HOW LONG BEFORE THE LEFTIES START LISTENING TO ADMIRAL ACKBAR AND STOP COMING ON? Tucker Carlson Embarrasses Feminist Who Defended Harassing Ivanka.

WHY, OH WHY DO WE KEEP FAILING OUR POOR BELEAGUERED FEARLESS LEADER? Obama’s last Christmas as president a season of disappointment.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Desperately Seeking Islamophobia.

There are four lines on the graph: African-American, Sexual Orientation, Islamic/Muslim and Other. Remarkably, the number of hate crimes against Muslims is the lowest on the chart, despite having “risen sharply” to a grand total of nine through October 24.

The largest number of reported hate crimes–30–is against the “other” group. Therein, perhaps, lies a story. “Other” includes White, Arab, Jewish, Asian and Hispanic/Latino. Nationally, according to FBI data, there are around four times as many hate crimes against Jews as against Muslims. What is the ratio in Minnesota? The Star Tribune must know, since it says, later in the article, that the “other” category includes eight hate crimes against Arabs (a new category added last year). That leaves 22–more than double the number alleged against Muslims–unaccounted for. Is anti-Semitism a bigger problem in Minnesota than anti-Muslim sentiment? I suspect so.

The Star Tribune quotes the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, itself a hate group, as though it were an authority on the subject.

The SPLC is awful. Back in 1995, right after the Oklahoma City Bombing, I was on the PBS Newshour with Morris Dees and had to call him out for lumping all gun owners and government critics together with Timothy McVeigh. It’s gotten worse since.

CHRISTMAS CHEER FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS:  ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd shocked that Christians didn’t treasure his gift of politicizing the holiday.

As with George, just think of Dowd as a Democrat operative with a byline, and it all makes sense. As one Twitter user replies, “Any chance you’re going to be this woke during Ramadan?”

TO BE FAIR, THAT WAS AN AWFULLY STUPID THREE SECONDS: “For shining a laser at a helicopter for three seconds, I lost my entire life.”

IS TRUMP BECOMING A CONSERVATIVE? “My guess is that throughout the general election campaign and continuing to the present, Trump has been stunned by the insane outpouring of hatred against him and his family from the Left and the Democratic Party,” posits John Hinderaker at Power Line. “My guess is that he didn’t see it coming. He wasn’t particularly conservative, and had never had anything to do with the social issues, the main locus of left-wing venom. As an urban real estate developer, he had worked collegially with Democrats in various cities. He had been a Democrat for much of his life; heck, he even had been a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. He must have been shocked by the hysterical hatred that the Democrats unleashed against him and his wife and children. Trump spends a fair amount of time on Twitter; how do you think he felt when he saw that #RapeMelania was one of the top trending hashtags? One thing we know about Trump is that if you hit him, he will hit back. During the campaign, he didn’t react much to the hatred that was unleashed against him, but I think we are seeing his response now. The liberals wanted war, so war they will get. Trump knows where his friends are–on the right–and it looks like that is where he will govern.”

Read the whole thing.

Related: Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca tweets and deletes “Eat shit, @realDonaldTrump,” and tweets, “Ivanka Trump is poised to become the most powerful woman in the world. Don’t let her off the hook because she looks like she smells good,” and “Ivanka HAS IT ALL, [and] by that I mean, ‘a job, family [and] sinister complicity in aiding the most aggressively anti-woman candidate of our time,’” before being embarrassed by Tucker Carlson last night.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: New Study Suggests That Men Need To Get Drunk With Their Friends Twice A Week To Stay Healthy. You don’t want to be a science-denier, do you?

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HEH. Seen on Facebook:

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Epiphanies often take the form of a sudden realization that things you once took for granted are on the brink of extinction.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: “What happened today is that the United States joined the jackals at the U.N.” “What happened in the U.N. was Obama showing off his power in the face of Donald Trump? Is that what the NYT means to say? That’s not just pathetic. It’s shocking.” It’s the final period, the election’s over, and the masks are coming off all over the place.

Plus, from the comments: “Now we know, or at least suspect, why the LA Times is hiding the Khalidi video and tapes.”

2016, MAN: More than 54,000 people in the southern German city of Augsburg must leave their homes Christmas morning while authorities defuse a giant 1.8-ton aerial bomb from World War II.

ROGER SIMON: Why Obama Has Hurt the Palestinian People Far More than Israel.

Read the whole thing.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Are Hydroponic Vegetables as Nutritious as Those Grown in Soil?

YES, THAT WAS PART OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS’ INTENT:

Shot: The electoral college is thwarting our ability to battle global warming.

—Headline, Washington Post opinion column, December 19th.

Chaser: Amazon starts flexing muscle in new space: air cargo.

—Headline, Reuters, yesterday.

If you’re writing for the Washington Post, and you believe that global warming is so severe that the electoral college serves as a hindrance because at least half the American public disagrees with your secular religion, getting the paper’s boss to terminate his giant empire would make a pretty good dent in and of itself in reducing America’s carbon footprint. If you can convince Jeff Bezos to go along, then we’ll talk again about the electoral college. (Pro tip: Convincing him to shut down the Post’s giant air-conditioned server farms would be an excellent first step.)

In the meantime, I still don’t want to hear another goddamn word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

JOURNALISM: “Most pics of Trump from @nytimes’ excellent photographic review of yr present him as shadowy figure. Can’t think why.”

HANUKKAH STARTS TODAY. Enjoy!

YOU CAN’T ASTROTURF THE BOX OFFICE: Hollywood’s Gun-Control Dud. “Miss Sloane, a highly anticipated movie demonizing the NRA and calling for gun control, has bombed. The movie succeeded only in emphasizing the top-down nature of the gun-control campaign and how little intensity there is for more regulations. The movie seemed to have everything going for it. Liberal movie critics loved it, and it was backed by a hefty ad budget along with heaps of favorable news coverage. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has already nominated the movie’s star, Jessica Chastain, for a prestigious Golden Globe, considered a strong predictor of the Oscars. But two weeks after its national release, it has made only $3.2 million. During its second weekend, it averaged just $102 per movie theater per day. With a ticket price of $10.30 per adult, that comes to an average of only 9.9 people a day seeing the movie in any given theater.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1325.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Aleppo And American Decline.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Amazing Blinkered European Elites.

Reading the article, one simply cannot understand how the European authorities could have worked themselves into such an obvious and massive set of errors. Nothing could be more obvious to a child than that mass immigration to Europe from war-torn regions convulsed by serial waves of radical Islamist ideology would create a massive threat.
Yet the EU essentially went about its business of bureaucratic infighting, process-worshipping, and complex institutional ballets without any real sense of urgency. Even today the EU has not developed an effective method of securing its frontiers. And control over your frontiers is the essence of sovereignty and the first element of any kind of internal security. This isn’t some arcane secret of statecraft; anybody who doesn’t understand this is massively unqualified to participate in governance.

The radical populists across Europe are wrong about many things, but they are right about this: governments that can’t protect their frontiers aren’t worthy of the name. Effective border control is what states are all about. Ask the Romans or the Chinese.

The failure of the Democratic and Republican establishments to understand that public concern over the security of America’s frontiers opened a pathway to victory for Donald Trump; the failure of European leaders to ‘get’ the vital importance of border control and, yes, immigration limitation is opening the door to massive political change in Europe.

European voters, like Americans, are patronized by their inferiors.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Call for church attacks puts Boston clergy on alert.

JOANNE JACOBS: Meritocracy’s losers: No degree, no respect. “The well-educated and well-off who live in or near big cities tend to endorse the notion, explicitly or implicitly, that education determines a person’s value.”

As Mickey Kaus wrote 25 years ago, lefties decry economic inequality even as they buttress social inequality. Because looking down on the working class is a core tenet of modern liberalism.

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