THE LEFT’S WAR ON SCIENCE: Climate activists step up campaign to cut funding to science museums. Today’s target is the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which is being denounced for taking money from Rebekah Mercer and allowing her to serve on its board of trustees. The activists want her removed because she has also donated to the Trump campaign and to think tanks skeptical of climate alarmism.

As the Times article notes, there is absolutely no evidence that Mercer has had any influence on the museum’s climate-change exhibits. Far from downplaying the threat of climate change, the museum has hyped it. I’ve written about the faulty science in its alarmist exhibits, and Edward Rothstein has critiqued its apocalyptic sermonizing. But none of this matters to the green activists determined to shame and intimidate conservative philanthropists even if it means less money for science education:

“To politicize science is shameful; to politicize the institutions that are designed to foster greater learning is even worse,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said. The museum’s executives “should acknowledge that they have a healthy endowment — a steady stream of funding — and they should thank Ms. Mercer for her service and talk about a reasonable plan for her to resign,” he said.

The chutzpah is astonishing. The only ones politicizing science at the museum are Brune and the other witch-hunters quoted in the Times. One of them is Michael Mann of Penn State, the researcher who produced the infamous hockey-stick graph and has done even more to discredit climate science with his unhinged activism. As usual, the threats to science come from one direction: the left.

BILL CLINTON’S KOSOVO WAR ISN’T QUITE OVER: My latest Creators Syndicate column.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1350.

ROGER SIMON DISCOVERS THE REAL REASON JOHN LEWIS AND COMPANY BOYCOTT THE INAUGURATION.

THE OBAMA LEGACY IN ONE CHART:

Full story here, with most of the trend lines going in the wrong direction.

Obama himself remains personally — but inexplicably — popular.

MARC THIESSEN: Yes, Trump can make Mexico pay for the border wall. Here’s how. Or he could just tax remittances.

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT: Maxine Waters’ Daughter Profits From Lucrative Campaign Operation.

Karen Waters has been on the payroll of her mother’s campaign committee, Citizens for Waters, since 2006. She has pulled in more than $600,000 for her services since that time.

Karen is in charge of endorsement mailers, known as “slate mailers,” for her mother’s campaign. The slate mailer operation has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for Waters’ federal campaign committee in recent years.

In order to appear on a Waters’ slate mailer, candidates for political office must pay Citizens for Waters from their own political committees. If a candidate does not directly pay Waters’ campaign committee, they must credit their own campaigns with in-kind contributions from Waters.

The mailers are sent to almost 200,000 constituents in the South Central Los Angeles area, where Waters holds considerable sway. The mailers consist of an “official sample ballot” with quotes from Waters about candidates and measures she supports.

Waters’ campaign received more than 20 payments totaling $297,500 for slate mailer endorsements in 2016.

It would appear that Karen Waters is running a smooth and profitable pay-to-play operation for her mother.

NIALL FERGUSON: Donald Trump’s New World Order: What A Kissinger-Inspired Foreign Policy Might Look Like.

Donald Trump therefore enters the Oval Office with an underestimated advantage. Obama’s foreign policy has been a failure, most obviously in the Middle East, where the smoldering ruin that is Syria—not to mention Iraq and Libya—attests to the fundamental naivety of his approach, dating all the way back to the 2009 Cairo speech. The President came to believe he had an ingenious strategy to establish geopolitical balance between Sunni and Shi’a. But by treating America’s Arab friends with open disdain, while cutting a nuclear deal with Iran that has left Tehran free to wage proxy wars across the region, Obama has achieved not peace but a fractal geometry of conflict and a frightening, possibly nuclear, arms race. At the same time, he has allowed Russia to become a major player in the Middle East for the first time since Kissinger squeezed the Soviets out of Egypt in the 1972-79 period. The death toll in the Syrian war now approaches half a million; who knows how much higher it will rise between now and Inauguration Day?

Meanwhile, global terrorism has surged under Obama. Of the past 16 years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with 93 countries experiencing an attack and 32,765 people killed. 2015 was the second worst, with 29,376 deaths. Last year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for 74 per cent of all deaths from terrorism: ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda.9 In this context, the President’s claims to be succeeding against what he euphemistically calls “violent extremism” are absurd. Much opprobrium has been heaped on Donald Trump in the course of the past year. But there was much that was true in his underreported August 15 foreign policy speech on the subject of Islamic extremism and the failure of the Obama Administration to defeat it.10

The “Obama Doctrine” has failed in Europe, too, where English voters opted to leave the EU in defiance of the President’s threats, and where the German leadership he recently praised has delivered, first, an unnecessarily protracted financial crisis in the European periphery and, second, a disastrous influx to the core of migrants, some but not all of them refugees from a region that Europe had intervened in just enough to exacerbate its instability. The President has also failed in eastern Europe, where not only has Ukraine been invaded and Crimea annexed, but also Hungary and now Poland have opted to deviate sharply from the President’s liberal “arc of history.” Finally, his foreign policy has failed in Asia, where little remains of the much-vaunted pivot. “If you look at how we’ve operated in the South China Sea,” the President boasted in an interview published in March, “we have been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in strengthening our alliances.”11 The new President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, apparently did not receive this memorandum. In October he went to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to announce his “separation from the United States.”

All of this means that merely by changing Obama’s foreign policy President Trump is likely to achieve at least some success.

Ouch.

RUSSIA AND TURKEY LAUNCH JOINT AIR STRIKES AGAINST THE ISLAMIC STATE: The Islamic State is a common enemy. Erdogan and Putin, however, have different political goals and different allies. Some of their different allies are the other guy’s enemies. So stay tuned.

TOP SECRET NO MORE: CIA publishes its history, nearly 13 million pages of documents online.

“Access to this historically significant collection is no longer limited by geography,” said Joseph Lambert, the CIA’s information management director in a press release.

The agency hoped in October 2016 to have the archive publicly available online by the end of 2017, according to a source with knowledge of the agency’s effort. The work was labor intensive, but the agency was able to complete this ahead of schedule as a result of significant advancements in technology and data management.

The archive touches on the CIA extensive history as an organization, from its inception up through the 1990s.

“None of this is cherry-picked,” said CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak. “It’s the full history. It’s good and bads.”

Here’s the link.

ARMOR SNOW PLOW: One of the more interesting photos in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge photo series. Members of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment (82nd Airborne Division) advance through a forest — riding on and following a Sherman tank.

THE PARDON PARADE: Anti-American Spies and Terrorists.

There is so much outrage over President Obama’s commutation of the 35-year espionage sentence imposed on treasonous American soldier Bradley Manning (a/k/a “Chelsea”), that his commutation last night of unrepentant terrorist Oscar Lopez-Rivera is just beginning to attract attention. Lopez-Rivera is an FALN leader who was serving a combined 70 years in prison sentences for the Puerto Rican communist organization’s terrorist war against the United States and his multiple attempts to escape from custody.

The FALN carried out 130 attacks in the United States. Beyond the damage done, they resulted in six murders, including a lunch-hour bombing at Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan in January 1975, as recounted by Joe Connor, whose father was one of four men killed in the attack.

Is it Friday yet?

TRUMP’S AMERICA: JUST LIKE NAZI GERMANY BECAUSE OF . . . FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT REQUESTS?

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: So I just got this letter from Trump’s transition team:

On January 16, 2017, CNN broadcast a story by Manu Raju, titled “First on CNN: Trump’s Cabinet pick invested in company, then introduced a bill to help it”, which omitted facts and drew conclusions in an effort to attack President-Elect Donald Trump’s designee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Tom Price.

The facts were available to CNN through House Financial Disclosure Filings. Dr. Price’s position on the Comprehensive Joint Replacement demonstration, which date back to fall 2015, is also a matter of public record.

The facts are:

• Dr. Tom Price has a diversified portfolio with Morgan Stanley in a broker-directed account. The portfolio includes both health care and non-health care related stocks.
• Dr. Price’s Morgan Stanley financial advisor designed his portfolio and directed all trades in the account. Pursuant to the arrangement with Morgan Stanley, the financial advisor, and not Dr. Price, has the discretion to decide which securities to buy and sell in his account.
• Dr. Price’s financial advisor periodically rebalances his portfolio to ensure proper diversification. On March 17, 2016, Morgan Stanley undertook a comprehensive rebalancing of Dr. Price’s portfolio. In the course of that rebalancing, the advisor purchased 26 shares of Zimmer Biomet, worth $2,697.74, on behalf of Dr. Price.
• Dr. Price learned of the purchase of Zimmer Biomet on April 4, 2016, when his financial advisor sent him a list of trades to be disclosed on his House Periodic Transaction Report (PTR).
• Dr. Price submitted the PTR reflecting the March trades on April 15, 2016.
• Dr. Price began work on his legislative effort to delay the comprehensive joint replacement demonstration project in 2015 in order to preserve treatment options for patients. He sent a Dear Colleague letter regarding this effort on September 21, 2015.

The Presidential Transition Team requests that CNN retract this blatantly false story.

Here’s more from The Daily Caller’s Richard Pollock.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Fourth graders in Michigan banned from watching Trump inauguration speech.

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JOSS WHEDON MORPHED INTO WARREN MEARS SO SLOWLY I HARDLY NOTICED: Joss Whedon Wants ‘A Rhino to F**k Speaker Ryan to Death’

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Damage Done to America by Manning… and Obama.

The degree to which Obama has wielded executive power in favor of America’s enemies and against his own political opponents and scapegoats is breathtaking. The treasonous Manning gets an 80 percent shave off his sentence. Now we learn Oscar Lopez-Rivera, an unrepentant FALN terrorist convicted of waging war against the United States, has also had his sentence commuted. Taliban commanders are released, replenishing our jihadist enemies even as they continue prosecuting a terrorist war against our troops and allies, in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter who may, at least indirectly, have caused the deaths of American soldiers. Iran is enriched and empowered with tens of billions of dollars – including ransom cash – and a mammoth nuclear energy program (with the certainty that it will yield a nuclear weapons stockpile) even as it remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism calling for “death to America.”

But if you are Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative Obama critic, the Justice Department inflates an administrative violation into multiple felonies and aggressively advocates (thankfully, without success) for a stiff prison sentence. If you are a tea party group gearing up to fight Obama’s re-election, here comes the IRS. If you are “anti-Muslim video producer” Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and Obama needs a scapegoat for his derelictions in Benghazi, you end up in the slammer. If you are a deep-pocketed financial institution that Obama wants to make the culprit for the government-driven financial meltdown, or to raid so the radical left’s legion of “community organizers” can be funded, prepare to pony up a 9- or 10-figure “settlement.” If you are a police department, be ready to be scandalized as a practitioner of racially malicious enforcement. If you are Israel, brace for the “international outlaw” smear.

Look at the way Obama treats America’s friends and compare it to the way he treats America’s enemies, and it’s obvious that Obama’s interests and America’s only rarely coincide.

Good riddance.

TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: House lawmaker’s chief of staff gets prison time for not paying taxes.

The chief of staff to Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson was sentenced to four months in prison for failing to file an individual income tax return for five years, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Issac Lanier Avant of Arlington, Va., will serve his time in a nonstandard manner, putting in 30 days first then serving every weekend in prison for 12 months – the total of which is four months. Avant will then spend one year on probation and have to pay $149,962 to the Internal Revenue Service in restitution. It’s unclear whether he will remain a top aide to Thompson.

Avant has worked in the House of Representatives as a chief of staff for 15 years. In December 2006, he was given the additional role of Democratic staff director for the House Homeland Security Committee. He did not file taxes from 2009 to 2013 when he earned more than $165,000. In total, the IRS lost $153,522, according to the Justice statement.

His federal income taxes were not withheld those years because he had improperly submitted a form to his employer in 2005 claiming he was exempt.

Uh huh.

Duck Hunter Blasts Drone In Utah.

Aerial cinematographer James Allred wanted to get some beauty shots of steam rising from the surface of a lake hear his Utah home on January 6th, but instead, his brand-new DJI Inspire 2 drone was damaged by shots fired by a duck hunter upset about his activities.

The hunter now faces criminal mischief charges, and possibly more.

The website Digital Circuit reports that the temperature was -18 when Allred started flying the drone. He thought it was behaving erratically, so he landed the aircraft and waited for things to warm up a bit. The drone is only rated down to -4 fahrenheit. When he resumed flight … still below that threshold, the link between the aircraft and the controller was lost, he said.

It stopped over the duck hunter, who got annoyed and opened fire on the aircraft. He took three shots, and hit the drone up to 28 times.

Somehow the aircraft continued to fly. Allred recovered his drone, and called the sheriff.

It seems to me the only thing the hunter is guilty of is meting out a little rough justice to a negligent drone pilot.

QUESTION ASKED: Is the great American road trip ending?

You don’t have to be a futurist to connect the dots. Once autonomous driving technology is proven, it’ll be in every car. It’s not hard to imagine that motorists will soon secure sizable insurance discounts for letting the onboard computer do all the driving.

From there, you can envision a not-too-distant future in which you can’t even drive your own car to your vacation destination. So long, great American road trip. That sensation of steering your own vehicle down the road, of feeling the asphalt under your own tires, will be history.

“Technology is poised to disrupt the automotive industry,” says Amit Jain, director of strategic planning for Verizon Telematics. “And that means the way people interact with cars on a daily basis will dramatically change.”

Being behind the wheel is being in control of your own destiny — so it’s easy now to see it being mandated out of existence.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Former UC-Hastings Dean: Legal Education Is ‘Delusional About Our Prospects’—With Plummeting Return On Investment, Is Law School A ‘Long Con’?

JOHN MCGINNIS: Our Laws Should Encourage Business Leaders To Become Cabinet Secretaries.

One of the best disruptions of Donald Trump has been his decision to nominate many officials to the Cabinet who have been enormously successful in business. Such appointees have run major organizations and thus can use their substantial management experience to impose order on the sprawling government bureaucracy. They also bring the perspective of business into the heart of government. A commercial republic can thrive only if, from time to time, officials set about lifting off the dead weights that democratic practices tend to place on the economy.

It is thus disheartening, if not surprising, that many Democrats in the Senate now want to eliminate most of the tax law that facilitates the transition of business people to government. This law permits appointees to an administration to defer their capital gains on the stock they must sell to avoid conflict of interest. It thus encourages wealthy individuals to take government posts, because otherwise they would face an unpalatable choice: Pay a huge capital gains bill or hold on to stock that would create conflicts of interest in their new positions. The legislation greatly aids in eliminating conflicts of interest, because in exchange for the tax deferral, appointees must put their money in treasuries or index funds.

Thus, it is not an interest in good government, but in insular government that is behind the push to change this law.One of the most striking aspects of the modern left-liberal agenda is the effort to create a politics run by and for the symbolic class—people who talk or write for a living. This impetus is most obviously demonstrated by the interest in campaign finance reform. Such reform does not touch the very substantial influence of the media or of the academy on the long term shape of politics, groups almost entirely on the left side of the political spectrum. But campaign finance reform would curtail the capacity of those who create and improve our material world from using their own resources to rent the media and get their own views out the public.

The attempt to gut this sensible tax provision is yet another part of the effort to protect the power of symbolic class and make it harder for the sensibility of business to infuse government.

Nothing in the performance record of the “symbolic class” suggests that we gain from putting more power in its hands.

ALINSKY, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD, I READ YOUR BOOK: DisruptJ20 Dramatically Scales Back Plans to Sabotage Inauguration After Project Veritas Sting.