SO, BASICALLY, THIS SORT OF THING IS BUSINESS AS USUAL: Yet Another Email Scandal? … This Time at Department of Homeland Security. “According to press reports, Johnson and 28 other top Homeland Security officials sought and were granted waivers to use the personal email accounts for the past year, despite the practice having been banned in April 2014. Included among those senior Homeland Security officials using the private email accounts on government-owned computers were Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Chief of Staff Christian Marrone and General Counsel Stevan Bunnell. . . . The waivers granted to Johnson and 28 other senior staffers were in direct violation of Homeland Security’s Sensitive Systems Policy Directive 4300A, promulgated on April 30, 2014. The directive was issued after hackers breached the Office of Personnel Management computer system.”

HE’S WORKING FOR DONALD TRUMP, RIGHT? Convert who protested outside Parliament over Syrian airstrikes with poster saying ‘I am a Muslim… do you trust me enough for a hug?’ now faces jail for threatening to bomb MP’s house.

BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: “How did we become a country more afraid of causing offense than playing defense?”, asks Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal:

Here’s how we became that society: By pretending that the extreme branch of Islam to which Farook plainly belonged is a protected religion rather than a dangerous ideology. By supposing that it is somehow immoral to harbor graver reservations about 10,000 refugees from Syria or Iraq than, say, New Zealand. By being so afraid to give moral offense that we neglect to play the most elementary form of defense.

If you see something, say something, goes the ubiquitous slogan. But heaven help you if what you see and say turns out to be the wrong something—an alarm clock, for instance, as opposed to a bomb.

This is President Obama’s vision of society, and it is why he delivered this sterile, scolding homily that offered no serious defense against the next jihadist massacre. We have become a country that doesn’t rouse itself to seriousness except when a great many people are murdered. Fourteen deaths apparently isn’t going to move the policy needle, as far as this president is concerned. Will 1,400?

As Betsy Newmark adds, “And it is the very self-reproachful sensitivity that Stephens describes that Trump’s bigoted statements play into.”

YA THINK? National Journal: Democrats’ Biggest Vulnerability In 2016: National Security. “Demo­crats are at risk of polit­ic­ally mar­gin­al­iz­ing them­selves on na­tion­al se­cur­ity in the run-up to the 2016 pres­id­en­tial elec­tion, ca­ter­ing to a base that seems dis­con­nec­ted from the grow­ing anxi­ety that the pub­lic feels over the threat from Is­lam­ic ter­ror­ism. Dur­ing a month when a hor­rif­ic ter­ror­ist at­tack killed 130 in Par­is and a homegrown, IS­IS-in­spired at­tack killed 14 in San Bern­ardino, Cali­for­nia, the Demo­crat­ic Party’s ma­jor fo­cus has been on cli­mate change and gun con­trol.”

A HEADLINE THAT WORKS BOTH LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY: Saudis Trying to Kill US Frackers.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Making of Mork and Mindy.

It’s an exhaustive aural history of the show and how it ran out of steam after the first season or two, though I felt a bit seasick after wading through all of the interspersed animated gifs of series clips featuring the late Robin Williams in all his original manic glory. Plus backstage gossip regarding how guest star “Raquel Welch was any director’s nightmare.”

(Via James Lileks. And in his honor, the obligatory Trek connection.)

VIDEO: Me on Dana Loesch’s Blaze TV show talking about Obama’s gun-ban distraction.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Tide Is Turning Against Democrats in the Debate Over Gun Control.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 943. Brian Leiter attributed nefarious motives to Paul Caron’s ongoing coverage, and polled his readers only to find that the greatest number of them agreed that “there is an IRS scandal and Taxprof is doing a service by keeping track of it.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. President Obama Allows a Literal War On Women.

OOF:

THE GRAY LADY’S PINCH OF PRIVILEGE: How Gun Control = More “White Privilege!”

JAMES TARANTO: The Left Loses Control: The Antigun Crusade Becomes Ugly And Unhinged.

You may ask: Why spend the first paragraph stating the obvious when the point of the editorial—signaled by that “But . . .”—is its antithesis? Because the Times is walking back this embarrassingly wrong assertion, from an editorial two days earlier: “There will be post-mortems and an official search for a ‘motive’ for this latest gun atrocity, as if something explicable had happened.”

The Times, of course, rushed to fit last week’s terrorist attacks into its “gun violence” template, and the Saturday editorial was a desperate attempt to keep it there against all evidence. In the print edition, the editorial ran in the left column, just below a banner headline reading “F.B.I. IS TREATING RAMPAGE AS AN ACT OF TERRORISM” (online: “F.B.I. Treating San Bernardino Attack as Terrorism Case”). It seems the Times execs admire our “Two Papers in One!” trope.

The editorial dealt with the contradiction by equivocating on the definition of terrorism: Politicians who favor gun rights “distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.” And the editorial went beyond earlier calls for “modest,” “common-sense” “gun-safety” laws to urge confiscation of legally owned firearms. . . .

The Times’s front-page editorializing may be an attempt to keep up with the Daily News, a New York tabloid that could be described as the Times for infants. The News’s reaction to the San Bernardino attack has been utterly unhinged.

The News’s first reaction was to denounce prayer. “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS,” screamed the front-page headline: “As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes.” The cover featured tweets from Republican Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Lindsey Graham and Speaker Paul Ryan saying they were praying for the San Bernardino victims, survivors and emergency personnel.

And it wasn’t just the News. It appeared as if the left had collectively decided that they could finally get gun control through the simple expedient of enacting prayer control. Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted: “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing—again.”

The Hill reported that Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, said: “We’ve had far too many moments of silence on the floor of the House. And while it is right to respectfully acknowledge the losses, we can no longer remain silent. What gives us the right to hold moments of silence when we do nothing to act upon the cause of the grief?” The Los Angeles Times reports that Rep. Jackie Speier, a Bay Area Democrat, plans to boycott any moment of silence for mass-shooting victims.

The Times’s Saturday editorial also scoffed at “elected leaders” who “offer prayers for gun victims.” And the paper’s columnist Timothy Egan demanded “No More Thoughts and Prayers.” Gun control, prayer control, thought control.

In the war on thought, no one is more militant than the editorial staff at the Daily News. . . .

The Times, the News, Murphy, Stasi and others have certainly succeeded in drawing attention to themselves, in part by paying attention to one another. “Nice of @nytimes to credit @NYDailyNews cover for showing impact a front page can have,” log-rolled the News’s Harry Siegel Saturday on Twitter.

Of course a child’s tantrum has that kind of “impact” too. In terms of adult impact, however—changing minds and policies—we suspect this will end up being as effective as the Times’s 1920 denunciation of Warren Harding. He went on to win the general election, 404-127, with what remains the largest popular-vote margin (60% to 34%) in modern electoral history. He took office in 1921 and was arguably the 20th century’s most underrated one-term president.

Indeed.

FIRST THE LA TIMES REJECTS OBAMA’S GUN-BAN PLAN, NOW IT’S SLATE: President Obama Just Offered Two Bad Ideas for Fighting Gun Violence. And it’s even Jamelle Bouie at Slate.

SARAH PALIN TALKS FAITH AND SON TRIG, and praises A&E’s Down Syndrome Docu-Series ‘Born This Way,’ at the PJ Lifestyle section.

STANLEY KURTZ: A Plan To Restore Free Speech On Campus. “The greatest advantage enjoyed by supporters of free speech is that the public outside of the universities — liberals and conservatives alike — continues to uphold the ideal of intellectual freedom. The most powerful way to activate that support is by way of state university systems. State legislatures have the ability to establish and reinforce the core values of their respective university systems, and any such initiatives would have consequences far beyond public institutions.”

Federal civil rights legislation protecting college students and faculty from arbitrary punishment for speech is also worth passing. Given Obama’s repeated statements on the importance of campus free speech, it would be hard for him to veto it.

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TWO WASHINGTON POSTS IN ONE:

● “History’s greatest invention: the refrigerator.”

—Headline, the Washington Post, December 4th, 2015.

● “Europe to America: Your love of air-conditioning is stupid.”

—Headline, the Washington Post, July 22nd, 2015.

● “Air Conditioning Is A ‘Big, Sexist Plot,’* Washington Post Investigation Reveals.”

—Headline, the Daily Caller, July 25th, 2015.

* Of course it is. Isn’t everything?

RON FOURNIER: The Fish Rots From The Head In Chicago: Why aren’t President Obama and Hillary Clinton demanding Rahm Emanuel’s head? Because he knows where the bodies are buried.

HOW BIG A FLOP IS OBAMA’S NO-FLY GUN-BAN PROPOSAL? THIS BIG: L.A. Times Editorial: Should people on the no-fly list be able to buy guns? Yes. “It is worth noting that the terrorist-list proposal would not have affected the San Bernardino attackers because neither of them was on the watch list, at least as far as has been reported.” When even the anti-gun LAT hates your proposal, it’s a flop indeed.

To be fair, the whole thing was just intended as a distraction from Obama’s many national security failures, not as a serious proposal.

CAN WE REALLY NARROW IT DOWN TO ONLY ONE? The Most Frightening Thing About a Hillary Clinton Presidency.

SO THIS SEEMS LIKE NEWS: “On or about Nov. 18th… there was a deposit of $28,500 into Syed Farook’s bank account.”

UPDATE: More here.

BUT, APPARENTLY, NOT TO CHANGE IT: WaPo: Recent terrorist attacks push Obama to reassess, and defend, his strategy.

ENDORSED: Cruz promotes Second Amendment rights as response to mass killings.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz offered a staunch defense of Second Amendment rights on the presidential campaign trail in South Carolina.

Cruz dropped his G’s and appeared to adopt a heavier southern twang in an appearance with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Rep. Trey Gowdy for a town hall in Greenville on Monday.

Scott playfully ribbed Cruz for his education at schools such as Harvard and Princeton, but the senator’s elocution appeared aimed at a deep southern audience.

“Have you noticed that just about every one of these shootings happens in a gun-free zone?” Cruz said. “Ain’t nothin’ bad guys like better than a bunch of unarmed victims.”

True.