CHANGE: House Passes GOP Tax Bill.

EZRA KLEIN NOW: The Republican tax bill is an American betrayal.

EZRA KLEIN THEN: It’s been a year since the Iran deal was signed. So far, it’s worked.

EZRA KLEIN ON OBAMA SIDELINING CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OF TERRORIST ORGANIZATION TO PURSUE IRAN DEAL: [Crickets]

I’m not sure we can trust Ezra’s definition of “American betrayal.”

WELL, THAT’S GOOD, BUT NOT GREAT: New study suggests flu vaccine could work as well as last year’s: The flu strain crossing Australia this year — and limiting the efficacy of the vaccine there — is different than the one in the United States, which means the vaccine could work. “The majority of the viruses are well-covered by the vaccine. . . . Last year, the vaccine was 43 percent effective against the H3N2 virus and 48 percent effective overall, according to the CDC.”

Great would be something north of 90%.

HILLARY CLINTON CAMPAIGN AND DNC ACCUSED OF “CORRUPT” MONEY SCHEME:

A new legal complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission alleges that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee used state chapters as strawmen to circumvent campaign donation limits and laundered the money back to her campaign.

The Committee to Defend the President, a political action committee, filed its complaint with the FEC on Monday with the allegations that the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) solicited cash from big-name donors, including Calvin Klein and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane — money that was allegedly sent through state chapters and back to the DNC before ending up with the Clinton campaign.

Well well well. Of course, at this moment in time, it’s just an FEC complaint. But, heh.

2017 GOES OUT WITH A BANG: Women’s March organizer accused of covering up sex abuse.

THAT’S NOT THE IMPRESSION YOU GET FROM READING THE MAJOR NEWSPAPERS:

Full report here.

WELL, THIS WAS THE SORT OF THING HE’D KNOW: Ancient Poo Is The First-Ever Confirmation Hippocrates Was Right About Parasites. “You’ve probably been wondering about this for a while: did the Ancient Greeks ever get intestinal worms like we do today? The answer, we can now tell you, is an unequivocal yes.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Liz Sheld unpacks the spin on Andrew “Andy’s office” McCabe.

CHRISTOPHER HARPER: Dictionaries as Propaganda Tools.

In a year when Trumpism, fake news, and myriad conservative terms held sway throughout the world, I am trying not to sound conspiratorial. But the dictionaries chose some liberal words to proclaim as the words of 2017. Merriam-Webster chose “feminism.” Dictionary.com went with “complicit,” while the Cambridge Dictionary anointed “populism.” These choices seem troubling, but Oxford Dictionaries went with something else worse: “youthquake.”

I am happy to say I have never heard someone use youthquake, which is defined as a “significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people.”

Former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland apparently coined “youthquake” in the 1960s to describe the youth culture of London back then. The word fell out of favor until this year when its use increased dramatically, according to an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus, which collects roughly 150 million words of spoken and written English from various sources.

The use of the word surged first in coverage of the British parliamentary elections in June before spreading to political commentary to the United States and elsewhere.

Youthquake triumphed over a politically leftist list that included “Antifa,” “broflake,” “kompromat,” “white fragility,” and “Milkshake Duck.”

You may not be interested in the Gleichschaltung, but the Gleichschaltung is interested in you.

SO THAT WAS “FAKE NEWS:” CDC Director Now Says There Are No ‘Banned’ Words at The Agency. “Fitzgerald noted that the confusion arose from ‘a staff-level discussion at a routine meeting about how to present CDC’s budget.'”

QUESTION ASKED REGARDING YESTERDAY’S WASHINGTON STATE AMTRAK CRASH: “How is it that a train was going 80 miles an hour around a curve where the speed limit was 30?”

THE HILL: Tavis Smiley on dating employees: ‘Where else are you going to meet people?’

BRAGGING RIGHTS? AOL Instant Messenger Made Social Media What It Is Today.

A DIRECTORY OF DEAD MALLS at DeadMalls.com.

JEFFREY SINGER: End The Ban On OTC Contraceptives. Planned Parenthood hardest hit. . . .

And to be fair, we should do the same with Viagra and related drugs, as has already been done in other countries.

BRUCE BAWER: What Led Germany to Accept a Tsunami of Migrants?

MIKE RAPPAPORT: Classical Liberal Administrative Law in a Progressive World.

UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE: Victor Davis Hanson discusses his new book, The Second World Wars, with Peter Robinson (video).

Part two of their interview is online here.

AND ANOTHER ONE: ‘Silicon Valley’ Star T.J. Miller Accused of Sexually Assaulting and Punching a Woman.

The Daily Beast has corroborated details of her story—which includes two separate incidents—with five GW contemporaries and spoke to numerous associates of both her and Miller.

Two of the GW contemporaries say they were in the off-campus house where the incidents allegedly occurred. The contemporaries later testified in student court about hearing the sound of violent thuds or seeing bruises on Sarah.

Three other contemporaries said they comforted and counseled Sarah in the aftermath of the incidents. Matt Lord was one of them. An ex-boyfriend of Sarah’s, he told The Daily Beast that he continues to believe her story more than a decade after the fact.

“I attended George Washington University for undergraduate studies from 2000 until December 2003… I had a romantic relationship with [this] woman, who spoke with me about T.J. Miller sexually assaulting her,” Lord, who currently works as an attorney in Montague, Massachusetts, wrote in a statement to The Daily Beast. “At the time I believed the statements she made regarding the assault by Mr. Miller, and I continue to believe the statements she made are true. She was engaged in student conduct proceedings regarding the sexual assault, and I remember the emotional toll that the assault and the subsequent conduct hearings placed on her.”

In the years since, Miller has attempted to address the lingering allegations by occasionally making light of them. He’s privately joked about committing violence against a woman in his past, according to three sources in the comedy world. Perhaps that is why some female performers and comedy professionals tell The Daily Beast that they have declined to work with Miller, citing a perceived history of abusive behavior.

FLASHBACK: T.J. Miller Insists ‘Emoji Movie’ Will Fight Trump, Make Young People ‘Adopt Progressive Values.’

GANGSTER STATE: North Korea Is Behind WannaCry.

The attack spread indiscriminately across the world in May. It encrypted and rendered useless hundreds of thousands of computers in hospitals, schools, businesses and homes. While victims received ransom demands, paying did not unlock their computers. It was cowardly, costly and careless. The attack was widespread and cost billions, and North Korea is directly responsible.

We do not make this allegation lightly. It is based on evidence. We are not alone with our findings, either. Other governments and private companies agree. The United Kingdom attributes the attack to North Korea, and Microsoft traced the attack to cyber affiliates of the North Korean government.

The consequences and repercussions of WannaCry were beyond economic. The malicious software hit computers in the U.K.’s health-care sector particularly hard, compromising systems that perform critical work. These disruptions put lives at risk.

The world is increasingly interconnected with new technologies, devices, networks and systems creating great convenience. Unfortunately, that provides bad actors opportunities to create mayhem with the hope of anonymity, relying on the complex world of ones and zeros to hide their hand. They have stolen intellectual property and done significant damage in every sector.

North Korea has acted especially badly, largely unchecked, for more than a decade, and its malicious behavior is growing more egregious. WannaCry was indiscriminately reckless.

It’s long past time for China to rein in its reckless and criminal ally.

MAYBE SOMEONE ON THE RIGHT SHOULD BUY IT UP CHEAP: Washington City Paper Staff’s Salaries Cut By 40 Percent as Owner Struggles to Find Buyer.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: University teaches white employees how to overcome the ‘discomfort’ of being white.

A year and a half ago at the Federalist, David Marcus wrote that “White people are being asked—or pushed—to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more. This is a remarkably bad idea.” Marcus’s piece was presciently titled, “How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism.”

And as Rod Dreher warned earlier this year, the elite left “needs to know [that] you aren’t going to be able to count on conservative people like me to help you oppose the alt-right, because you are their ‘respectable’ left-wing mirror image.”

JOHN SOLOMON SLICED AND DICED LISA BLOOM MONDAY NIGHT: It happened on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” and it was brutal. Reporting last week for The Hill, Solomon was first with the news that Bloom – daughter of celebrity ambulance chaser Gloria Allred – sought multiple forms of compensation for women willing to publicly accuse Donald Trump of sexual harassment during last year’s presidential race.

In response, Bloom tried to dismiss Solomon’s reporting as the work of a “far-right journalist.” Bad mistake because Bloom’s ad hominem isn’t remotely grounded in reality. And Solomon pounced when asked about it by Laura Ingraham: “I learned a long time ago — I’ve been an investigative reporter for 30 years — if you can’t attack the facts, you try to do an ad hominem attack on the reporter. The facts are unassailable.”

It was downhill from there, at least for Bloom. LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby has the details.

OF COURSE HE DOES: Leahy Regrets Calling For Franken Resignation Before Ethics Committee Investigation.

RESPONDING TO FAKE HISTORY: No, Salon, the U.S. Was Not ‘Founded on Gun Control.’ “The attempt was published in Salon, and one of its authors, Ed Asner, is a 9/11 truther. Given that, the quality of the work is about what you’d expect.”

Asner’s an old-line Hollywood commie. Of course he wants Americans disarmed, and of course he’s willing to say anything to advance the cause. That’s who they are, that’s what they do.

Reminder: A similar thesis by Michael Bellesiles received the prestigious Bancroft Prize before it was exposed as a fraud. It should have been obvious that it was shady, but prestigious leading historians were eager to believe it, and smeared critics until they were finally forced to acknowledge its bogus character.