SCIENCE: Scientists Have Developed a Baldness Treatment That Helps Grow New Follicles.

MARK STEYN: Steinle Verdict a ‘Miscarriage of Justice’ in the Profoundest Sense.

PATTERICO: Lawsplainer: The California Homicide Statutes Relevant to the Steinle Murder Case.

More here from Sarah Rumpf. The murder charge was iffy, but the real crime was that this guy was present in the United States at all.

IT’S ALWAYS THE JEWS: Liberal Hero Linda Sarsour Blames Her Bad Image On Jewish Controlled Media.

AX CFPB’S TPS REPORTS: According to the (excellent) legal eagles David Rifkin and Andrew Grossman, new Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney can use the oft-overlooked Paperwork Reduction Act to nullify many of his predecessor’s regulations (paywall likely):

Federal agencies are eager to impose paperwork burdens on citizens and businesses. It costs an agency almost nothing to impose a new record-keeping requirement or reporting mandate. The expense falls on those required to carry it out. The obvious solution was to put agencies on a paperwork budget and force them to internalize the costs they foist on the public.

To ensure that agencies don’t evade that responsibility, the PRA established robust centralized oversight in the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House. Every “information collection request” issued or imposed by a federal agency must be approved by OMB. That includes government forms as well as requirements that private parties collect information. If OMB disapproves a request, the agency cannot enforce it…

The CFPB was designed to be an independent agency, but unlike the others it has a single director. The PRA limits the ability to overrule to “an independent regulatory agency which is administered by two or more members.” So OMB can disapprove any action by the bureau that imposes unnecessary or excessive paperwork burdens, without fear of being overruled.

Mr. Mulvaney should exercise that power. Every single provision of the short-term lending rule is structured around information collection requests subject to the PRA. The rule’s central requirement is that lenders determine a borrower’s ability to repay by demanding financial information from the borrower, verifying it, and then recording the result of various calculations. Each step is its own paperwork burden.

It’s a burden that the CFPB admits will destroy 80% of the short-term lending industry.

VARIETY: Harvey Weinstein vs Michael Moore: Who do you cheer for? It’s really tough to pick a side here.

UGH: Argentina’s missing submarine: ‘No one will be rescued.’

The submarine had 44 people on board. Luis Taglapietra, whose son Damián was a 27-year-old trainee on the submarine, told the TN news channel: “This is perverse and impossible to understand. They’re playing word games,” referring to the navy announcing it was calling off rescue efforts while agreeing to continue searching for the submarine as long as it is not in too deep waters. “What they are really saying is that they’re not going to be looking for it any more.”

The San Juan went missing on 15 November when it lost radio contact with the naval base in Mar del Plata, but it was not until two days later that the navy announced publicly that the submarine had gone missing.

“More than double the number of days than it would have been possible to rescue the crew have passed,” Balbi told reporters.

The huge sea and air rescue effort for the German-built submarine will now be reduced to trying to locate the vessel itself.

Relatives of the crew had already abandoned hope that they would be found alive. “They lied to us from the start,” Taglapietra said to the Guardian. “We don’t know what happened and it’s impossible to tell the truth from fabrication.”

Probably nothing worse than typical bureaucratic ass-covering, which in this case is more than bad enough.

CHANGE: Trump to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel on Wednesday.

That’s a bad headline. Israel declared Jerusalem the country’s capital in 1950. POTUS is merely recognizing the fact.

SARAH HOYT: Publishing in Cloud-CooCoo Land.

Read the whole thing.

HUSH MONEY: Matt Lauer wants $30 million from NBC after his firing for sexual harassment, report says.

ROGER SIMON: The Unintended Consequences of the Kate Steinle Decision.

WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY THINKING? Philly Lawmakers Seek to Ban Bulletproof Glass in Liquor Stores.

IS THE GLASS HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL OF ARSENIC? Everybody Stinks and Everything’s Great, Andrew Klaven writes.

HMM: NBC’s shifting statements on Lauer draw scrutiny.

The initial Wednesday morning memo on Lauer’s firing, signed by NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack, referred to a woman who had come forward to complain about Lauer on Monday night, saying that it was “the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he’s been at NBC News.”

NBC’s second statement, released later Wednesday, said, “We can say unequivocally that, prior to Monday night, current NBC News management was never made aware of any complaints about Matt Lauer’s conduct.”

Employees at NBC News especially noted the wording shift from “in 20 years” to “current NBC News management,” according to a network staffer. Lack’s current tenure at NBC News began in 2015, though he had previously headed the news division from 1993 to 2001. The tweak raised questions over whether NBC brass was suggesting that past executives may have heard of inappropriate behavior.

At least one, CNN president and former “Today” executive producer Jeff Zucker, addressed the issue on Thursday. At Business Insider’s Ignition conference, he denied any knowledge of bad behavior by Lauer.

What did management know and when did they know it?

THAT’S ONE DECIOBAMA: G.O.P. Seeks More Offsets After Analysis Says Tax Bill Adds $1 Trillion to Deficit.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, FREE SPEECH EDITION: FIRE files amicus brief with Wisconsin Supreme Court in McAdams v. Marquette.

FIRE has filed an amicus brief with the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the case of John McAdams, the tenured Marquette University professor who was fired after criticizing a graduate student instructor’s pedagogical techniques on his personal blog. FIRE filed the brief this afternoon, along with a request that the court consider it as it decides whether to hear McAdams’ case.

McAdams said in May that he would appeal the decision of a Milwaukee circuit court judge who ruled that, despite Marquette’s contractual promises of free speech and academic freedom, Marquette was within its rights when it effectively fired McAdams back in 2014 by suspending him indefinitely without pay.

McAdams’ attorneys at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty appealed the ruling in September. But earlier this month, they took the additional, rare step of asking the Supreme Court of Wisconsin to hear McAdams’ case on bypass, meaning that the Supreme Court would hear the case directly before waiting for the appeals court to rule on the case first.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court can elect to hear such cases when, among other considerations, it believes the matter is one it would ultimately decide to hear, regardless of the outcome at the appellate level, in order to develop the law at issue in the case.

FIRE’s brief supports McAdams’ position that his appeal warrants this unusual and important step.

FIRE does excellent work. If you’re looking for a place to make a year-end donation, keep them in mind.

YUGE: This Trump Decision Is A Major Blow To The Administrative State.

The Trump administration switched sides Wednesday in a case pending before the Supreme Court that could retroactively nullify tens of thousands of agency decisions.

The case, Lucia v. SEC, has major implications for the process by which federal agencies try or punish those in violation of laws or regulations.

The litigation concerns an agency’s decision to allow career bureaucrats to preside as the functional equivalent of judges during enforcement proceedings. These officials, called administrative law judges (ALJs), are hired by career bureaucrats. They are not appointed by the president, a court or an agency head, but they exercise significant authority on behalf of the U.S. government in official proceedings.

ALJs can, among other things, issue subpoenas, make decisions about the credibility of witnesses or the admissibility of evidence, and issues provisional rulings that are generally upheld on final review — if a final review occurs at all.

The professionalization of the bureaucracy has proven far more corrupt than the spoils system it was supposed to clean up.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Video: University of Florida Campus cops defend vandalism, destruction of property. It’s amazing how consistently useless campus police seem to be in protecting the ability of people on the right to speak.

AT AMAZON, Cyber Monday Deals continue all week.

PRESS EMAIL FROM THE SPECIAL COUNSEL: “The court has scheduled a plea hearing for Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn (Ret.), 58, of Alexandria, Va., at 10:30 a.m. before U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras at the D.C. federal courthouse on 3rd and Constitution. A criminal information has been filed and is attached. No additional information is available at this time.” It’s two counts of False Statements Act violations from talking to investigators.

UPDATE: From the comments: “So we have a Scooter Libby approach to this investigation. What you hear now is the slurping sound at the bottom of a dry hole when a prosecutor can’t find anything worth charging and the defendants have been cooperative i.e. stupid. The ‘Don’t Talk to the Police’ rule just keeps getting more applicable here.” Sadly, yes it does. As for the rest, well, we’ll see, but this isn’t an auspicious start.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Steinle Verdict, Today’s Harassment Allegation Advent Calendar and Much, Much More.

WHY ARE LEFTY MEDIA OUTLETS SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY?

THE GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTING OFFICE LOOKS AT SECURITY SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES DEPLOYED ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER: This is a detailed pdf. The title is a fair summary: “Southwest Border Security: Border Patrol Is Deploying Surveillance Technologies but Needs to Improve Data Quality and Assess Effectiveness.”

One of the conclusions:

Since 2005, Border Patrol has spent more than one billion dollars deploying technologies to the southwest border, but is not yet positioned to fully quantify the impact these technologies have on its mission.

The pdf includes background information on border surveillance operations.

HEALTH: Apple Watch will alert heart-study participants if they have an irregular beat.

The company, in collaboration with Stanford Medicine, launched the Apple Heart Study app on Thursday that uses the heart rate sensor inside the Apple Watch to collect data on irregular heart rhythms. The study had been previously announced back in September.

If an irregular heart rhythm is detected, participants in the study will be notified through the Apple Watch and on their iPhones. Should that occur, you’ll be offered a free consultation with a study doctor, and possibly an electrocardiogram (ECG) patch for additional monitoring.

Of course, at that point you’ll likely also wish to consult your own physician.

Indeed. It isn’t about wearing a cure on your wrist, but about getting vital information quickly enough to make a difference.