AT AMAZON, 60% off Singer products.

HEH: “Of course Obama thinks the economy is doing fine. Everyone he meets can afford $38,000 a plate for dinner.”

FROM CATO: The Costs And Consequences of Gun Control. “Although universal background checks may sound appealing, the private sale of guns between strangers is a small percentage of overall gun sales. Worse, the background check bills are written so broadly that they would turn most gun owners into criminals for innocent acts — such as letting one’s sister borrow a gun for an afternoon of target shooting.”

That impact is, I suspect, not unintentional. Though it would, as usual, result in more minorities in jail. Why do the Democrats want to expand the mass incarceration of minority citizens?

DARWIN AWARD NOMINEE: Burglar stuck in chimney dies after homeowner lights fire.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Our sons’ $189,000 student debt is delaying our retirement.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Planned Parenthood And Those Villainous Christians: If we can’t condemn Islam for Muslim terrorists, why do we condemn Christians? Because it’s politically useful, of course.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Does Woodrow Wilson Belong At Princeton?

RICHARD COHEN: “The presidency has changed Barack Obama. His hair has gone gray, which is to be expected, and he looks older, which is also to be expected, but his eloquence has been replaced by petulance and he has lost the power to persuade, which is something of a surprise. You can speculate that if the Obama of today and not Winston Churchill had led Britain in World War II, the Old Vic theater would now be doing ‘Hamlet’ in German.”

To be fair, some of us suspected that in 2008, while others admired his pants-crease.

MICKEY KAUS: Why Doesn’t The GOP Elite Give Up On Amnesty? “If the Republican establishment is so panicked about Donald Trump — a wild, proto-fascist egomaniac with his finger on the button, in their telling — you’d think it would do the one thing that would almost certainly stop him: Surrender. By ‘surrender’ I mean abandon their decades long dream of winning Latino votes through a magic pill called ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ (known to its opponents as amnesty). . . . Anger over elite ‘more immigration’ plans is the molten core of the Trump eruption. Is there any doubt that if ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ went away for good, Trumpism would wither? So why don’t Haley Barbour and Karl Rove call a big K Street meeting where they say, ‘Boys, we have to throw the damn yahoos this bone. We’re giving up on amnesty.’ . . . I used to think the answer to the mystery was that it was all about Jeb — i.e., the push for amnesty was specifically designed to promote a Bush candidacy in 2016. Yet the Bush campaign is dying and the elite’s still clinging to amnesty. So that can’t be it.” It’s a mystery.

HUD IS A $50 BILLION FEDERAL DEPARTMENT AND IT’S BOOKS ARE WORTHLESS? The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton reports that’s essentially the conclusion of the department’s inspector general in an audit report that details nine “material weaknesses,” and “eight significant deficiencies in internal controls and six instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations.” This is what happens when congressional oversight becomes an after-thought in the age of the imperial presidency. The IGs are essential points of the legislative branch’s oversight spears, but Congress has to do the shoving to make sure targets are hit and things get fixed.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 936.

ILYA SOMIN: Judge Posner’s troubling explanation for his shift on same-sex marriage. “In 1997, Judge Richard Posner argued that it would be wrong for courts to strike down laws banning same-sex marriage. In 2014, he authored a judicial opinion invalidating such laws. While Posner was right to change his position, the justification he offers for the shift is a deeply troubling one.”

JAY ROSEN TRIES TO EXPLAIN WHY DONALD TRUMP HASN’T FLAMED OUT:

To an extent unrealized before this year, the role of the press in presidential campaigns relied on shared assumptions within the political class and election industry about what the rules were and what the penalty would be for violating them. This was the basis for familiar rituals like “the gaffe,” which in turn relied on assumptions about how a third party, the voters, would react once they found out about the violation. These assumptions were rarely tested because the risk seemed too high, and because risk-adverse professionals — strategists, they’re called — were in charge of the campaigns.

The whole system rested on shared beliefs about what would happen if candidates went beyond the system as it stood cycle to cycle. Those beliefs have now collapsed because Trump “tested” and violated most of them— and he is still leading in the polls. (Rob Ford in Canada was there before Trump.) There has been a cascading effect as conventions that depended an one another give way. The political press is pretty stunned by these developments. It keeps asking: when will the “laws of political gravity” will be restored, or have they simply vanished?

“The question now is whether Candidate Trump is immune from the laws of political gravity or soon will be isolated and regarded as an object of scorn or curiosity rather than of presidential seriousness,” wrote the Washington Post’s Dan Balz back in July. (Other uses of that phrase here, here and here.) But what the press describes as “laws” were never really that. They were at best conventions among the political class, in which I include most Washington journalists— though they would not include themselves.

This is much like Obama’s strategy of governance, in which he has ignored many of the unwritten rules of American politics, trampling on custom and tradition. And mostly gotten away with it, leaving politicians (mostly GOP politicians) as mystified as Dem pundits are by Trump. You can get away with a lot, if you don’t care what people who don’t like you think, only if they can stop you. Whether it’s a good formula for the country over the longer term, of course, is a separate question entirely.

ALAN KEYES: “The next crisis could be the end of the republic: Why we must impeach President Obama.”

There are those who will say that, with less than a year left in his occupancy of the Oval Office, it’s too late to hold him accountable. I have no doubt that among them are some of the same people who rejected the need to turn the 2014 election into a referendum on the issue of impeaching and removing him from office. They reflect the general mentality, suspiciously prevalent in this era of elitist faction domination, which seems never ready to hold elected officials to account for the damage they inflict upon the sovereignty and constitution of the people of the United States. . . .

Given the dictatorial bent Obama’s tenure has more than amply demonstrated in service to their agenda, it’s excusable to suspect that the neglect of accountability intentionally serves the larger agenda of overturning the U.S. Constitution, an agenda now more and more openly avowed.

It’s never too late for the U.S. Congress to use its Constitutional power to thwart this agenda, but it will be too late if and when the U.S. is hit by a crisis damaging enough to encourage Obama, or the next elitist faction tool, to declare that circumstances have suspended the Constitution’s implementation until further notice. Say if you like that it could never happen here. That was true in the days when Americans still had the confidence to stand on the rights the Constitution guarantees, and the courage to defend their stand. Thanks to the triumph of partisan passivity and subservience, that stalwart character is now in doubt. If it were not, the GOP majorities in both Houses of Congress would have already been moved to do what the Constitution requires.

BECAUSE IT WAS DISHONEST, POLITICIZED, SCAM “SCIENCE.” Why Congress stopped gun control activism at the CDC.

Background here.

HILLARY’S PROMISE FOR BLACK PEOPLE — HOW CAN IT MISS? “If Bill Clinton gave black America bad policy and Obama gave black America no policy, then Hillary Clinton is left only with good policy. She must achieve what her predecessors only promised.” It’s a sure thing! A sure thing!

IT’S NOT TOO LATE: Cyber Monday Deals are here all week.

OBAMA’S CHIEF POSITIVE LEGACY: SPACE? My USA Today column: Cashing In On The Final Frontier.

WHEN LAW PROFESSORS FIGHT: Phil Hamburger responds to Adrian Vermeule’s critique of his book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

OBAMA’S TRIP TO THE UN ‘GLOBAL WARMING’ SUMMIT EMITS MORE CO2 THAN DRIVING 72 CARS FOR A YEAR:

President Barack Obama may warn that carbon dioxide is causing global warming, but his flight to Paris to join other world leaders at the United Nations climate summit emitted more CO2 than driving 72 cars for a year.

Obama’s Paris jaunt will send more CO2 into the atmosphere than 31 American homes‘ energy usage for an entire year. The president’s trip is equivalent to burning 368,331 pounds of coal or 797 barrels of oil, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon footprint calculator.

Just one leg of the president’s Sunday trip to Paris emitted 189 tons of CO2 after travelling 3,855 miles and burning 19,275 gallons of jet fuel, according to Daily Caller News Foundation calculations based on past presidential flights. Obama’s return flight to Washington, D.C., would double the amount of CO2 burned to 378 tons — more than 72 cars driving for a year.

Which is seemingly the size of the typical Obama motorcade when he’s off on a fundraiser, golf game, one of his many vacations, or a jaunt that combines all of the above.

TO BE FAIR, THE NFL HAS A LOT OF EXPERIENCE DEALING WITH SERIOUS CONCUSSIONS AND AGING, INJURED PLAYERS:

A longtime Hillary Clinton aide reached out to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) after the former secretary of State sustained a head injury in late 2012.

“[S]peaking of your cracked head, I reached out to both the Nfl commish (I remembered that his dad held your Senate seat) and Bill Frist,” longtime aide Philippe Reines told Clinton in an email on Christmas Eve of 2012.

As always, real life trumps satire. At least, I think these Washington Free Beacon articles on Hillary’s rather shaky health are satire…

Related: “Emails show Clinton staff asked NFL for help spinning her concussion, the State Department blacked out its list of Hillary’s ‘achievements’ and Madame Secretary couldn’t find ‘Homeland’ on her TV” — all you can do when faced with a dowager train wreck like that is to simply Roll On Laugh Flooring…

RAHM EMANUEL’S GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Cover-up In Chicago. “The city’s leaders have now brought charges against a police officer, Jason Van Dyke, for the first-degree murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. But for more than a year, Chicago officials delayed the criminal process, and might well have postponed prosecution indefinitely, had it not been for a state court forcing their hand. They prevented the public from viewing crucial incriminating evidence — first one police car’s dashboard camera video; now, we learn, five such videos in total. And these senior officials turned a blind eye to the fact that 86 minutes of other video surveillance footage of the crime scene was unaccountably missing.”

JAMES TARANTO: A Rhetorical Question: Why Conciliate Muslims But Not Pro-Lifers?

Post hoc ergo propter hoc: On Friday a man started shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo. By the time the suspect, Robert Dear, was in custody, he had allegedly killed a policeman and two civilians.

“Why is it the same knee-jerk Republicans freaking out about ISIS are fostering terrorism in the homeland? Recruiting and influencing loonies to do their dirty work to eliminate the evil scourge known as abortion?” rants Bob Lefsetz, “a music industry analyst and critic,” in New York’s Daily News, a tabloid that of late has degenerated into a slightly more high-toned version of Salon.

We’ve heard this before. And at least this time there is evidence, albeit far from conclusive, of a political motive: An anonymous “senior law enforcement official” tells the New York Times “that after Mr. Dear was arrested, he had said ‘no more baby parts’ in a rambling interview with the authorities.” But also: “The official said that Mr. Dear ‘said a lot of things’ during his interview, making it difficult for the authorities to pinpoint a specific motivation.”

President Obama rushed to politicize the crime. But interestingly, not only did he frame it solely as part of his lame-duck effort to combat “gun violence” by restricting the lawful purchase of firearms; he pooh-poohed the suggestion that it was political in nature: “We don’t yet know what this particular gunman’s so-called motive was.”

Colorado’s Gov. John Hickenlooper was a bit less circumspect. He told CNN: “Certainly it’s a form of terrorism, and maybe in some way it’s a function of the inflammatory rhetoric we see on all—so many issues now, there are bloggers and talk shows where they really focus on trying to get people to that point of boiling over. Just intense anger. Maybe it’s time to look at how do we tone down that rhetoric.”

While disavowing any effort to “limit free speech,” the governor said “the United States of America ought to begin a discussion” on how to “begin to tone back the inflammatory rhetoric.”

Such a conversation, it seems safe to surmise, would quickly degenerate into a shouting match. Planned Parenthood itself responded to the shooting with harsh denunciations of its critics, as the Washington Times reports. . . .

National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes that the left is rather selective in blaming political rhetoric for acts of violence—for example, insisting there is no connection between Black Lives Matter protesters’ foul antipolice rhetoric and actual attacks on cops. On the other hand, Colorado Springs isn’t the first time the left has blamed a terroristic act on a video.

But there’s an additional problem with the video-made-him-do-it theory of the case. The CMP videos, at least the parts of them we’ve seen, can’t be called “hate speech” by any stretch. They are not harsh denunciations of Planned Parenthood; they are exposés. The words and actions that horrify abortion foes—as well as decent people with more permissive views on abortion—are uttered and described by current and former Planned Parenthood employees and business associates.

We were struck by the contrast between the left’s responses to the Paris and Colorado Springs attacks. The former brought out a display of empathy toward Muslims; the latter, of antipathy toward pro-life Americans.

Hillary Clinton: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” It would be at least as true to say that pro-life Americans are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism—but instead Mrs. Clinton responded to Colorado Springs with this false choice: “We should be supporting Planned Parenthood—not attacking it.”

“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate [over accepting Syrian refugees],” President Obama said Nov. 17. “ISIL seeks to exploit the idea that there is a war between Islam and the West.”

Why wouldn’t a similar logic apply to the demonization of pro-life Americans in the aftermath of Colorado Springs? That’s not a rhetorical question: The logic doesn’t apply because the attacks were very different. The ones in Paris were carried out by an organization that unmistakably has religious motives and political goals. By all accounts the Colorado Springs killer was a lone nut. There is no antiabortion terrorist organization to which to recruit anyone.

Whatever the merits of his refugee policy, the president is right to reject “the idea that there is a war between Islam and the West,” although it would be fatuous to deny that that is how Islamic supremacists see the matter. To judge by the reactions to Colorado Springs, though, many on the left really do regard Americans who oppose abortion—almost all of whom do so peaceably—as their enemy.

To be fair, the left regards everyone who disagrees with them as their enemy.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Bloomberg: Sweden Anti-Immigration Party Surges in Poll Amid Refugee Crisis.