NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Panama and Mexico Help Potential Terrorists Reach the U.S. Border.

SOLAR STILL NOT COMPETITIVE WITHOUT SUBSIDIES:

Solar power installer SolarCity, the country’s largest provider of rooftop panels, has exited the Nevada market in the wake of the state’s rollback of the net metering fees paid to residential solar owners. The departure marks an escalation in the war over net metering that is roiling the industry.

One of the fastest-growing markets for residential solar, Nevada is the first state to drastically revise its policies on net metering—wherein owners of residential solar arrays are compensated for the power they send onto the utility power grid, usually at retail rates. All but a handful of states have instituted net metering. Claiming that these fees represent an unfair transfer of costs to the utilities and non-solar customers, utilities have mounted a well-funded campaign to reduce or eliminate the payments. The Nevada Public Utilities Commission concurred, calling on utilities to cut the compensation for solar providers from retail to wholesale rates.

Not surprisingly, the solar industry disagrees. Calling the net metering decision “unethical, unprecedented, and possibly unlawful,” SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive predicted that it will “destroy the rooftop solar industry in one of the states with the most sunshine.”

Seems fair to me. You’re selling power at wholesale here, not a retail. Why should you get the retail price, except as a subsidy?

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Paraplegic Man Trains for the Cyborg Olympics.

AT AMAZON, Trade In Your Old Stuff, Get New Stuff.

GIVING THAT WARMING’S BEEN “PAUSED” FOR NEARLY 20 YEARS, CAN THIS REALLY BE DUE TO “CLIMATE CHANGE?” U.S. Becomes More Vulnerable to Tropical Diseases Like Zika. “Until May, Zika had never touched this hemisphere except on Easter Island, 2,200 miles off the Chilean coast. Now it circulates in 14 Latin American or Caribbean countries and Puerto Rico.”

Bring back DDT.

MELISSA BRAUNSTEIN: ‘Married At First Sight’ Explains Why Americans Can’t Commit: The millennial reality show participants who agree to arranged marriages are as burned by their parents’ divorces as everyone else. The post-1970 divorce explosion left plenty of damage in its wake.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Should The Navy Go To A Big Fleet / Small Ships Doctrine?

I REMEMBER WHEN “NO GO AREAS” WERE JUST A PARANOID RIGHT-WING FANTASY: Teenage victim of Cologne ‘African and Arab’ sex mob reveals how she and her friends were surrounded by 30 men and groped as officials admit the city is a ‘no-go’ area for women.

THE OBAMA ERA IN ONE SENTENCE: “We have a Democrat who is allowed by the press to fail quietly, discreetly, and off center stage.”

GERMAN WOMEN, WELCOME TO SHARIA: Germany shocked by Cologne New Year (Muslim) gang assaults on women.

The mayor of Cologne has summoned police for crisis talks after about 80 women reported sexual assaults and muggings by men on New Year’s Eve.

The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.

City police chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely new dimension of crime”. The men were of Arab or North African appearance, he said.

Women were also targeted in Hamburg. . . .

What is particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organised. Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.

Police in Hamburg are now reporting similar incidents on New Year’s Eve in the party area of St Pauli. One politician says this is just the tip of the iceberg.

And there are real concerns about what will happen in February when the drunken street-parties of carnival season kick off.

And this gem from the New York Slimes Times:

Calls came from the Bavarian Christian Social Union on Tuesday to deport any asylum-seekers found to be among the perpetrators in Cologne, a sentiment echoed by the left-leaning Süddeutsche-Zeitung in a commentary that noted that German law provides for such action.

Yet the commentary, by Heribert Prantl, also warned about the risks of the debate’s taking on a poisonous tone that would only make integration of the many young refugees and immigrants legitimately in the country that much more difficult.

“The young men who come to Germany must begin working as quickly as possible,” he wrote. “Work socializes. It is about our national peace, which is threatened by the excesses in Cologne and the excesses in the Internet.”

Yeah, I’m sure that’s it: Give these men a job–and/or rich taxpayer-funded benefits–and all of this violence and sexism will magically disappear. I mean, it’s not like Islam considers women to be objects or anything. And a sovereign nation can’t deny entry to non-citizens because of such dangerous beliefs or kick them out; that would be a violation of their “human rights.” 

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 972.

ROGER KIMBALL: Epiphany: What was Cruz or Rubio is Now Cruz or Trump.

DON SURBER: FBI Headed For A Showdown Over Hillary. Money quote, from Joseph DiGenova: “I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an attorney general. It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable.” Well, stay tuned.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Libertarian public-interest lawyer Clint Bolick nominated to Arizona Supreme Court.

WISCONSIN’S SECRET WAR: Bad Santa: John Doe prosecutor delivers letters to the people he spied on.

He walked into work Tuesday morning to find he had received an “unbelievable” notice.

Opening the manila envelope, the Wisconsin conservative learned that government agents had secretly seized his emails – professional and personal – sent and received over a two-year period beginning Jan. 1, 2009.

He found out he had, without his knowledge, been dragged into Wisconsin’s notorious John Doe investigation, one of perhaps dozens of individuals who in recent days have received similar notices from former John Doe special prosecutor Francis D. Schmitz.

Some, like the conservative who spoke to Wisconsin Watchdog on Tuesday, had no idea they had been under surveillance in a massive, politically driven spy operation.

“Just unbelievable,” said the conservative, who asked not to be identified. He remains active in Wisconsin politics. “It feels like a different country. It feels like something that shouldn’t be done in the United States of America.”

It’s increasingly the Democrats’ dream, though.

IT’S A POOR REFLECTION ON THE TAX SYSTEM THAT IT LENDS ITSELF TO THIS: How I Fell Face First Into An Epic IRS Scam.

Related: Why We Fear The IRS:

What’s interesting about this scam is that it’s a departure from classic confidence schemes. Think about something like the Nigerian e-mail scams, and how they draw their victims in: greed for a lucrative finder’s fee in exchange for doing something that sounds maybe a little bit shady, but maybe sort of noble too. The victim is then strung along by playing to the greed, and kept from talking to others who might point out the scam by because they think they are complicit in something legally questionable.

The IRS scam, on the other hand, works entirely by fear. It takes people who haven’t done anything wrong, and makes them afraid that they have. That’s a pretty hefty achievement. Imagine trying to extort money from someone by, say, claiming that they had murdered someone. You might elicit laughter, or bewilderment, but you’d rarely elicit much cash.

Which raises the obvious question: How did we get into a situation where it’s so easy for people to believe that the IRS is about to arrest them for a crime they weren’t even aware of having committed?

You guessed it: The IRS is incredibly powerful, and the tax code is incredibly opaque.

It’s a scam in itself.

ONLY 13 PERCENT OF VA’S TOP 300 HOSPITAL EXECS ARE VETERANS: Wait a minute! The Veterans Preference Act became law in 1944 and ever since then returning veterans are supposed to have a leg up for good government jobs, right? So why are there so few veterans running the key facilities of the agency whose sole reason for being is caring for veterans?

Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group analyzed the bios and talked to highly educated, skilled veterans who were repeatedly rejected by VA. How can this be? I don’t know, maybe the first priority of the career bureaucrats running VA is protecting themselves rather caring for veterans???

YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO THE STATE: Federal government tells parents they are inferior.

In a draft policy statement jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Education, federal bureaucrats have — on their own initiative — subordinated parents to a secondary role in the rearing of their children. While the draft is neither finalized nor binding (yet), it serves as a clear shot across the bow of every freedom-loving parent who naively believes that his parenting principles, priorities and practices will be protected and respected by government.

The entire purpose of the 18-page statement is to explain, promote and bureaucratically implement what the departments call “family engagement.” This term sounds like something every good parent would inherently want, but here’s how the government defines it: “the systematic inclusion of families as partners in children’s development, learning and wellness.”

That’s right: the government is going to include you, the parent, as a partner in rearing your child. Are we supposed to thank it for this privilege?

Thank, tar-and-feather, it’s up to you.

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QUESTION FOR HILLARY, AND HER ANSWER: “Somebody’s lying. Who is it?” Interview with Hillary Clinton About Benghazi.

JONATHAN TOBIN: Hey, why does nobody want to talk about how every place that has Muslim immigration experiences an explosion of rape? “Western journalists may have reported the epidemic of rape that took place during mass protests in Cairo’s Tahir Square as Egypt lurched from the Arab Spring to Muslim Brotherhood tyranny and now to the return of a military government. That was especially true since some of their own, including a prominent CBS correspondent, were among the victims. What happens in Egypt can be dismissed as exotica even if it is horrifying. But when Western societies find themselves dealing with similar instances of sexual assault on this scale, it is time to realize that integrating large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East can bring it with problems that are not merely a function of poverty, prejudice or a lack of a welcoming spirit on the part of the host countries.”

OUCH: AP fact check: Obama gun-control actions wouldn’t have stopped any mass shooting.

DAVID SOLWAY ON ISLAMIC SCHOOL PROJECTS:

What we are observing are the effects of a macropolitical strategy, reinforced not only by curricular structures and testing practices, but by the ostensibly innocent maneuvers that feature on the mirco-tier of educational procedures. The nexus between sectarian politics and partisan education is now firmly entrenched in the American cultural mindscape, and we can see how this plays out on the level of primary and high school “learning projects.” We have read accounts of elementary and high school students pledging allegiance in Arabic, observing Muslim holy days, being drilled in Islamic vocabulary, prayers and culture, being taught the five pillars of Islam and world history from an Islamic perspective, reciting the Shahada (“There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah”) and being taken on field trips to mosques (but not to churches, synagogues or Hindu temples).

A recent controversy illustrating this tendency involves high school students in Blaine, Minnesota, instructed to perform a song in their Christmas concert that includes the Arabic phrase Allahu Akbar, which CBS considerately explains in its report on the event “means God is Great.” No, not quite. As Carol Brown comments in American Thinker, it means “Allah is supreme. As in Islamic supremacy.” It is also the cry uttered by legions of jihadists as they commit their acts of terror, slaughtering innocents at will. But students, to the detriment of all of us, are not informed about the implications of the phrase.

Read the whole thing.