THE CLOSE TIES BETWEEN exercise and beer.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The 10 Obfuscatory Essentials for Covering Jihad as a Journalist: “Minimize the extent of the threat, separate the jihadist’s ideology from his acts, and if possible, proudly display your Western guilt by attributing the attacks to perceived slights and injustices at the hands of Israel, Europe, or America.”

TAR. FEATHERS. Michigan Man Charged With Felony For Passing Out Leaflets On Juror Rights In Front Of Courthouse. This is so clearly legal — and stories like this come out often enough — that it suggests the people who make these arrests just don’t care about the law.

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING…Man saw suspicious activity in Calif. but didn’t report it because of profiling concerns:

From CBS Los Angeles:

Neighbors in Redlands were shocked that the suspects had ties to their area.

“I was in awe that it was happening four houses down from my property,” one neighbor said.

A man who has been working in the area said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.

“We sat around lunch thinking, ‘What were they doing around the neighborhood?’” he said.  “We’d see them leave where they’re raiding the apartment.”

From last month: If you see something, say something. And get sued for $15 million.

And from Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal on the tenth anniversary of 9/11:

A note about CNN’s “Footnotes of 9/11,” which takes up the subject of people who are mentioned in the “9/11 Commission Report.” They were part of the history of the day, if peripheral figures, though in one or two instances they emerge as more. One of the more memorable of the eight subjects here is the Dulles Airport ticket agent who checked in two of the hijackers—Middle Eastern men whose look and demeanor immediately raised his suspicions. The agent followed the men, he reports, then stopped himself from alerting anyone. He didn’t want to be accused of prejudice, of harboring suspicions because of racial feelings. A vignette from a footnote—but one that has much to tell about some of the underlying reasons for the ease with which the hijackers were able to board the planes and fulfill their murderous mission.

In her article, Rabinowitz also reviewed a Smithsonian Channel special called “9/11: Day That Changed The World.”  But in reality, very little has changed when it comes to the power of PC to stifle doubleplusungood crimethink.

ED MORRISSEY: Here’s Why the Media Stopped Reporting on Clinton’s New Emails.

This lack of interest seems to be of a piece with the narrative that emerged in late October, after the Democrats’ first presidential debate and Clinton’s testimony to the House Select Committee on Benghazi. They rushed to declare that time frame “the best ten days of the Clinton campaign,” even though as Marco Rubio pointed out in a subsequent debate , the testimony actually demonstrated that Clinton lied about Benghazi.

In an e-mail uncovered in the scandal, she told her family within hours of the attack on the consulate that it was an organized terrorist operation, while insisting for the next two weeks that it was a spontaneous demonstration in response to an obscure YouTube video.

Still, ever since then the narrative has had Clinton recovering her bearings and moving past the e-mail scandal even as the FBI probe continues and more classified information is redacted. The collective yawn from the media after this week’s release gives us an indication of the level of media interest we can expect, as Hillary Clinton gets closer to the nomination. They want to keep that narrative going rather than look at the thousand ways Clinton lied about her e-mail system and risked national security in order to thwart legitimate oversight into the State Department’s performance.

Just imagine the media’s curiosity if Clinton actually won the election. Perhaps the best reason to vote Republican in 2016 is to allow the media to resume its stated mission of holding government accountable and holding the powerful responsible for their actions.

Yep. If you want to see accountability in the White House, and concern for civil liberties in America, you have to have a GOP President.

I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC, BUT WE’RE CNN, AND WE LOVE TO SCREW WITH THE NEWS: Not the Onion: CNN Does Christmas Report About Michigan Satanists.

The Onion at least tries to be intentionally silly.

Incidentally, aren’t there other fast-growing alternative religions in Michigan that CNN could be doing a timely report on these days?

PARIS COMES TO SAN BERNARDINO?: First suspect identified as Syed Farouk, “very religious” Muslim.

“He was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim,” his estranged father of the same name told the New York Daily News. . . .

A sympathetic neighbor of the deceased suspect said that “maybe two years ago, he became more religious. He grew a beard and started to wear religious clothing: the long shirt that’s like a dress and the cap on his head.”

He may also have traveled to Saudia Arabia, in a pilgrimage to Mecca.

One other suspect who was killed in a shootout with police was identified as Tashfeen Malik, Farook’s wife, who was born in Pakistan. Farook met Malik online and she left Saudi Arabia to join him in the U.S. . . .

RELATED:  ISIS adherents praise San Bernardino massacre, “America burning.”

ISIS extremists began celebrating the mass shooting in San Bernardino hours after the massacre, creating the hashtag #America_Burning, Vocativ discovered. The Islamic State, however, did not take credit for the shootings in the ghoulish postings.

Vocativ deep web analysts used our technology to discover the sickening ISIS posts on web forums where the extremists frequently share information.

“Three lions made us proud. They are still alive,” one ISIS adherent tweeted in Arabic after the shootings at Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. “California streets are full with soldiers with heavy weapons. The Unites States is burning #America_Burning #Takbir”

ثلاث ليوث اثلجوا صدورنا بفضل الله مازالوا أحياء ويتجولون شوارع كاليفورنيا بالزى العسكرى وبأسلحة ثقيلة#أمريكا_تشتعل#تكبيـر

— ﺳ̲ﻟ̲آﻣ̲يےﻋ ﺂ̲ﻟ̲ﺩ̲ۆﻟة (@alSaoD__yahoD__) December 2, 2015

“God is great and he the one to be praised for that,” another supporter posted in the forum in Arabic. “This is hell with god’s will.” But the hashtag was primarily used on Twitter where one ISIS extremist taunted the United States with a tweet that read “Let America know a new era #California #America_burning.”

لتعلم #أمريكا أننا في زمان جديد #كاليفورنيا#امريكا_تشتعل — أبومصعب المصري (@abomossabelmass) December 2, 2015

Another ISIS supporter posted in reference to the shooting on Twitter, “God is the greatest. May god spread fear in the homes of the Crusaders.”

الله اكبر…اللهم انشر الرعب في عقر ديار الصليب فكم اذو المسلمين — john–almwhid (@almwhid_john) December 2, 2015

Hope, and change. But hey, I’m sure it was just a dispute over a party, workplace violence or something. As President Obama told reporters this morning, “At this stage, we do not yet know why this terrible event occurred,” Obama said during remarks at the White House. He added: “It is possible this was terrorist-related, but we don’t know. It is also possible this was workplace related.”

JIM GERAGHTY: So How Much of this ‘Hybrid’ Attack Was Jihadism?

Yesterday the country got the perfect Rorschach test of violence. People who want to downplay violent Islamist jiahdism and self-radicalization among American-born Muslims will see “workplace violence” or an excuse for another gun control push. Others will contend this is an Islamist sleeper cell, even if it isn’t formally set up by ISIS or al-Qaeda.

CNN summarizes what is known about Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik:

Police say Farook, 28, and Malik, 27, are either married or in a relationship. The Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, said Farook has been married for two years — but wouldn’t confirm whether Malik was the wife’s name.

Farook and his wife left their 6-month-old girl with Farook’s grandmother Wednesday and said they had a doctor’s appointment.

They abandoned their child? Okay, stop. This was not driven by a workplace dispute. To leave your infant child and then commit horrific violence that is likely to lead to your death from police action requires an almost otherworldly devotion to . . . some other cause, something you consider more important than life, death, and the inherent biological urge to protect your offspring. “Larry from accounting keeps taking the last doughnut at staff meetings” or “they took my red Swingline stapler” isn’t the sort of motive at work here.

What motivation have we seen that would make seemingly ordinary people go on mass-murdering attacks? What ideology or twisted religious fervor have we seen people willing to sacrifice their children for, willing to die for?

Plus, Jim quotes a report nothing the presence amidst the IEDs, and the “tactical clothing, including vests stuffed with ammunition magazines,” “the couple also had GoPro cameras strapped to their body armor.” As Jim adds, “That’s the sort of thing you bring if you want to make videos to terrorize other people, and rally others to their cause or ideology . . . it also would explain why they left the scene instead of staying to shoot it out with police at the social services facility. They intended to live to tell the tale, at least for a while.”

Read the whole thing.

NOT ALL COLLEGES ARE TRYING TO LIMIT FREE EXPRESSION: Chapman University has recently taken several impressive steps to prove its commitment to free speech on campus. First, it developed and ratified a statement on free speech modeled after the University of Chicago’s free expression policy statement. Then, last weekend, Chancellor Daniele C. Struppa wrote a fantastic piece in The Orange County Register on the meaning of free expression and the recent efforts on college campuses to censor offensive speech. You can read more about the Chapman statement and Struppa’s article over at The Torch.

SOME MODEST PROPOSALS TO REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS: My USA Today column: The Climate Change Jet Set.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 938.

THE NEW YORK POST GOES THERE:

Unlike the Dems who were blaming the GOP and NRA within minutes yesterday, they waited to see who did it. . . .

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Paul Ryan: Attacks no reason to ‘trample’ gun rights. “I think we can protect our civil liberties while also giving us the tools to prevent these kinds of terrorist attacks from occurring. We are a free society and we don’t want terrorists to make us take away our freedoms from ourselves.”

Democrats used to say things like that. Now they’re all about the trampling.

WHY ARE HELICOPTER PARENTS SO NERVOUS?

The most plausible explanation I’ve heard is that we got richer, and richer people can expend more effort protecting their kids. This certainly jibes with the observation that the most obsessively overprotected kids are the children of the affluent. Yet even this explanation raises a sort of “yes, but.” We haven’t gotten that much richer in the 30 years since I was in school, and yet parenting has undergone a radical transformation. Despite legions of women going back to work, parents spend more time with their children than they did a few decades ago. Can we really explain this in terms of people getting richer? Intensive parenting is most common among the group of parents who are working more hours than they used to, not fewer; from that fact, and their increasing incomes, I’d predict that they’d be paying other people more to supervise and manage their children, not to hear that they were doing so themselves.

So while the economic explanation rings true, “we got richer” doesn’t seem to be enough. Rather, we have to look at the specific way in which we got richer. Specifically, we need to look at the rise of the extensively educated professional class.

One of the things you might notice about novels from the 1950s and 1960s is how many of the affluent people in them are engaged in trades like selling insurance, manufacturing some dull but necessary article, or running a car lot. These people are rarely the heroes of the novel (even then, writers found it much easier to imagine themselves as doctors or lawyers or, for that matter, as rough-hewn working-class types than as regional office-supplies distributors). But it is telling that those novelists took for granted that the writers and professionals would be intermingled with the makers and sellers, something that comes across as distinctly odd to the residents of the modern coastal corridors. Few of my friends even run a budget outside their own households, much less a profit and loss statement, and very few indeed have ever gone on a sales call.

Our elites have declined in quality. But there’s more to it than that. Read the whole thing.

THEY SHOULD: Will Congress Ever Declare War On ISIS?

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SOME MODEST PROPOSALS TO REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS: My USA Today column: The Climate Change Jet Set.

CLAYTON CRAMER: This San Bernardino Attack Sure Sounds Like ISIS. Impossible. The President has assured us that ISIS is contained.

FLASHBACK: People don’t stop killers. People with guns do.

And another flashback: The Arizona Tragedy And The Politics of Blood Libel.

BRAD THOR: “I have never seen CAIR jump into action this fast before. This is spin. This is damage control.”

Related: “Hi @johnpodesta, any thoughts on your employee slandering the GOP and NRA in the wake of the Muslim terror attack?”

ONE YEAR AFTER THE BOGUS UVA RAPE STORY, bogus documentary ‘The Hunting Ground’ on shortlist for Oscar nomination.

Variety had predicted in October that the film would make the list, and while being on the shortlist doesn’t mean it will actually get a nomination, I think its chances are good. (And if it does get the nomination, I’ll be able to say the creators of an Oscar-nominated propaganda film tried and failed to discredit me.)

In its write-up of the shortlist, the New York Times noted up front that the film has been criticized, unlike the other shortlist candidates.

“‘The Hunting Ground,’ recently broadcast on CNN, has been the subject of criticism from college officials and others who say it is filled with distortions; the director Kirby Dick and the producer Amy Ziering have stood by the film,” the Times wrote.

Those “distortions” include severely flawed statistics exaggerating the problem of campus sexual assault, misrepresented allegations from several of the film’s main accusers and almost no effort to tell the full story of campus sexual assault by seeking comment from the students and schools maligned. It wasn’t until after the film was sent for consideration at the Sundance Film Festival (and after the Rolling Stone’s gang-rape story was revealed as a hoax after the author failed to contact the accused students) that the filmmakers attempted to tell the other side of the story.

And once the criticism started flowing, the filmmakers conspired to edit Wikipedia to make the facts appear to agree with the narrative in the film.

This is just Hollywood warming up the “war on women” narrative for Hillary. Though you’d think that when talking about putting a Clinton in the White House, you wouldn’t want to bring up the subject of rape. . . .

BLAME AMERICA FIRST: Dems blame GOP, Ryan, ‘aiding, abetting terrorists’ by rejecting gun control.

DIVERSITY: “We identified only two conservatives at Princeton and two at Yale.”

POLICE CHIEF: San Bernardino Shooting Well-Planned, Wasn’t Spontaneous.

San Bernardino’s police chief confirmed that the mass shooting at a county Christmas banquet did not look like a spontaneous attack due to the amount of planning, devices, weapons and tactical gear involved.

Chief Jarrod Barguan told reporters in a late-night press conference the shooting suspects, both killed in a gunbattle with some 20 officers at the end of a pursuit, have been identified as Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27. Farook was a U.S.-born citizen; the chief wasn’t sure of Malik’s background. He said he had no information on whether either had a criminal record.

Barguan said there was a relationship between the two; CBS News reported that the pair had been married for two years. CAIR said earlier that Farook and his wife have a 6-month-old baby.

Farook was an environmental specialist at the county health department. He had attended the Christmas party last year, and this year left the party early “angry” under circumstances that led police to the Redlands residence. The Daily Beast reported that Farook’s mother lived there.

Initial reports indicated there may have been as many as three shooters, but the police chief said officials are “pretty confident” there were two.

Hmm.