CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: DNC Chair Candidate Gave Clinton Donor’s Hedge Fund a Huge Tax Break. “In 2014, the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies asked Perez’s Department of Labor for permission to use a 401(k) to invest in Medallion, a profitable fund set up by billionaire James Simons—who donated $11 million to pro-Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA during the 2016 presidential election. Bloomberg reported in 2015 that the exemption granted by Perez’s Labor Department was the second afforded to Medallion, enabling the fund to skirt millions of dollars in taxes on investments. The hedge fund is in fact notorious for its tax-evading practices: In 2014, Renaissance Technologies was criticized by a bipartisan senate committee for disguising short-term profits as long-term capital gains to avoid $6 billion in taxes.”

“DEMAND.” Democrats to Demand Trump Veto Changes to Medicare and Social Security.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. It’s Not the Settlements, Stupid.

Rick Richman:

Here is how [White House deputy national security advisor Ben] Rhodes quantified the administration’s “grave concerns”:

[S]ince 2009, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has increased by more than 100,000 to nearly 400,000. … There are now nearly 900,000 — I’m sorry, 90,000 settlers living east of the separation barrier that was created by Israel itself. And the population of these distant settlements has grown by 20,000 since 2009.

The figure of 100,000 sounds significant until you realize that 80 percent of it has been in the settlement blocs “everyone knows” Israel will retain in any conceivable peace agreement. The 20,000 person increase east of the separation barrier, established to stop the wave of Palestinian mass murders against Israelis, translates into less than one percent of the population in the disputed territories, over a period of eight years.

It is ludicrous to argue that the settlements are an “obstacle to peace,” because they were not an obstacle to offering the Palestinians a state on three separate occasions: (a) in July 2000 at Camp David; (b) in the Clinton Parameters six months later; and (c) in the Olmert offer at the end of the one-year Annapolis Process in 2008. Each time, the Palestinians rejected a state on substantially all of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in Jerusalem. Since then–as Rhodes’ numbers show–the vast majority of Israeli settlement activity has been within settlement blocs that no one can realistically expect Israel to dismantle.

It’s not the settlements, indeed. It’s Obama and the rest of the elite’s Marxian deep thinkers expressing anti-colonial outrage against a people returned to their own land after a 2,000-year diaspora and a six-million person Holocaust.

EVAN BERNICK AND CLARK NEILY: Peril and promise on Trump’s Supreme Court list: Americans want judges who, like Antonin Scalia, don’t accept government arguments on faith.

CURRENCY MANIPULATION: China Hits Reset on Yuan Fixing.

Starting Jan. 1, the central bank will expand the number of currencies in the basket uses to calibrate the yuan’s value to 24 from 13 and reduce the weighting given to the U.S. dollar to 22.4%, from 26.4%, according to an announcement by the central bank’s China Foreign Exchange Trade System late Thursday.

By diluting the dollar’s share and bringing in currencies from the Korean won to the Saudi riyal and Swedish krona the People’s Bank of China is giving itself more room to maneuver to keep the yuan from falling too fast, analysts said.

In recent weeks, the yuan has buckled under uncertainty about China’s economic performance, a surging U.S. dollar following Donald Trump’s presidential-election victory and escalating flows of Chinese currency moving offshore.

The potential for faster U.S. interest-rate increases could add even more downward pressure on the yuan, with some analysts and investors predicting that the currency could break the psychologically important seven-yuan-per-dollar level as soon as next month.

Remember, this is China trying to prop up the value of the yuan.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Be sure to pick up your “pronoun preference” pin at the door. “University of Kansas students are being offered buttons through the school’s library system meant to make their preferred gender pronouns clear.”

OUT: TRUMP WILL START A WAR WITH RUSSIA OVER PETTY PERSONAL PIQUE.

In: Obama sanctions Russia over hacking, expels 35 officials.

Related: Putin spokesman: Russia to consider retaliation after US sanctions.

HUH: States that legalized marijuana saw a drop in traffic deaths.

“Instead of seeing an increase in fatalities, we saw a reduction, which was totally unexpected,” said Julian Santaella-Tenorio, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.

Since 1996, 28 states have legalized marijuana for medical use.

Deaths dropped 11 percent on average in states that legalized medical marijuana, researchers discovered after analyzing 1.2 million traffic fatalities nationwide from 1985 through 2014.

The decrease in traffic fatalities was particularly striking – 12 percent – in 25- to 44-year-olds, an age group with a large percentage of registered medical marijuana users, the authors report in the American Journal of Public Health.

Though Santaella-Tenorio was surprised by the drop in traffic deaths, the results mirror the findings of another study of data from 19 states published in 2013 in The Journal of Law and Economics. It showed an 8 to 11 percent decrease in traffic fatalities during the first full year after legalization of medical marijuana.

Correlation is not causation, of course, and the story also notes that after an big initial drop, fatalities in some states began to rise again. But concerns about stoned drivers making the roads radically more dangerous haven’t materialized, which ought to (but probably won’t) put a stop to some of the Reefer Madness-level panicmongering over legalization.

PUTTING THE “PERMISSIONLESS” BACK IN “PERMISSIONLESS INNOVATION:” Uber Tells California Where to Shove Their Regulations.

PRIVACY? New York State To Motorists: All Your Info Are Belong To Us.

Beginning next month, all motorists who wish to travel through the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel or Queens Midtown Tunnel in New York City will have no choice but to hand over their location data to the government. Previously it was possible volunteer this information by way of “EZ Pass,” which motorists can purchase and install in their vehicles. However, those who wished not to utilize “EZ Pass” had the option of paying the old fashioned way, by handing over U.S. currency to attendants.

But now New York State is instituting a brand new “innovation” for these various crossings. No longer will there be any option available for those who’d prefer that the government not indiscriminately collect their data. As of January 2017, anyone traveling these bridges and tunnels will be forced forfeit their information by way of “scanning devices” which indiscriminately suck up the license plate information of every vehicle passing through.

Thus decrees King Cuomo II: “Customers who do not pay their tolls are subject to $50 violation fees, car registration suspensions, and other enforcement actions.”

Nanny-statists gotta nanny-state.

ENDORSED: It’s Time For Congress To Fix Colleges’ Civil Rights Problem:

A generation of litigation has inflicted loss upon loss on public universities, yet the campus climate is still rife with censorship and due-process violations. It turns out that administrators fear their own on-campus ideologues and the progressive education bureaucracy far more than they fear the federal courts. Indeed, the financial penalty for angering a bureaucrat — loss of federal funding — is far greater than any damage award imposed by any court. Judges are proving to be a poor check on campus power.

So it’s time to turn the tables. It’s time to readjust the incentives. Congress needs to intervene in two concrete ways. First, it needs to withhold federal funds from any public university that repeatedly violates the constitutional rights of its students or faculty. If a court of final jurisdiction finds that a public university violated the constitutional rights of a student or faculty member more than once in any five-year span, it should lose all federal funding for at least a year. Moreover, there should be a substantial, fixed financial penalty for each constitutional violation, no matter how infrequent.

Second, universities need to get out of the sexual-assault-adjudication business. Universities are educational institutions, not criminal courts, and they are poorly equipped to decide criminal cases or even civil liability.

I agree entirely.

THIS IS WHY WE RARELY TAKE BATHS IN THE OCEAN DEPTHS: Sponges grew carnivorous in ocean depths.

DIPLOMACY IN 2016: Russia Responds To Obama’s Expulsion of Diplomats By Tweeting “Lame Duck” Meme.

INDEED, HOW DID WE GET IN THIS MESS? Election Fraud Nonsense. 

THIS IS ONE OF MY FANS. HE SELF-IDENTIFIES AS A TANK: University of Kansas Librarians Jump on the ‘Pick Your Pronouns’ Bandwagon.

SO WE TOLD THE MAN THIS SHOULD BE HIGHER FROM THE BEGINNING: But he honestly thought it was an exercise in futility and no one would donate, despite the fact he helps everyone who hits a rough patch.

The thing is, the minimum would get him through the next couple of months, but he might be back here again in another year.  So we tried to figure out how much would give him a chance to turn his life around and stop being at risk.  And here we are.  If you donate $50 or more and let your name show, send me your snailmail and I’ll send you a signed book.  I can’t promise a specific book, since some of them are still packed, heavens alone know where, but I’ll send you a signed Hoyt book, for helping Charlie Martin get back on his feet.

DID I MENTION HOW SHOCKED I AM? Shock: Boys Prefer Puzzles and Games to Dolls, and This Somehow… Is Harmful to Girls.

ABOUT TIME: Congress Moving to Cut U.S. Funding to U.N. in Wake of Anti-Israel Vote.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Mounting evidence of administration dishonesty over U.N. resolution.

I DISAGREE.  BIG IDEAS WILL KILL YOU: Big Ideas Will Numb You,

OFT EVIL WILL SHALL EVIL MAR: How George Soros Destroyed the Democratic Party.

YOU WENT FULL 2016, CALIFORNIA. NEVER GO FULL 2016: California Democrats legalize child prostitution.

OFT EVIL WILL SHALL EVIL MAR: Has Obama’s Israel gambit already backfired by dividing the left and uniting the right?

HOW ABOUT WE JUST DO THE OATH AND GO HOME? Trump Should Have a Celebrity-Free Inauguration.

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