the power to do violence on our behalf, but we cannot tolerate lies from them. Carol Lackner, Lois Lerner and a good selection of the leadership at the IRS, corrupt Travis County prosecutor Rosemary Lehmberg (as low a specimen of human grotesquery as public life has to offer) — nobody deserves what goes on at Rikers Island, but if anybody does, that’s who it is. There’s no hole deep enough.

That’s our other national prison scandal: Who isn’t in them.

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Roger Simon posts on Diane Feinstein’s report.

… LET’S REVIEW:  Looking around the world today,  Libya (under control somewhat while Khadafy was alive) is an unholy mess;  with no real end in site to negotiations, Iran is continuing to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles while expanding its influence into Yemen and maintaining strength in Syria and Lebanon and cementing its alliances with North Korea and Venezuela (among others); putative NATO member Turkey is becoming more Islamist by the day under the rule of Obama’s pal Erdogan;  ISIS continues to control large portions Syria and Iraq and may secretly be in cahoots with Turkey; Russia has moved into Ukraine and has everyone from Moldova to Finland nervous;  China controls more of the Pacific every day, our Japanese and South Korean friends worried if they can trust us anymore;  Europe is a weak sister with an increasing Islamic population they don’t police and that runs rampant in their own ever-growing neighborhoods, the influence of Sharia law expanding over that continent and hardly anyone doing anything about it; and America, under Obama, has turned into the “pitiful, helpless giant” that it was accused of being during Vietnam, but really wasn’t (until now)…. And with all that, my senior senator Dianne Feinstein is worried the CIA has become a little brutal???   What an unbelievable, self-righteous idiot!

Matthew Continetti says “national conversations” are worthless, especially when Al Sharpton is talking.

… National conversations are worse than useless. They are harmful. They presuppose, they live off of, the racial, ethnic, and sexual divisions they intend to mend. Separate the public into competing tribes, and not only will disagreements between them fester. Other tribes will feel unrecognized, excluded, alienated from the proceedings. Differences will become entrenched. Slights and peeves will multiply.

It happened in 1997. The panel was divided between those who wanted to focus on the state of black America and those who wanted to consider the full range of ethnic identities and grievances. The argument was intense, feelings were bitter. No consensus was truly reached, no injustices righted, no problems definitively solved.

So it is today. What the campaign and election of the first black president brought forth was nothing less than an unofficial national conversation on race, now about to enter its seventh year. First Bill Clinton was accused of blowing racial dog-whistles. Jeremiah Wright became a celebrity, and then it was Sarah Palin who was said to be exploiting white anxieties.

Holder called America a cowardly nation, Obama held a White House beer summit after calling a white policeman stupid, the Tea Party was written off as racist, the president said that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin. Democrats accused Republicans of using voter ID laws to return to Jim Crow. Ferguson, Staten Island—these are just the latest topics in an ongoing racial gabfest.

The result? The public says race relations are worse than when Obama took office. Nor has anyone explained how matters might improve by further highlighting cultural antagonisms and historical abuses. Quite the opposite: The most passionate race activists may actually want to incite conflict and distrust and Balkanization. It keeps them in business. And it’s good for ratings. …

QZ posts on why Google doesn’t care about hiring top college grads. Remember! The only 2016 presidential candidate on the horizon, without a college degree is Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin. We need government by dropouts and C students. Government by A students from the two left coasts is a disaster.

… Google’s head of people operations, Laszlo Bock, detailed what the company looks for. And increasingly, it’s not about credentials. …

… People that make it without college are often the most exceptional

Talent exists in so many places that hiring managers who rely on a few schools are using it as a crutch and missing out. Bock says:

“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”

Many schools don’t deliver on what they promise, Bock says, but generate a ton of debt in return for not learning what’s most useful. It’s an “extended adolescence,” he says.

Learning ability is more important than IQ

Succeeding in academia isn’t always a sign of being able to do a job. Bock has previously said that college can be an “artificial environment” that conditions for one type of thinking. …

Popular Mechanics has a report on a study attempting to measure effects on human health of many alternative ways to power a car.  

… The findings showed a dramatic swing in the positive and negative effects on health based on the type of energy used. Internal combustion vehicles running on corn ethanol and electric vehicles powered by electricity from coal were the real sinners; according the study, their health effects were 80 percent worse compared to gasoline vehicles. However, electric vehicles powered by electricity from natural gas, wind, water, or solar energy might reduce health impacts by at least 50 percent compared to gasoline vehicles.

“We were surprised that many alternative vehicle fuels and technologies that are put forward as better for the environment than conventional gasoline vehicles did not end up causing large decreases in air quality-related health impacts,” Tessum says. “The most important implication is that electric vehicles can cause large public health improvements, but only when paired with clean electricity. Adapting electric vehicles without taking steps to clean up electric generation would be worse for public health than continuing to use conventional gasoline vehicles.”

EV batteries are a problem, too, but a changing one. According to Tessum, previous studies have suggested that emissions from electric car battery production make such vehicles worse for public health than gasoline vehicles, even when the electricity to power them comes from non-polluting sources. “However, battery technology is evolving quickly,” he explains.” Using updated estimates of emissions from battery production, and accounting for the fact that much of the pollutant emissions from the battery production supply chain occurs in remote areas far from people, we found that the health impacts of electric vehicle battery production are much lower than previously estimated.”  …

John Tierney, mostly retired now, writes on how not to try too hard.

The advice is as maddening as it is inescapable. It’s the default prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws. Relax. Act natural. Just be yourself.

But when you’re nervous, how can you be yourself? How you can force yourself to relax? How can you try not to try?

It makes no sense, but the paradox is essential to civilization, according to Edward Slingerland. He has developed, quite deliberately, a theory of spontaneity based on millenniums of Asian philosophy and decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists.

He calls it the paradox of wu wei, the Chinese term for “effortless action.” Pronounced “ooo-way,” it has similarities to the concept of flow, that state of effortless performance sought by athletes, but it applies to a lot more than sports. Wu wei is integral to romance, religion, politics and commerce. It’s why some leaders have charisma and why business executives insist on a drunken dinner before sealing a deal.

Dr. Slingerland, a professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, argues that the quest for wu wei has been going on ever since humans began living in groups larger than hunter-gathering clans. Unable to rely on the bonds of kinship, the first urban settlements survived by developing shared values, typically through religion, that enabled people to trust one another’s virtue and to cooperate for the common good.

But there was always the danger that someone was faking it and would make a perfectly rational decision to put his own interest first if he had a chance to shirk his duty. To be trusted, it wasn’t enough just to be a sensible, law-abiding citizen, and it wasn’t even enough to dutifully strive to be virtuous. You had to demonstrate that your virtue was so intrinsic that it came to you effortlessly. …

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Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College on wave elections.

We have had a wave election. For those of a conservative disposition, it is a satisfying wave. According to Michael Barone, speaking recently here at Hillsdale’s Kirby Center, this wave is like several recent wave elections in its magnitude and decisiveness. There was a wave in favor of the Republicans in 1980 and again in 1994. There was a wave in favor of the Democrats in 2006 and again in 2008. There was a wave for the Republicans in 2010. There was a stalemate in 2012. Now there is a Republican wave in 2014. Looked at one way, these waves appear more like tides, ebbing and flowing.

These waves have something to do with a change in opinion over the last 50 years. Increasingly large majorities of the people consistently profess themselves afraid of their government. They think it too big. They think it does not account to them—that it is beyond their control and does not operate with their consent. They think it should be smaller, even if that means they receive fewer services. It seems that the growth of government has not made people feel safe and happy.

Nonetheless, two of the recent waves elected people who support larger government, and Americans continue to depend upon government more than ever. At all levels, government consumes something close to 40 percent of the economy, not even counting regulatory costs, which are nearing $2 trillion. People seem to be groping for a solution to this, and they do not seem to think they have found it.

This picture is not unprecedented. In the period leading up to the American Revolution, loyalists or Tories contested with revolutionaries, and these two groups alternated having the upper hand between 1763 and 1776, and even later, after the war had begun. The people were making up their minds about something fundamental, and a consensus was slow in forming.

In the period before the Civil War, there were those who advocated destroying slavery in the slave states, where the national government’s constitutional authority to do so was weak or nonexistent. There were others who supported slavery where it existed, and even the extension of slavery into new regions. Others still would find some compromise that would do the least dramatic possible thing. And then there was the new Republican party, founded to stop slavery’s expansion and seek a constitutional path to its eventual abolition. This too was a fundamental question, and it took a long time and eventually much blood to decide it.

This controversy over slavery grew up in the course of one generation. One may mark it by two of the most important statutes in American history—the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Northwest Ordinance brought the territory that became Michigan and other states into the Union, and it was the first time that a government like ours, ours being the first such government, had grown. It did not choose to grow by establishing colonies, but rather by treating the citizens of the new regions as full citizens as quickly as they could get organized. The Northwest Territory had belonged to Virginia, and Virginia, a slave state, on the motion of Thomas Jefferson, a slave holder, gave the land to the Union for free on condition only that there be no slavery allowed in it at any time. Although Virginia also insisted on a provision to return escaped slaves from Virginia back to their servitude, the document must be read as a sign of a consensus about slavery. We have it, those early Americans said, and we do not know what to do about it, but we know that it is wrong and should not be extended elsewhere. Many in the Founding generation stated this, often in beautiful terms. And eight states either abolished slavery or set up laws for gradual emancipation relatively quickly after the Revolution. …

The Smithsonian Magazine writes on the healthy benefits of sunlight.

The year’s darkest day is drawing near. December 21 marks the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of 2014. Thanks to artificial illumination, winter’s lack of sunlight doesn’t change our lifestyles quite as much as it did in the past. But our bodies definitely take notice—scientists are discovering that prolonged darkness can play a role in disorders from depression to diabetes. The consensus seems to be that sunlight is essential to humans, provided we can get the right dose on a regular basis.  

Most people know that too much exposure to ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun can cause cataracts and skin cancer. The World Health Organization estimates that between 2 and 3 million rarely lethal non-melanoma skin cancers occur globally each year, along with 132,000 far more serious cases of melanoma skin cancers.

Protecting the skin with lotions and clothing and avoiding too much time in searing sun can drastically reduce the odds of developing of skin cancer. But avoiding sunshine altogether isn’t a great idea, because the light can produce a plethora of positive health impacts. For starters, UV rays in sunlight trigger a photosynthetic process in the skin that produces vitamin D. This vitamin’s active form may help to regulate more than 1,000 genes, which in turn govern most of the body’s tissues. Vitamin D is also crucial for bone health and for keeping the immune system going strong. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Stephen Colbert to President Obama the other night on jobs: “I’ll give it to you. You’ve employed a lot of people—mostly as secretary of Defense.”

Conan: President Obama met with Britain’s Prince William in the Oval Office. A meeting between a symbolic ruler with no real power and the future King of England.

Fallon: Joe Biden will help with the 35th annual lighting of the National Menorah at the White House. Hearing that, Smokey the Bear said, “Hold my calls.”

Meyers: California’s DMV is issuing drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants. After about two hours at the DMV, they all asked to be deported.