THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED. DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT THE PLANET? Carnegie Mellon study finds eating lettuce is more than three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon.

TERRY TEACHOUT: “Ten years and one week ago I was stricken with congestive heart failure during a Broadway preview that took place as a blizzard was getting underway.”

DID L.A. SCHOOLS OVERREACT? The NYC schools received a similar threat and deemed it a hoax.

A New York superintendent received the threat early Tuesday morning, [NYPD Commissioner Bill] Bratton said. De Blasio said the threat was specific, and Bratton said it appears to have come from overseas. The NYPD began an immediate investigation with the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the FBI.

Bratton said one indication that the email is a hoax is that Allah was not spelled with a capital “A.”

“The language in the email would lead us to believe that this is not a jihadist initiative,” he said. ” … That would be incredible to think that any jihadist would not spell Allah with a capital ‘A.’”

Latest report is that the threat originated from an IP address in Frankfurt, Germany. The LAUSD has 700,000 students and only announced the closure this morning. Think of the child care issues for working parents.

ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE AS Type 3 Diabetes?

SAM’S CLUB CEO: Don’t Send Me White Men.

BILL MCGURN: Looking Down on the American Voter: Whining about Donald Trump’s support instead of trying to grab it.

Mr. Obama does not trust the American people. We saw this earlier this month, when he used an Oval Office address about the carnage in San Bernardino to lecture the rest of us about tolerance. Once again he refused to call Islamist terror by its rightful name, perhaps because he is not sure how Americans he once described as clinging to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” might react if he were to speak honestly.

Today Mr. Obama has become our most politically correct president, with nothing real to say on the threats we face. No surprise, then, that the chief beneficiary would be our most politically incorrect candidate, Mr. Trump.

Because when Mr. Trump speaks about suspending Muslim immigration or “bombing the s—t” out of oil fields controlled by Islamic State, what supporters hear is this: I won’t let political correctness stand in the way of keeping America safe. And when Republicans respond by tut-tutting about how distasteful they find him—instead of showing why his argument is full of holes—they too come across as condescending, implicitly sharing the president’s belief that the knuckle-dragging American public just can’t handle the truth.

That’s a pity, because as admirable as a lack of political correctness is in a dangerous world, it’s no substitute for a tough foreign policy. For the main weakness of Trump foreign policy is not that it’s “fascist,” “unhinged” or “outrageous.” It’s that it’s almost all seat-of-the-pants.

In Las Vegas, Mr. Trump’s rivals have an excellent opportunity to move us past chest thumping. He (or she) might start by distinguishing his approach from the lead-from-behind ethos of the Obama years, which has left the world with a highly destabilized Middle East and an Islamic State fast rewriting established borders.

Yes.

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: What’s Happening to Obamacare’s PPOs?

Consumers buying insurance on the exchanges are increasingly finding themselves limited to more restrictive plans—narrow-network health maintenance organizations and exclusive-provider organizations—which offer extremely limited coverage when they want to visit out-of-network medical providers. And many patients aren’t thrilled. “I feel deserted,” one cancer patient, suddenly cut off from long-time doctors, told the Houston Chronicle this month. “This is my life we’re talking about,” another told the paper earlier this year.

The promoters of this scam should be punished the way people guilty of similar private sector fraud would be punished.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Our Affirmative Action Mess.

PETER BERKOWITZ: Universities Losing Control After Decades Of Indoctrination. Choose the form of your Destructor. . . .

UPDATE: A reminder: Evan Coyne Maloney’s excellent documentary, Indoctrinate U.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 950.

TERRORISM: All LAUSD schools closed by ‘credible threat’ of violence. “Officials have closed all Los Angeles Unified School District campuses Tuesday morning after receiving a ‘credible threat’ of violence involving backpacks and packages left at campuses. Authorities said they plan a search operation of all of the LAUSD’s more than 900 schools. The nation’s second-largest school district has more than 700,000 students.”

Plus: “We get threats all the time. This was a rare threat.”

UPDATE: Threat came from “overseas.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “Well, at least Spike Lee is in the clear on this; his latest bomb was discovered December 4th.” Heh.

SPEAKING OF OBAMA’S RECORD: Will Democrats Sink the ACA?

Among Democrats, there’s at least one part of the ACA that’s unpopular: the law’s so-called Cadillac tax. This provision, which is supposed to take effect in 2018, taxes plans offered by employers that pass a certain threshold: individual plans that cost over $10,200 annually or family plans that exceed $27,500. The total amount that a company pays over those thresholds for is taxed at 40 percent. Hillary Clinton—as well as some unions—have come out against this tax.

In Bloomberg, Peter Orszag, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, argues that this Democratic opposition to tax is the “biggest legislative threat the Affordable Care Act has faced in the past five years.” . . .

It would be deeply ironic if a Democratic initiative were to so deeply undermine the ACA. We don’t know whether Orszag is correct that the tax would successfully bring down costs, nor do we know whether eliminating the tax will sink the law. It’s certainly true, at the very least, that Democrats would need a clear way to make up the revenue lost by the tax, and the debate over the best place to find that money would likely be contentious. And, of course, it’s by no means guaranteed that those Democrats who oppose the tax will manage to undo it, even were Clinton to become President.

But regardless of how that all shakes out, this story shows that a big and controversial provision of the ACA has yet to implemented, and that stakes around its implementation are high. The debate over the ACA—no less over American health care as a whole—isn’t over. By a long shot.

Related: ObamaCare Premiums Just Keep Rising. I see a lot of my Facebook friends — especially youngish single ones — complaining about rising premiums and absurdly high deductibles. The GOP could make an issue of this, if it were smart. It could likely even target these people using social media. . . .

TWO POINTS: (1) HILLARY’S NO OBAMA; (2) OBAMA WOULD DO WORSE IF HE HAD TO ACTUALLY DEFEND HIS RECORD. Zogby Report Card: Obama would barely beat Trump in an election.

On the other hand, there’s this: Poll: Clinton would sail to win over Trump. To be fair, nobody has made Clinton defend her record, either.

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OBAMA’S AWFUL YEAR.

I wonder what sort of “fun” is on tap next year, the semi-retired president’s blessedly last year in office?

OTHERWISE, THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON: Know Your Tropes For Exploiting Terrorism.

TERRORISM: Before the final shootout, four mysterious hours in San Bernardino.

ROGER SIMON BRINGS NEWS FROM TRUMP CITY: Fear and Loathing in Where Else?

I don’t care what candidate you support, the souls of the dead of San Bernardino will be hovering over that debate stage Tuesday night.  This kind of butchery cannot be allowed to continue on our soil — hopefully not anywhere.  Even more, it cannot be allowed to expand.

The most disturbing fact to emerge in the last few days is that our head of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, evidently put the kibosh on surveying social media accounts of Middle Easterners applying for visas.  That is nothing short of political correctness gone insane.

Read the whole thing.

GIVEN THAT THE ONLY PART OF THEIR “CULTURE” THEY CARE ABOUT IS VOTING DEMOCRAT, THAT’S TRUE: Liberal Hispanic activists assail Rubio, Cruz as ‘traitors’ to their culture. See, if you can’t call Republicans a bunch of old white people — because, you know, that’s the Democratic field this time around — you call them race traitors, a term with a long Democratic Party history. . . .

All leftist affinity groups care more about leftism than affinity, when push comes to shove.

ASHE SCHOW: Fox News documentary covers campus sexual assault.

This past weekend, Fox News ran a special report about how colleges and universities across the country are handling sexual assault. The documentary (in which I appeared) ran counter to the prevailing narrative that schools are hotbeds of sexual assault where accusers aren’t taken seriously.

The report, hosted by Martha MacCallum, follows the stories of three men accused of sexual assault and the way they were branded as rapists despite evidence to the contrary in a culture that says we should believe all accusations regardless of merit.

“We’ve long heard that government is best kept out of the bedroom, but as it turns out, in colleges across the nation, government is insisting that it be referee in life’s most intimate moments,” MacCallum says at the beginning of the report. “And far from resisting, activists on campus are inviting the government in. In fact, they’re demanding that it do more.”

It’s a threesome with creepy Uncle Sam. As I’ve said, I think that this kind of micromanagement of adults’ sex lives violates the right of sexual privacy developed in Lawrence v. Texas.

CELEBRATING A DESERTER IN THE ROSE GARDEN. Regarding Bowe Bergdahl, Mark Steyn writes:

Cynicism about the politicization and corruption of all federal institutions is so widespread that this decision must be accounted something of a heartening surprise: the Army has ignored the recommendations of its investigating officer and decided that Bowe Bergdahl will face a general court martial for desertion and “misbehavior before the enemy”.

For some of us, who Bergdahl was was obvious from the first day. Yours truly, June 2nd 2014:

So the Taliban get five warriors back to return to the battlefield. And in return we get some Stockholm Syndrome deserter-revert to head up the next “War is never the answer” rally.

By contrast, the Administration was either deeply stupid, or chose to lie to the people:

Bowe Bergdahl was …declared by the laughably misnamed “National Security Advisor” to have “served the United States with honor and distinction”.

Deeply stupid, or chose to lie to the people? As they say at Red State, “Embrace the healing power of ‘And.’” As Steyn writes, “If there were a real press in this country, someone would ask Obama how it is that he became the first president to host a Rose Garden celebration for a deserter.”

Related: “I wonder if Barack Obama is insane enough to contemplate pardoning this guy, some time in December of 2016?  It would be, in fact, insane; but at the same time, the President’s got his own reputation to protect – or, more accurately, his own self-image to pander to.  God forbid that a man that the White House described as serving with honor and distinction should rot in a military jail for the next half-decade…”

NOTE THAT THE WORD USED ISN’T “BRIGHTNESS:” The Unbearable Lightness of Being John Kerry.

HOW COULD THEY HAVE ANYTHING TO HIDE? THIS IS THE MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY! State Department sued over refugee plan.

A conservative legal watchdog is suing the State Department to obtain documents about its work with aid organizations to resettle refugees in the United States.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit, months after failing to obtain the records through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In a statement, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the administration’s failure to respond to its request is proof “that the Obama administration has something to hide about refugees, terrorism, and national security.”
“The Obama administration doesn’t want Americans to know about how it places refugees from terrorist states in their local communities,” Fitton said.

In particular, the conservative group is seeking to obtain agreements between the State Department and the nine voluntary organizations that help to place refugees within the U.S.

Those will be released no sooner than December of 2016.

TIME MAGAZINE’S PERSON OF THE YEAR DECLARES MULTICULTURALISM A SHAM:

“Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a ‘life lie,’ ” or a sham, she said, before adding that Germany may be reaching its limits in terms of accepting more refugees. “The challenge is immense,” she said. “We want and we will reduce the number of refugees noticeably.”

Although those remarks may seem uncharacteristic of Merkel, she probably would insist that she was not contradicting herself. In fact, she was only repeating a sentiment she first voiced several years ago when she said multiculturalism in Germany had “utterly failed.”

But that didn’t stop her from doubling down; Europe is in the process of getting it good and hard as a result.