JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE WILL LOAN YOU MONEY, YOU DON’T HAVE TO TAKE IT: Want to Avoid Another ‘Big Short’? Try Some Personal Responsibility.

SURE WE CAN TRUST HER WITH THE PRESIDENCY: Clinton emails may have been classified above top secret.

MAYBE THERE IS ONE, AND YOU WEREN’T INVITED: David Brooks: It’s Time For A Republican Conspiracy.

Or maybe it’s a conservative insurgency. In which case, Brooks definitely wasn’t invited.

JON HENKE: The Foundations behind the Left.

Over a decade ago, the New York Post’s Ryan Sager published a blockbuster story, showing that “campaign finance reform has been an immense scam perpetrated…by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a “mass movement.” Based on the astonishing testimony of Sean Treglia, who ran the campaign finance reform effort for Pew Trusts, Sager reported that…

…Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of “experts” all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.

“The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington,” Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. “The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.” …

From 1994 to 2004, almost $140 million was spent to lobby for changes to our country’s campaign-finance laws. … The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.

These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros’ Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).

Perhaps most (or least?) surprisingly, Treglia said the good news for the Foundations was that “Journalists didn’t care. They didn’t know. They didn’t care … so no one followed up on the story.” Treglia said, “if any reporter wanted to know, they could have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn’t…”

As a result, we got the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, which has only succeeded in, as opponents predicted, making politics less transparent and more expensive.

Unfortunately, after this story broke, the media continued to not know and not care. News reports overflow with stories about the Koch brothers or corporate donations, but the far more massive and highly political left wing Foundations operate almost entirely without scrutiny.

Consider this: in 2013, the left wing Center for Public Integrity reported that “Four foundations run by [the Koch brothers] hold a combined $310 million in assets…” By contrast, the Ford Foundation’s endowment is more than $12 billion — about 38x larger than the Koch Foundations.

On a list of the top 100 US Foundations (by asset size), the Ford Foundation is #2. The various Koch Foundations don’t make the list, nor do they make the list of top 100 Foundations by annual giving.

Yet, the news media and transparency groups constantly harp on the Koch’s massive organization and its “insidious,” “dark money” influence on American politics, while almost completely ignoring the far larger left-wing political Foundations.

In part, this is due to the perception in the media that money from conservative/libertarian/free market leaning organizations must be tainted, while funding from left-wing Foundations is free of such bias. It may also be due to the fact that the left wing Foundations fund many media organizations — I’m looking at you, NPR, PBS, Washington Post, LA Times and others — sometimes even funding them to cover “[other people’s] money in politics.”

But that doesn’t explain all of the media apathy. Even right-of-center media is generally uninterested in these behind-the-scenes details about the left-wing Foundation money machine.

Sager’s 2005 story was a revelation to me at the time and it has continued to inform my understanding of how the left-wing political machine operates, domestically and internationally, up to the highest levels. Indeed, President Obama himself was a part of this, spending 8 years funding gun control and anti-2nd amendment research and advocacy as a Director of the Joyce Foundation.

Follow the money.

AT AMAZON, New Year, New You.

Plus, outlet deals in Outdoor Gear.

THIS IS ACTUALLY AMAZING, GIVEN ALL THE PROPAGANDA TO THE CONTRARY THAT THEY’RE SUBJECTED TO: British people are proud of colonialism and the British Empire, poll finds.

WHY SYRIAN/ARAB/NORTH AFRICAN REFUGEES ARE A PROBLEM, IN ONE PICTURE.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: FBI investigating Kent State professor for alleged link to ISIS. “He is also being investigated for allegedly recruiting students to join ISIS.”

Hey, kids, join ISIS! Downside: If you fail in your mission, you may be burned alive in a cage. Upside: 20 points extra credit on the final exam!

I LIKE THE WAY IT LOOKS: Force 1 Billed as “American Sports Car With No Excuses” in Detroit.

AT THE CONSERVATIVE WAHOO: Thoughts on Amending The Constitution Through A Convention Of The States.

INTERESTING: Sarah Palin endorses Donald Trump.

BREAKING: Federal Judge Obama Appointed Strikes Down His Fast and Furious Executive Privilege Claim.

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE MALE COLLEGE STUDENTS? Legislation would deny education to accused students. “We’ve created a system where false accusations are easier to make and carry few if any consequences.” Well, for the accusers.

THE VIEW FROM THE JOURNOLIST:

POTATOES AND PREGNANCY: “A new study suggests that the more potatoes in a woman’s typical diet, the more likely she is to develop gestational diabetes, a serious complication of pregnancy.”

Gary Taubes, call your office.

A VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE: I say, the leftwing Boston Review doesn’t seem to much like that Donald Trump fellow, do they? “Trump: the Futility of Liberal Backlash:”

Although there are conservatives, libertarians, and disaffected civic dropouts in Vermont—people whose votes will matter in the Republican primary—it was hard to believe Trump was just in Burlington to court ballots. He seemed also to be seeking a particular kind of reaction: a liberal backlash that has not just been futile in disrupting his campaign but has actually emerged as a source of its surprising success.

Trump is the Republican frontrunner, so when he is racist, chauvinistic, dishonest, or otherwise vile, responsible people condemn him. And yet it seems that this outrage only serves to further legitimize him in the minds of supporters and would-be supporters. Any criticism becomes a compliment if it originates in the opposition. When it was quickly revealed, for instance, that Trump’s first television ad featured footage not of Mexicans entering the United States, as implied, but rather of Moroccans crossing into Spain, many liberals felt they had scored an important “gotcha.” The campaign responded masterfully. “No shit it’s not the Mexican border,” said Trump’s campaign manager, the elegant Corey Lewandowski. “But that’s what our country is going to look like. This was one thousand percent on purpose.” Just like that, and the “liberal media” looks more concerned with taking down The Donald than protecting America’s borders—just as Trump’s partisans suspected.

It’s worth a read, if only for that light bulb moment when the far left learns that their clapped-out old gotcha games aren’t going to work anymore.

BRING BACK DDT: Short Answers to Hard Questions About Zika Virus. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned pregnant women against travel to several countries in the Caribbean and Latin America where the Zika virus is spreading. Infection with the virus appears to be linked to the development of unusually small heads and brain damage in newborns.”

WHY HILLARY IS IN REAL TROUBLE:

A fourth observation: As Sunday’s debate showed, Mrs. Clinton is now running as basically the third term of President Obama. She may tweak what he did here and there, but she is fully embracing Mr. Obama. In an election year in which anger and disgust at the political establishment and business as usual are dominant and in which only a quarter of the American people believe the country is headed in the right direction, that is a dangerous strategy to adopt. In addition, there’s a historical burden Mrs. Clinton faces: Since 1948, a political party has won three straight presidential elections only once, when George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan, who was much more popular at the end of his second term than, in all likelihood, Mr. Obama will be.

Observation number five: Mrs. Clinton may face real legal trouble. Right now there are two FBI investigations, and Mrs. Clinton is at the center of them.

Read the whole thing.

SO, THIS COLUMN FROM LAST SUMMER IS HOLDING UP PRETTY WELL: Trump-Sanders 2016: The ticket we deserve.

CHANGE: RNC Severs Relationship with NBC News for February 26 Debate.

Gee, and after all NBC, MSNBC and lately CNBC has done for the GOP.

OBAMA’S KEYSTONE XL DECISION TRIGGERS CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE: Oil giant TransCanada has filed an intriguing (and underreported) lawsuit against various Obama Administration officials involved with the Administration’s decision to deny a cross-border permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

The gravamen of the lawsuit is that the President has no unilateral authority under the Constitution to restrain foreign commerce, since the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce is given solely to Congress under Article I, section eight.

Writing a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal, TransCanada general counsel Kristine Delkus explained:

This decision . . . was contrary to basic principles of constitutional law. The president can exercise only powers granted by a statute or the Constitution. The administration acknowledged that no statute supports its action. Nor does the Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s famous 1952 ruling in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, rejecting President Truman’s claim that he could seize private steel mills, sets out the governing principles that also defeat President Obama’s similar claim of unilateral power. Unless Congress expressly or implicitly approves of presidential action, the president has no independent power to act unless the matter falls beyond the scope of Congress’s constitutional interests.

Article I of the Constitution provides Congress with power over the domestic and international commerce at issue. And in early 2015, both houses of Congress passed legislation—later vetoed by the president—directing that the Keystone XL pipeline be constructed without any further presidential action.

Still, even if Congress had not acted, Mr. Obama’s action is unlawful because it falls far outside of the limited tradition of presidential-permit approvals. Presidents have for many decades lightly regulated certain border facilities through a permit-approval process focused on distinctly cross-border and operational concerns. No president before has prohibited construction of a major infrastructure project affecting such extensive domestic and international commerce. Nor has any other president ever claimed the power to block cross-border trade to enhance his negotiating power abroad.

The key is the last paragraph. Congress has not enacted a law authorizing the Keystone XL (bills must, after all, survive a presidential veto to become a law). But so what? Congress–and Congress alone–possesses the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce. When Congress fails to use this power, the power does not magically devolve to the President, any more than do the other enumerated congressional powers such as the power to tax, establish a uniform rule of naturalization or bankruptcies, coin money, establish post offices, etc.

In the absence of an affirmative exercise of Congress’s power to regulate foreign commerce, the legal default is a “free flow” of such commerce. Indeed, this is the essence of the Court’s Dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence, in which courts invalidate state laws that interfere with the free flow of interstate commerce (by discriminating against out-of-staters), even though Congress has not chosen to exercise its affirmative commerce power.

President Obama’s justification for his executive order denying the free flow of oil across the U.S.-Canadian border? Climate change. Yes, you read that right. President Obama claims the right to regulate foreign commerce because of climate change. In his words:

America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change.  And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. . . .As long as I’m President of the United States, America is going to hold ourselves to the same high standards to which we hold the rest of the world.  And three weeks from now, I look forward to joining my fellow world leaders in Paris, where we’ve got to come together around an ambitious framework to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can.

So President Obama is claiming a unilateral power to restrict the free flow of foreign commerce based upon his perception that the U.S. needed to have credibility with an international community hellbent on reaching a climate change agreement in Paris. But this is not a situation in which national security concerns could, at least in theory, support unilateral presidential action under Article II. There is no evidence–nor does the Obama Administration make such a claim–that the Keystone XL pipeline poses a risk to national security; if anything, reducing dependence on oil generated by OPEC nations enhances U.S. security. In the words of the State Department’s Record of Decision and Statement of National Interest:

Canadian oil is a relatively stable and secure source of energy supply for many reasons, and few countries share all of the political or physical characteristics that enable Canada to remain in this position. Its producing areas are physically close to the U.S. market, and there are limited chokepoints to disrupt trade between Canada and the United States. Canada has a low likelihood of political unrest, resource nationalism, or conflict – above-ground factors that sometimes disrupt oil production in other regions. Additionally, it is not a member of OPEC, which acts to restrict oil production and influence market conditions. The Canadian oil sector is efficiently run, without undue political interference. Canadian oil sands projects have low production decline rates compared to conventional oil fields, providing greater geologic certainty of future supply levels.

Instead, the Obama Administration’s purported constitutional basis for restricting foreign commerce is that the President’s “executive power” under Article II, section one, combined perhaps with his power over foreign affairs in Article II, section two includes a shockingly broad power to do what the President thinks is best for the country, including regulating commerce, if/when doing so may enhance the President’s ability to negotiate non-binding international “agreements” that do not even rise to the level of treaties. I suppose by this logic, President Obama could have enacted much of Obamacare unilaterally, without the need for legislation, if the international community was in the middle of “universal health care” talks.

But hey, I’m sure this President–who is a self-proclaimed constitutional law scholar–would never do anything to undermine the Constitution’s separation of powers.

AT THE VERY LEAST, THIS IS PAYBACK TO THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT THAT TREATED HER LIKE CRAP: Sarah Palin Endorses Donald Trump.

Related:

FROM JAMES LILEKS: HERESY, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON THE “HER.” “If you want to insist that women had made equal contributions in art, literature, philosophy, war, politics, and so on, but were denied recognition because of Sexism, then you have to admit that women were allowed to participate in art, literature, philosophy, war, politics, and so on. This contradicts the standard view of the past.”

THE MICROBIOME REVOLUTION: Companies Aim to Make Drugs from Bacteria That Live in the Gut. “It’s a jungle in there: massive populations of microbes, immune cells, and cells of the gut tissue are interacting and exchanging countless chemical and physical signals. Disruptions to this complex ecosystem, often called the microbiome, have been linked not only to gastrointestinal problems but also to metabolic, immunological, and even neurological disorders.”

SHOCKER: Governor of early caucus state dependent on ethanol subsidies wants to defeat presidential candidate who opposes ethanol subsidies.

If I were Reince Priebus, I’d tell Iowans that the GOP’s official position is they can have ethanol subsidies or the first-in-the-nation caucuses, but not both.