AT AMAZON, deals on Men’s Socks and Underwear.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems.

RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Flashback: Schumer calls flight attendant who told him to turn off cell phone ‘bitch.’

WHAT HATH MERKEL WROUGHT? Germany’s Islamist scene growing: security chief. “Germany’s domestic security chief warned Sunday that the country’s radical Islamist scene is not only growing, but becoming more decentralised, posing greater challenges to surveillance operations. . . . Overall, the number of Salafists — or fundamentalist Sunni Muslims — in Germany has risen to more than 9,700, sharply up from 3,800 people in 2011, said Maassen.”

Admit a bunch of people who despise you, then act weak. What could go wrong?

ANDREW KLAVAN: Atrocity in Chicago and in the Media:

In fact, the Chicago torturers don’t represent “black people” any more than do Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas or Martin Luther King. Dylann Roof doesn’t represent “white people” or “American culture” any more than John Glenn or George Washington. These are individuals acting on good and bad ideas and doing good and evil according to those ideas. If there is a bigger story behind any of it, it’s the ideas not the color of people’s skins.

But if  journalists reported that story rather than their tired black versus white fairy tales, they would not only expose the truth behind these horrible incidents but also the malevolence of their own political bias. They will not do it.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S BEEN A BAD YEAR FOR THE FBI: Sun-Sentinel: FBI owes better answers on Fort Lauderdale airport shooting. “According to various reports, Santiago said he wanted to talk about the government having taken over his mind, about being forced to watch propaganda videos on ISIS and about feeling forced to fight for the Islamic State terror group. You’d think words like ISIS and Islamic State would hit agents in the face.”

Well, it’s not like he said he was a Tea Partier and opposed ObamaCare or something. That would have gotten a much more vigorous response.

THE ONLY GOOD TIGER IS A DEAD TIGER: A German Tiger tank transformed into a junk pile. Today’s StrategyPage Battle of the Bulge photo. This is really a superb post-combat photo.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1340: Tax Professors Discuss The Future Of Tax Administration And Enforcement After ‘What The Media Often Refer To As The ‘IRS Targeting Scandal’.’

Well, after all, it was an IRS targeting scandal. One of the things that has disappointed me about that scandal is the extent to which so many tax professors have gone out of their way to ignore it, to try to minimize it, and even to try to shame Paul Caron out of continuing to cover it. I used to think of tax folks as wonks who cared more about getting it right than about politics, but — as with pretty much every species of seemingly-honest wonkery — that turned out not to be the case once Obama was in office.

ROGER SIMON: “Of all the tantrums being thrown by the Democrats in their inability to accept defeat and move on, perhaps the most absurd is the Great Russian Hacking Scandal.”

LAWPROF SCOTT GERBER ON THE LAW PROFESSORS’ LETTER AGAINST JEFF SESSIONS: “Of course, this is not the first time that leftist law professors have tried to influence Congress with preposterous arguments.” “Lobbying Congress in such transparently partisan terms as my leftist colleagues are prone to do — Sessions is a Republican, so he must be evil; Bill Clinton is a Democrat, so it was OK for him to commit perjury — only makes us look worse to prospective students. It’s time to start behaving like professors again.”

Plus, from Northwestern’s Stephen Presser: Sen. Sessions and the smug self-satisfaction of the law professoriate.

Well, colleges and universities now serve as “political action committees for the left,” and there’s no reason why law schools should be different.

UPDATE: Flashback: “People would happily trust experts, but experts have again and again proven themselves to be untrustworthy. Intellectual authority requires integrity and self-discipline, and those have been in notably short supply.”

BUSINESS AS USUAL: White House Shifts Blame From Obama When Confronted With Damaging Stat on Sluggish Growth.

When confronted Friday with a damaging statistic about sluggish economic growth during President Obama’s tenure, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that Obama would take responsibility for whatever happened during his presidency before shifting blame to events that preceded him entering office.

“The president is also going to leave office, I believe, with a distinction of being the first president since Herbert Hoover not to experience a year of growth three percent GDP,” NBC News reporter Ron Allen said during the White House daily press briefing. “That’s correct, right?”

Earnest said that he is unaware of the statistic but can “certainly look into it.”

“That’s what I’ve read,” Allen said before asking if the statistic is true, would Obama accept responsibility for it.

He also wanted to know how the White House would explain the “sluggish” economic growth over the past few years.

“And the other thing, some would argue that the slow growth is, in part, what has contributed to this feeling of anxiety in the country, that things aren’t getting better and that may be one of the crucial variables that swung the election, if you want to keep going on down this road or what,” Allen said.

Earnest started his response by saying that Obama will take full responsibility because he has done so in the past.

“Well, I’ll say a couple things about that,” he said. “I think the first is that the president of the United States is somebody who takes responsibility for what happens in this country while he’s president, and President Obama has certainly done that in a variety of settings.”

Earnest then said that Obama has acknowledged and given credit to the private sector for “driving our recovery.”

He then shifted the blame to the 2007-2008 financial crisis that occurred under former President George W. Bush before Obama entered office.

Of course he did.

JOHN KERRY: I’m “proud” of our efforts in Syria.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour. Plus, Hourly-Fresh Deals on Best Selling Products.

Also, shop today’s Kindle Daily Deals.

Plus, today’s Digital Deals.

And don’t miss today’s deals in Grocery and Gourmet Food.

MITT ROMNEY: Trump Has Made A Smart Choice For Education Secretary. “In 1970, it cost $56,903 to educate a child from K-12. By 2010, adjusting for inflation, we had raised that spending to $164,426 — almost three times as much. Further, the number of people employed in our schools had nearly doubled. But despite the enormous investment, the performance of our kids has shown virtually no improvement. The establishment predictably calls for more spending and smaller classrooms — in other words, more teachers and more pay. But more of the same is demonstrably not the answer.” Public schools nowadays are primarily Democratic Party vote farms maintained with taxpayer money. Any actual education that goes on there is purely secondary.

THE INSTA-WIFE: The Real Fear That Liberals Have: Caring for Elderly Family Members?

I’M SURE THAT PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL KEEP THEM SAFE: Feds will guard voting machines after Russian hack. “The Department of Homeland Security took the crucial step Friday night of designating voting machines as critical infrastructure, and subject to federal protections.”

This will also help with Attorney General Sessions’ efforts to end voting fraud.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Ebony Magazine Editor: Hate Crimes Can’t Be Committed Against White People, Cops. “When we use a phrase like ‘hate crime,’ we’re typically referring to crimes against people of color, people of various religious groups, LGBT people, people who have been historically attacked, abused or disenfranchised on the basis of their identity. To now extend that to the majority group and a group of people that have a history with African-Americans that has been abusive, and we can apply that to either police officers or to Caucasians, I think gets into very tricky territory.”

HETEROPHOBIA: ‘Outsiders’ Author SE Hinton Says She’s ‘Being Attacked for Being Heterosexual.’ As she says, want a great gay novel? Write it.

RICH WEINSTEIN: “Interested in how we got to this Obamacare craziness? This is pretty much a Gruber confession video.”

EUGENE VOLOKH: Donald Trump 1, New York Times “fact-checking” 0.

WHY TRUMP WON (CONT’D):

AT AMAZON, New Year, New You.

Plus, save on Home Essentials from AmazonBasics.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Why are people so terrified of Milo Yiannopoulos’s book?

The response to Milo Yiannopoulos getting a big-bucks book deal with Simon & Schuster has been nuts. Even by today’s standards. The cry has gone up that S&S — or SS, amirite? — is endangering the wellbeing of women and gays and blacks and other minorities that have felt the sting of Milo’s camp polemics. Please. It’s a book, not a bomb. It’s words, sentences, ideas, not fire and pogroms. Everyone needs to calm down.

Milo is the Breitbart editor turned darling of the agitated, anti-PC right, given to manicured fuming against feminism, Islam, censorious students, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and other things that apparently threaten Western civilisation. When it was revealed that Simon & Schuster would be publishing his first book in March, and that it is called ‘Dangerous’, and that Milo has been remunerated very handsomely indeed for it, Twitter went epileptic; snowflakes melted; literary doyens called for a boycott.

The New Yorker went full haughty, calling on its readers to protest ‘vociferously’ against S&S, ‘in emails, letters, tweets, phone calls — you name it’. The publishing house should be made to ‘answer for the harm it condones through [this] decision’, it said, as if S&S were making landmines rather than bits of paper with words on them. Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters actress subjected to vile racist abuse by alt-right morons on Twitter, said S&S is helping the alt-right to ‘spread their hate’. S&S-published author Karen Hunter said she was rethinking her relationship with the publishing house.

Most perversely, the Chicago Review of Books said it would not review any S&S books through the whole of 2017, in protest against what its editor, Adam Morgan, calls the ‘deadly consequences’ of Milo-style ‘hate speech’. Morgan says rhetoric like Milo’s, whether on race or transgenderism, has ‘real-world consequences’ — it nurtures violence. ‘It arguably encourages people such as Omar Mateen [the Florida nightclub shooter] and Dylann Roof [the Charleston Church shooter] to think of entire groups of people as less than human,’ he says. In short, publish Milo’s book and people will die. This is bonkers, and indistinguishable from the fuming of pointy-hatted policers of heresy in the past, who likewise feared that certain ideas, certain words, might warp minds and destroy souls.

Ultimately, this is about status anxiety. If they can’t silence and marginalize people, what have they got left?

But they’re not doing a very good job of silencing and marginalizing Milo.