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MAD DUCK: Obama Appoints Cop Killer Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Attorney to 6-Year Civil Rights Post.

Earlier: Heather Mac Donald on how Trump Can End the War on Cops.

“OFT EVIL WILL SHALL EVIL MAR:” Harry Reid leaves Senate with a legacy that will help Trump.

When President-elect Donald Trump looks to the Senate for confirmation of his Cabinet nominees next year, he’ll have outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to thank for Democrats’ powerlessness to block his choices.

The Nevada Democrat, a fierce Trump opponent who often referred to the president-elect as “a spoiled brat,” took dramatic action in 2013 to end Republicans’ ability to mount a filibuster to derail President Obama’s judicial and Cabinet nominees.

Reid, who was majority leader at the time, used a parliamentary move known as the “nuclear option” to change a nearly 40-year-old Senate rule. The change meant that the Senate now needs only a simple majority of 51 votes — rather than a super-majority of 60 — to proceed to confirmation votes on Cabinet secretaries, agency directors and judges, except for the Supreme Court.

Reid, who leaves a legacy as a master parliamentarian, said he’s still glad he did it, despite that fact that the rule change will now be used by the Republican majority to help Trump staff his administration.

Yeah, he’s lying about that like he lied about Romney’s taxes.

SCOTT JOHNSON: “I’m quite sure that the science does not support this assertion made by President Obama at his press conference yesterday: ‘Almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago’ (video below). He probably even believes it, but he believes a lot things that just aren’t so.”

THE HORROR IS REPUBLICANS TREATING THEIR OPPONENTS LIKE DEMOCRATS DO: Is North Carolina a Sign for What’s Coming In Politics?

SO MAYBE OUR AUTISM EPIDEMIC IS THE RESULT OF DERMATOLOGISTS’ BAD ADVICE TO AVOID THE SUN: Autism linked to vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy, researchers find.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Trump Can End the War on Cops:

President Obama has repeatedly accused the police and criminal-justice system of discrimination, lethal and otherwise. During the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July by an assassin who reportedly was inspired by Black Lives Matter, Mr. Obama announced that black parents were right to “fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door”—that the child will be fatally shot by a cop.

The consequences of such presidential rhetoric are enormous, especially when amplified by the media. Officers working in high-crime areas now encounter a dangerous level of hatred and violent resistance. Gun murders of officers are up 68% this year compared with the same period last year.

Police have cut way back on pedestrian stops and public-order enforcement in minority neighborhoods, having been told repeatedly that such discretionary activities are racially oppressive. The result in 2015 was the largest national homicide increase in nearly 50 years. That shooting spree has continued this year, ruthlessly mowing down children and senior citizens in many cities, along with the usual toll of young black men who are the primary targets of gun crime.

To begin to reverse these trends, President Trump must declare that the executive branch’s ideological war on cops is over. The most fundamental necessity of any society is adherence to the rule of law, he should say. Moreover, there is no government agency today more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police.

Read the whole thing. The 180 degree reboot of the culture wars will be fascinating, and at times likely extremely painful to watch. Trump will dial back the radical racialism of the Obama White House, but as Ross Douthat warned prophetically in September, in the 1970s and ‘80s, the “Nixon-Reagan rightward shift did not repeal the 1960s or push the counterculture back to a beatnik-hippie fringe. But it did leave liberalism in a curious place throughout the 1980s: atop the commanding heights of culture yet often impotent in Washington, D.C.”

The latter half of that sentence certainly sounds good, but those “commanding heights” Douthat referenced give the left plenty of power to cause fear and dread in their never-ending culture war. As with Trump before him, Richard Nixon was elected by the voters as the “law and order” president to bring order to the chaos caused by an out of control Democrat White House, but thanks to panicked and malaise-ridden nihilistic leftists, the pop culture pumped out by the media in the early 1970s as a response to his election was pretty much this, non-stop:

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Prof prevails in FOIA fight for race-based admissions data: An extended legal battle between the University of Arkansas and one its law professors has come to a close after the school agreed to let him study the effects of race-based admissions policies. Prof. Robert Steinbuch also faced retaliation from colleagues, who complained that his research was “distressing” to students because it suggested that lower admissions standards result in lower bar-passage rates. Which, of course, they do.

And this illustrates that, as an administrator, it’s a really bad idea to pick a fight with a tenured professor. The Dean at UALR is stepping down, but Steinbuch’s still there. Sure, as a conservative he’s outnumbered on the faculty. But that doesn’t limit what he can do.

Back when I was a very new law professor and was briefly dating a secretary from another college, I remember she said that was the real power of tenure: You can’t get rid of them, and if they decide to make a hobby out of making your life miserable, well, they have a fair amount of free time to devote to it. . . .

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To mark the anniversary of Zaevion Dobson’s death, I interviewed his mother. “Zaevion was a protector. He was the protector of my home, of his brother. [When the shooting happened] Zaevion had a chance to run, but he didn’t. He jumped on top of the girls.”

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Vector Space Systems wins approval for Tucson rocket factory.

BIG GOVERNMENT IS ALL FUN AND GAMES FOR AN ELITE LEFTIST UNTIL IT IMPACTS THEIR LIFE: CNN commentator compares her TSA ‘vagina chop’ to Donald Trump’s ‘p-grabbing.’

“This certainly looks awful and all and we’ve posted before on the TSA’s ridiculous security theater, but was it really necessary to turn this into something anti-Trump?”, Twitchy asks, adding that CNN’s Angela Rye was apparently “randomly selected for extra screening and that’s when the problem started.”

According to her Wikipedia page,  Rye “is a political commentator on CNN and an NPR political analyst. She served as the executive director and general counsel to the Congressional Black Caucus for the 112th Congress.” She also blogs at the Huffington Post, where in 2013, she wrote a lengthy post headlined, “7 Issues President Obama Must Address During His Second Term.” Curiously, TSA reform and generally downsizing government’s power didn’t appear to be much of a concern. And slagging Trump rather than suggesting that his incoming administration reign in the TSA’s overreach apparently didn’t occur to her as well yesterday, which instantly wrote off the goodwill of many of his voters, who elected him precisely to stop this sort of federal attack on everyday people.

Irving Kristol was famously quoted as saying that a neoconservative is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.” Perhaps this incident might cause Rye to rethink her premises regarding Washington’s power, but given the track record of her fellow leftists over the past month, I’m not hopeful. Which is why, unfortunately, given her favorable thoughts on Obama, and her left-leaning C.V., this Libertarian Party ad released at the peak of the Occupy Wall Street blue-0n-blue kabuki seems apropos:

ALL HAIL BREAKS LOOSE: Storm-Related Lawsuits Are Wreaking Havoc In Texas.

THE TIME IS RIPE FOR VODKAPUNDIT TO START HIS OWN AIRLINE: Southwest Airlines Captain Congratulates Passengers After They Drink All the Plane’s Booze:

[Sportswriter Jimmy] Durkin called it a “Raiders flight,” but not because it was filled with Oakland Raiders players. These were just fans dressed [in] “Raiders paraphernalia.” They weren’t even “particularly rowdy,” just thirsty as hell.

Well, now it all makes sense.

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JOEL KOTKIN: How Silicon Valley’s Oligarchs Are Learning to Stop Worrying and Love Trump: With resistance to the so-called sharing economy now centered in big blue cities, the bosses of those companies may find common cause with Trump’s regulation-demolishing approach.

FASTER, PLEASE: Space Junk Solution? Japan Would Use a Tether to Nab Debris & Destroy It.

FAKE NEWS: Media Duped By Reddit Hoax of Woman Accidentally Having Sex With Her Brother.

IT’S COME TO THIS: GameIndustry Website Compares ‘Call of Duty’ Developers to Nazi Propagandists.

JOHN HINDERAKER: All of a sudden, Democrats are worried about Russia?

Barack Obama has spent the last eight years resisting the idea that Russia is an adversary of the United States. First we had the “reset”; next the cancellation of the Eastern European missile shield; then we had Obama assuring President Medvedev that he would be able to give away the store, but the Russians would need to wait for his second term; and then the presidential debate where Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s statement that Russia is our number one geopolitical rival by saying that the 1980s called, and they want their foreign policy back. In between, we had a foreign policy that was supine in the face of Russian aggression in Crimea and Ukraine.

Now, in a typically head-snapping 180-degree turnabout, Obama and his fellow Democrats portray Republicans as soft on Communism Russia. It’s a throwback to the 1970s, but with the parties’ roles reversed. . . .

This is what I don’t understand: in October 2014, the Russian government hacked into both the White House’s and the State Department’s computer systems. For an unknown period of time, weeks if not months, the Russians were reading White House and State Department emails–a far more significant security breach than the accounts of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and John Podesta. The Obama administration never did discover that its communications had been compromised, but an ally (I suspect it was Israel) alerted the administration to the Russian intrusion. The White House’s computer system was down for weeks while experts tried to deal with the Russian hack and improve security.

What was President Obama’s reaction to this hack, which could reasonably be seen as an act of war? There was none, apparently. The administration downplayed the significance of the intrusion. The Russian government had been reading White House and State Department emails? No big deal! The liberal press followed suit. The newspapers that are now hysterical about the alleged Russian hacking of Wasserman Schultz’s email account dutifully kept quiet about what happened in the White House and the State Department. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Democratic Party newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times remained silent because the midterm election was just a few weeks away, and the story reflected badly on the Obama administration.

Threats to U.S. national security are no big deal. But costing the Democrats power, well, that’s serious!

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To mark the anniversary of Zaevion Dobson’s death, I interviewed his mother. “Zaevion was a protector. He was the protector of my home, of his brother. [When the shooting happened] Zaevion had a chance to run, but he didn’t. He jumped on top of the girls.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1318.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Fall Of Aleppo.

MAKE TECH UPGRADES GREAT AGAIN! The Problem: Tech Upgrades Just Aren’t That Great Anymore:

This week, after four and a half years of faithful service, I finally replaced my old laptop. I will not bore you with the litany of troubles that led to this decision. The only interesting thing about my decision to replace my old 15-inch Macbook Pro is what I chose to replace it with: a nearly identical Macbook, about four years newer. But not quite the newest model. For the first time in my life, I decided to sit out an upgrade cycle and buy the older model, now being sold at a discount like day-old bread.

I won’t say that the discount played no role in my decision. But in previous years, I’d have swallowed hard and handed over the money, because I am, in the laptop world, a hardcore power user. I game on my laptop. I frequently have a dozen or so applications open, two or three of which are browsers with many tabs open. Faster processors, more memory — these things are sufficiently valuable that I’m willing to pay for them, because they make me more productive.

The trouble is, the upgrade cycle is no longer delivering those things. The processors in the latest model were marginally faster than in the previous one, but you couldn’t add memory, which I needed more. Instead, Apple is focusing on things I care about a lot less, like making the laptop thin — even though that meant losing USB and SD card ports that I still use, and losing a lot of “play” from the keyboard. As a friend pointed out to me, Apple has become obsessed with thinness to the point of anorexia. . . .

And we’re seeing this in upgrade cycles. My 4.5 years is actually on the low side for replacing a computer; the average now is nearly six years, which of course means that a substantial number of users are waiting longer than that. For replacing mobile devices, too, consumers are waiting longer, in part because phone companies are no longer subsidizing the phones to get you to invest in a contract, but also, I suspect, because devices are just not getting better as fast as they once were.

Yes, some of this is physical limits, some of it is software, and some of it is just that existing products are really quite good. I used to buy a new digital camera every 6 months because it was worth it for improved performance. Now I’ve still got my Nikon d300, which is roughly a decade old, and it’s so good I have no real motivation to replace it. The new ones are better, but they’re not that much better for the things I care about.

REMINDER: White House, Clinton Tied To PR Firm Behind Electoral College Push.