MARK STEYN: The James Taylor Doctrine.

Related: James Baker Advising Jeb Bush, Keynoting J Street Conference. ” Baker is of course infamous for reportedly saying in private conversation, while George HW Bush’s secretary of state, ‘F**k the Jews, they didn’t vote for us anyway.’ But his antipathy towards Israel is well documented. He wanted the US to punish Israel for destroying Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. He hated Netanyahu as early as 1990, barring him from entering the State Department’s building. And last but not least, he co-wrote the Iraq Study Group’s 2006 paper that recommended (among other things) that the US tilt its foreign policy away from Israel and towards Syria and Iran, advice that President Obama seems to have taken to heart.”

Poor Israel. All the worst people in our horrible political class hate her.

DR. VON NEUMANN, CALL YOUR OFFFICE: This Robotic Arm Can Build Parts for Itself.

BRITAIN DIGESTS THE FAILURES OF MULTICULTURALISM: We must listen to Trevor Phillips and his inconvenient truths about race: Britain is indebted to the former equalities head for highlighting the mess in which multiculturalism has left us all. “To find inconvenient facts suppressed in one leading university may be regarded as censorship. To have an entire society silenced looks like something worse, and far more sinister. Yet that is the picture of the UK drawn by Trevor Phillips in his excoriating Channel 4 documentary, Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True, to be screened tonight. You have to hand it to the former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. It takes guts to tell a story in which your own side, who fancy themselves supremely virtuous, emerge as the baddies.”

WELL, THAT’S COMFORTING: Records Reveal That Elizabeth Warren Has Met With Federal Reserve Chief Twice As Often As Any Other Lawmaker. “Warren was also among a handful of Democratic lawmakers to publicly advocate for Yellen to take over for the Fed instead of Larry Summers, the president’s preferred pick. It is rare for lawmakers to publicly advocate for an individual before the president has made a selection.”

GOOD THING THERE’S NO DANGER OF THEM GETTING NUKES: Iran endorses nuclear EMP attack on United States. “American officials have confirmed that Iranian military brass have endorsed a nuclear electromagnetic pulse explosion that would attack the country’s power system. American defense experts made the discovery while translating a secret Iranian military handbook, raising new concerns about Tehran’s recent nuclear talks with the administration.” Relax. Valerie Jarrett would never let anything like that happen.

I don’t want to live in a Bill Quick disaster novel.

ED MORRISSEY: Dems Use Loretta Lynch as Bait for a War on Women.

IOWAHAWK: “Obama tried harder to influence the Israeli election of 2015 than to support the Iranian uprising of 2009.”

APRES MOI, LE DELUGE: A reader emails:

One interesting angle on BHO’s double-down lame duck presidency that I’ve not seen anywhere is that he clearly couldn’t care less about positioning his putative successor for a win in 2016. I can’t think of a sitting president (in my memory at least) whose VP was not considered a serious candidate, if not the heir presumptive. (For all their mutual disdain, Bill Clinton was willing to do whatever it took for Gore, who was so busy distancing himself from Clinton, he failed to notice that folks didn’t care.) I don’t think he’s clever enough to be going through the Left’s wish list (“mandatory voting!” “amnesty!” “free community college!”) to allow Hillary to position herself to his right the better to appeal to the median voter.

I suppose that it fits within the (1) “He’s above politics, man” meme that gets floated as well as the (2) he’s an insatiable narcissist, which are two sides, perhaps, of the same coin.

Maybe this is being discussed and I just don’t visit the right websites.

Not as much as it might be. Good point.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 679.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Bibi Is Back: The Consequences for U.S.-Israeli Relations.

Bibi’s win is another in a long string of Middle East failures by President Obama and will add to the belief by both our friends and our enemies in the region that the costs of being Obama’s friend can outweigh the costs of his enmity. Egypt’s President Mubarak thought he was Obama’s friend; so did his successor President Morsi. The Syrian moderate rebels expected their friend in the White House to back them. The Zionist Union thought that promising to work more closely with Obama was the ticket to an electoral win in Israel. Meanwhile, as Bibi can now testify, those who defy this White House don’t seem to pay much of a price: just ask Syria’s Assad or, for that matter, his patrons in Iran. ISIS has more visibility and power in the Middle East than al-Qaeda ever did, while the Sunni Arab tribes of Iraq who saved America’s bacon during the surge and who counted on American influence to protect their interests in postwar Iraq are being overrun by Shi’a militias. . . .

If Bibi’s election message is that the peace process as we have known it needs fundamental change and reshaping, he is right. But if his intention is to kill it, or even to proclaim a moratorium during which Israel will create so many new facts on the ground that the concept of a Palestinian state no longer looks viable, then U.S.-Israeli relations will continue to cool.

Yeah, I’m not sure anything Bibi could do would make Obama happy, except maybe die. And I don’t think the Palestinians have done anything to deserve their own state.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I’ve been watching Obama’s growing hostility for years now. The Jewish analogy I have used for him is Pharaoh. If you recall in Exodus, the Jew-hating ruler was so bent on destroying the Jews, he ignored all of Mose’s warnings and destroyed himself and his country instead. The term for that is hubris. Self-defeating arrogance that puts yourself above Hashem. In my estimation, Obama has only experienced three plagues so far, with four lying in wait. He’s cursing the wind now and it won’t be long before he completely loses control. It should be quite a sight.”

WHAT JIMMY CARTER RUINED: 25 Photos of Iran Before the 1979 Revolution.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food. No matter what happens, you gotta eat.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!

ROSS DOUTHAT: Men, Money, and the Marriage Crisis: “This is not the place to get into the separate debate about the wisdom of our immigration policy, but if you take it as a given, the issue is this: The men dragging down the overall low-skilled wage average since the ’60s are primarily recent immigrants, whose numbers have dramatically increased relative to mid-century, and whose wages are low by American standards but obviously much higher than the wages earned by their fathers and grandparents in their countries of origin. . . . All that I’m saying here is that we should approach this policy debate with a real sense of the strong cultural element at work, and without the illusion that we’re dealing with a crisis in marriage and family that’s been brought on by economic devastation, immiseration, stark decline. The trend in income and safety-net spending doesn’t bear that thesis out … which is why its defenders often end up invoking income inequality rather than absolute trends, a subject I hope to turn to later on this week.”

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Egypt Wants To Junk Cairo. “Roughly half of Egyptians earn less than two dollars per day, so you can imagine what the slums look and smell like, but even the ‘fancy’ neighborhoods like Zamalek are drab and depressing. So it’s easy to understand why the nation’s rulers want to pick up and leave and start over. Cairo will sink even further if that ever happens, but what do they care? They use a crooked military dictatorship to lord over the country like it’s their own private plantation.”

This is basically what Nigeria did with Abuja, or Brazil with Brasilia.

NEW FRONTIERS IN H1-B VISAS: Edison’s plans to cut jobs, hire foreign workers is assailed.

Southern California Edison’s plans to lay off hundreds of employees and hire foreign workers instead is coming under attack from lawmakers in Congress and local unions.

On Tuesday, more than 300 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers rallied in Irvine in support of their fellow Edison employees and protested what they say are unfair labor practices.

Meanwhile, members of Congress are upset about reports that Edison is laying off workers in favor of bringing in cheaper labor from overseas under the controversial H-1B visa program. The visas are intended to bring in skilled and educated foreign workers.

Limiting H1B visas would make a good issue for the GOP, and split the Dems.

A. BARTON HINKLE: The Death of Free Speech on College Campus: From trigger warnings to “free speech zones,” the First Amendment is in peril on campus. I think that we need civil rights legislation abolishing qualified immunity and offering treble damages for deprivation of civil rights by accredited institutions of higher learning.

WHAT’S SAD IS HOW MANY PEOPLE THINK THIS WAY: The First Amendment Should Never Protect Hatred. “One of the most admirable things about Europe is that most (if not all) of the right-wing rhetoric that you hear in the US is explicitly against the law there. For example, attempting to link Islam with terrorism, saying that gay marriage isn’t really marriage, or saying that trans women aren’t really women would get you charged with discrimination and/or incitement to hatred. Numerous European public figures have been charged with hate crimes for implying that large-scale immigration is connected to higher crime. In fact, a politician in Sweden was prosecuted for hate crimes for posting statistics about immigrant crime on Facebook. Assaults on the human dignity of Muslims are simply not tolerated in Europe, and Europe cracks down hard on any attempts to incite hatred against Muslims. In a notable example, a woman in Austria was convicted of a hate crime for suggesting that the Islamic Prophet Muhammed was a pedophile. Recently, a man in Sweden was charged with incitement to ethnic hatred for wearing a T-shirt saying “Islam is the devil.” Nobody in Europe believes that these laws interfere with their sacred, guaranteed right to freedom of speech. Rather, these laws protect freedom of speech by ensuring that it is used responsibly and for the purposes of good.”

THAT SEEMS ABOUT RIGHT: Media declare loser in Israeli election: Barack Obama.

WAIT, WHAT? “Sometimes white people are right, in spite of their skin color.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D). THIS SHOULD WORK. Judge sends strong message with teacher’s sentence.

Saying there is no room for double standards, an Oakland County judge sentenced a 30-year-old female teacher to spend the next six to 15 years in prison for having a sexual relationship with a student. . . .

Grant was dismayed by letters asking for leniency for Ronk, a former teacher at Bishop Foley High School in Madison Heights, but making no mention of concern for the boy.

“You are dealing with children that are still developing emotionally,” Grant said Wednesday. “To have this continuing double standard is unacceptable. The law does not recognize a double standard, the law is clearly on point in terms that these children are developing human beings. This was a person in position with power and influence over him.”

If we’re going to end this pervasive culture of female sexual entitlement, there will have to be consequences for abusive behavior.

JONAH GOLDBERG: “I was very, very, disappointed in the Walker team for the decision to capitulate to the bullying efforts of the Iowa state GOP.” “I get that Walker needs to win Iowa and that staffers aren’t more important than the candidate. But principles are. If Walker didn’t want a critic of the Iowa caucuses on his payroll he shouldn’t have hired one. But he did.”

Ethanol subsidies are stupid, though that’s only sort of what this is about. And while the special interest groups are watching and keeping score, they aren’t the only ones out there who are watching and keeping score.

GOVERNMENT AS CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE: Secret Service erased tapes of latest White House incident. A fish rots from the head.

IT’S HARD TO SANDBAG TED CRUZ: Late Night’s Seth Meyers sandbags Ted Cruz on climate change: “So, you trust satellites more than computers?” “This clip showed that this left-leaning audience, which was fully primed and ready to cheer for yet another sermon on climate change, was disappointed when they discovered that there were cogent counterarguments that had the capacity to dispel their faith. Of course, no semi-religious conviction dies easy and moments like these are sure to be repeated in the coming months. For conservatives, that might be the best news they’ve heard since, well, last night.”

A good response: “I trust data more than models. A model is the pickup artist book that says if you wear a purple tie women will say yes. Data is what actually happens when you try it.”

THOUGHTS ON THE OUTRAGEOUS USE OF POLICING AS A CITY REVENUE STREAM.