GOOD LORD: Arizona Cop Acquitted for Killing Man Crawling Down Hotel Hallway While Begging for His Life.

The incident occurred in January 2016. Daniel Shaver apparently was showing off a pellet gun, and it was visible through the hotel room window. This promped somebody to call to the hotel front desk, which prompted a call to the police.

So it wasn’t unreasonable for police to approach the hotel room thinking the encounter might be dangerous. They knew there was a gun there, and they didn’t know it was a pellet gun. But that video shows some truly baffling decisions by Brailsford that escalated the situation to make it even scarier, not the least of which was that Brailsford’s bluster and open threats of violence made him appear as terrified as Shaver.

The contents of the body camera footage had been described to the public before, when Brailsford was first charged, but the video itself was withheld until this morning.

Forcing Shaver to crawl toward the police like this increased the likelihood that Shaver would lose balance and make wild movements, and Brailsford’s bizarre orders were probably confusing even to a sober person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M62Va6Ft2cw

Read the whole thing. And the video, I must warn you, is disturbing.

HEATHER WILHELM: ‘Evil’ Tax Cuts? Nope, It’s Blue-State Panic.

Thank goodness for people like Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown, the New York Times editorial board, and other blue-state stalwarts, whose No. 1 concern is to fight this pernicious money grab by a sinister, well-organized, and garishly wealthy elite! But hark, New York Times: What have we here? Why, it’s an analysis from your own news pages, dated December 5, with a doozy of a headline: “Among the Tax Bill’s Biggest Losers: High-Income, Blue State Taxpayers.”

Well, this is certainly awkward.

Let’s read on: “While the Republican tax overhaul would add up to an overall tax cut for individual taxpayers, at least through 2025, millions could still immediately receive a tax increase,” notes the report. Interesting! Who might those people be? “For many, particularly those in Democratic areas who earn $200,000 or more, the increase would come from the repeal of the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT.”

If you know anything about California, you likely now know why good old Governor Moonbeam is freaking out. California may be filled with natural wonders, but it’s also a Democratic area chock full of people who earn $200,000 or more — and it’s also known for high state-level income taxes, with a top marginal rate of 13.3 percent. In the bad old days, Californians could count on simply deducting this highway robbery from their federal taxable income, masking the state’s shenanigans and blunting the financial pain. The GOP tax bill yanks what is essentially a federal subsidy away, forcing blue-state residents to face the reality of their local high-tax, high-spending regimes.

They’re only being asked to pay their fair share.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS: HomeKit flaw in iOS 11.2 allowed remote access to smart devices, temporary fix already in place.

FRANKEN, BARTON, CONYERS, ETC. WILL IT NEVER END?: Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers a trenchant analysis of what’s fueling the burgeoning congressional sex scandal and why it isn’t likely to end soon. Check out the first segment of his Friday podcast, “The Combustible Mix of Scandal, Moral Relativism and Political Expediency.”

TOTALLY NONPARTISAN AND UNBIASED INVESTIGATION, WE SWEAR, PART 1,000,007: Mueller’s ‘Right-Hand Man’ on Russia Probe Represented Clinton IT Aide Who Set Up Unsecure Server.

THANK YOU FOR HELPING ME REACH MY FUNDRAISING GOAL! Thanks to your generous support, as well as shoutouts from Glenn and Popehat.com, my $3,000 matching fundraiser on Facebook for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education met its goal almost a week early. Perhaps, more than ever, free speech on campus needs all the help it can get, so your support is greatly appreciated!

BUT WHEN AND WHY?

More details here, but we haven’t yet seen the full money quote.

HMM: Obama Appointed Judge Mysteriously Recuses Himself From Michael Flynn Case.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras abruptly recused himself Thursday night with no explanation. Contreras is an Obama appointee who also sat on the FISA court while the Trump team was under surveillance by the Obama administration. Judge Emmet Sullivan, an Bill Clinton appointee, was randomly assigned to take over the case after Contreras’ recusal.

Of note, Contreras was appointed to the FISA court on May 19, 2016 – before the warrant to surveil one-time Trump advisor Carter Page was issued “in the summer” of 2016. It is unknown whether or not Contreras was involved in the decision, or whether he was involved in surveillance on Michael Flynn.

In fact every single FISA Court judge was appointed during the Obama administration.

Read the whole thing.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Don’t Tune Out ‘What About?’ Maybe you actually are being hypocritical. Cop to it. Learn from it. Get back on topic.

Last week, as you may have noticed, Republicans passed a tax bill. As you may also have noticed, Democrats were aghast. Passing a bill like that on straight party lines! Using a parliamentary maneuver to push through something that could never have survived a filibuster! How could Republicans be so brazen, so immoral, so fiscally irresponsible?

Those of us who remembered saying many of the same things during the passage of Obamacare had to beg them to stop. I mean, we could have been seriously hurt, laughing that hard.

But when I pointed this out, the good citizens of Twitter informed me over and over that this was mere “whataboutism.”

Claiming “Whataboutism” is just a way to deflect.

BREXIT BREAKTHROUGH: The EU and Britain Have Agreed on Key Terms of Divorce.

The European Commission said enough progress had been made after the two sides worked through the night to end an impasse over the status of the Irish border that had scuppered an earlier attempt to clinch a deal on Monday.

The Commission gave its verdict in a statement after intense talks, which resulted in British Prime Minister Theresa May taking an early-morning flight to Brussels to announce the deal alongside Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Donald Tusk, the chairman of European Union leaders, welcomed the deal but said London still needed to provide more clarity on the new relationship after Brexit, and bemoaned the fact the first round of talks had taken so long.

“We all know that breaking up is hard, but breaking up and building a new relation is much harder,” he said. “So much time has been devoted to the easier task and now … we have de facto less than a year” left for talks before Britain is due to leave in March, 2019.

And not a moment too soon, if this next story has any weight to it: Martin Schulz wants ‘United States of Europe’ within eight years.

The leader of Germany’s Social Democratic party has sketched out red lines for talks to form another coalition government with Angela Merkel.

In a speech at the SPD’s party conference in Berlin that called for the creation of a “United States of Europe” by 2025, as well as a more robust social security net and a phasing out of coal power, Martin Schulz made the case for entering open-ended talks with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

He also tweeted that “Any state that won’t ratify this treaty will automatically leave the EU.”

Whether Schultz, who just led the SPD to its worst election result in the postwar era, has enough juice to make that happen remains to be seen.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Catholic School Under Fire For Celebrating Christmas. “Some students are complaining that Loyola University Chicago puts a greater emphasis on Christmas than on other religious holidays, such as Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan.”

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Mueller’s Circus, Days of Rage and Much, Much More.

JAILED FOR A TEXT: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups.

One night this September, construction supervisor Chen Shouli fired off a joke in a chat group.

“Haha,” he typed on his black iPhone 7, followed by an off-color wisecrack about a rumored love triangle involving a celebrity and one of China’s most senior government officials.

Four days later, he says, the police telephoned, ordering him in for questioning.

“I thought, I haven’t done anything wrong, have I? I’m law-abiding,” recalls Mr. Chen, a wiry 41-year-old. “So I went in. Once I arrived, they wouldn’t let me leave.”

Mr. Chen was locked in a cell for five days, he says. According to the police report, his comment on the WeChat messaging app was deemed “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a broad offense that encompasses gang fighting and destruction of public property and is punishable by detention without trial.

In China’s swiftly evolving new world of state surveillance, there are fewer and fewer private spaces. Authorities who once had to use informants to find out what people said in private now rely on a vast web of new technology. They can identify citizens as they walk down the street, monitor their online behavior and snoop on cellphone messaging apps to identify suspected malcontents.

Strong encryption is everyone’s friend — except the tyrant.

MICHAEL BARONE: Real target of Republican tax bills: Feds, eds, and meds bloat.

The Republican tax bills do indeed reduce revenues to the “feds,” with surprisingly small rate cuts for high earners and by cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 20 percent. The current rate, highest in the world, had to be lowered sooner or later, as most liberal economists (and Barack Obama) have long admitted.

And it is hard to take seriously those moaning about increased budget deficits from those unwilling to reform entitlements, which includes all Democrats and many Republicans, notably President Trump.

The critics have more of an argument when it comes to eds and meds. But there’s a counterargument there as well. The tax bills push against the counterproductive government policies that have been pushing up education and health care costs, to the detriment of the consumers thereof.

The tax bills impose a new 1.4 percent tax on the investment income of endowments of very wealthy colleges and universities. They would eliminate deductions for student loans and tax tuition waivers for graduate students.

These institutions have been coasting on their reputation for excellence and as havens of free thought, even as they impose speech codes, conduct kangaroo courts on sexual assault charges and allow humanities and social science departments to be dominated by “postmodern” agitprop and gibberish.

Student loans impoverish many students, especially dropouts, while the money they pump into universities produces administrative bloat, to the point that there are more administrators than teachers in higher education today. Government subsidies produce an oversupply of Ph.D.s, whose theses go unread and whose job prospects are dismal.

Yep. Somebody should write a book on that problem.

CHEESEHEAD STASI: DOJ Report: Wisconsin’s Infamous John Doe Investigation Was More Sinister Than First Reported.

A Wisconsin Attorney General report on the year-long investigation into leaks of sealed John Doe court documents to a liberal British publication in September 2016 finds a rogue agency of partisan bureaucrats bent on a mission “to bring down the (Gov. Scott) Walker campaign and the Governor himself.”

The AG report, released Wednesday, details an expanded John Doe probe into a “broad range of Wisconsin Republicans,” a “John Doe III,” according to Attorney General Brad Schimel, that widened the scope of the so-called John Doe II investigation into dozens of right-of-center groups and scores of conservatives. Republican lawmakers, conservative talk show hosts, a former employee from the MacIver Institute, average citizens, even churches, were secretly monitored by the dark John Doe.

State Department of Justice investigators found hundreds of thousands of John Doe documents in the possession of the GAB long after they were ordered to be turned over to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The Government Accountability Board, the state’s former “nonpartisan” speech cop, proved to be more partisan than originally suspected, the state Department of Justice report found. For reasons that “perhaps may never be fully explained,” GAB held onto thousands of private emails from Wisconsin conservatives in several folders on their servers marked “Opposition Research.” The report’s findings validate what conservatives have long contended was nothing more than a witch-hunt into limited government groups and the governor who was turning conservative ideas into public policy.

“Moreover, DOJ is deeply concerned by what appears to have been the weaponization of GAB by partisans in furtherance of political goals, which permitted the vast collection of highly personal information from dozens of Wisconsin Republicans without even taking modest steps to secure this information,” the report states.

And in an all-too familiar occurrence involving allegations of government abuse, a key hard drive believed to contain the court-sealed John Doe documents leaked to The Guardian in October 2016 has suspiciously disappeared – GAB officials with knowledge of the hard drive can’t seem to explain what happened to it.

People should be jailed and disbarred for this.

WHY ARE LEFTY-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL PREDATION? X-Men Director Bryan Singer Accused of Raping 17-Year-Old Boy, Threatening Him Into Silence.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: China sues Venezuela’s oil company over unpaid bills.

According to court documents filed on Nov. 27 in Houston, Texas, Sinopec USA claims that PDVSA has failed to pay for half of a $43.5 million order for steel products. The lawsuit was first reported by the Financial Times on Wednesday.

The disputed amount is small when compared to the massive debts Venezuela is struggling to repay.

Venezuela and PDVSA owe more than $60 billion just to bondholders. In total, the country owes $196 billion, according to a paper published by the Harvard Law Roundtable.

China’s state banks loaned $60 billion to Venezuela between 2007 and 2016, and the lawsuit is just the latest sign that Beijing is growing impatient with the embattled South American country.

Even the comradely international socialist brotherhood gets tense when the bills don’t get paid.

FREE SPEECH FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE: Two very wrong perspectives on Masterpiece Cakeshop

John McGinnis:

Consider, first, Linda Greenhouse: “in my opinion, if someone wants to be able to pick and choose his customers, he should bake for his friends in his own kitchen and stop calling himself a business.” On her view, people in commerce lose all expressive rights, because on any sensible line, sometimes a baker will be able to refuse a customer because of what that customer insists must be included in the cake design.

Greenhouse’s prejudices against people in commerce are right out of the nineteenth century. There aristocrats and landed gentry looked down on people in trade, thinking that the way those with income earned from land gave them social superiority and a more capacious set of rights. Similarly, Greenhouse earns income as a journalist, and does not regard that as a low commercial activity, although it entirely depends on consumers buying media products. Nevertheless, she feels she should get a full panoply of First Amendment protections while mere artisans get none.

Someone really ought to write a book about how antidiscrimination laws are gradually eroding civil liberties.

CLAIRE BERLINSKI: The Warlock Hunt: The #MeToo moment has now morphed into a moral panic that poses as much danger to women as it does to men.

Among us, it seems, lives a class of men who call to mind Caligula and Elagabalus not only in their depravity, but in their grotesque sense of impunity. Our debauched emperors, whether enthroned in Hollywood, media front offices, or the halls of Congress, truly imagined their victims had no choice but to shut up, take it, and stay silent forever. Many of these men are so physically disgusting, too—the thought of them forcing themselves on young women fills me with heaving disgust. Enough already.

All true; yet something is troubling me. Recently I saw a friend—a man—pilloried on Facebook for asking if #metoo is going too far. “No,” said his female interlocutors. “Women have endured far too many years of harassment, humiliation, and injustice. We’ll tell you when it’s gone too far.” But I’m part of that “we,” and I say it is going too far. Mass hysteria has set in. It has become a classic moral panic, one that is ultimately as dangerous to women as to men.

If you are reading this, it means I have found an outlet that has not just fired an editor for sexual harassment. This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name, vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to pick over my flesh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the mafia, al-Qaeda, or the Kremlin?

But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability. We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity. The punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime—like any other serious crime—requires an unambiguous definition. We have nothing of the sort.

Read the whole thing. And here’s a nice note of sanity, in the form of a tweet from Berlinski: “So strange. Everyone likes it. I’d braced myself to hide under the bed, barricade the doors, and tell anyone who called I’d never even heard of this ‘Berlinski’ woman.”

Like most mass hysterias, there’s a critical mass, but not really the totality they’d like you to believe.

PRISON COLONY: Australians Applaud the ‘Erosion of Religious Liberty’ as Same-Sex Marriage Becomes Law.

DIGGING DEEPER: Newly Revealed Experiment Shows How F-35 Could Help Intercept ICBMs.

I covered this one earlier in the week, but the only article I could find was locked tight behind a paywall. This one is free:

The F-35 is studded with sensors like no other aircraft, including the Distributed Aperture System, or DAS, a half-dozen 17-pound electro-optical and infrared sensors. These feed a helmet-mounted display that allows the pilot to effectively “see through the plane” and spot incoming aircraft and missiles.

In October 2014, Northrop and MDA launched FTX-20, an experiment to see, among other things, whether the DAS could track an enemy ICBM. They took data from the sensors, ran it through algorithms developed by Northrop and MDA’s Enterprise Sensor Lab, generated a 3D-moving picture of the missile’s trajectory, and conveyed it over the Link 16 tactical data exchange. This kind of targeting data can help cue the U.S. Navy’s anti-ballistic missile destroyers or short- and intermediate-range missile defenses like the Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, missile battery deployed in South Korea.

The F-35 sensors aren’t meant to replace the infrared satellites that detect launches, or the sea-based X-Band Radar that can feed targeting data about missile launches to destroyers. Rather, Northrop officials said, the DAS data would help the other missile-defense gear get a targeting track on a missile more quickly, improving the odds of nailing the shot. (You also need two of them in the air for triangulation.)

“That information can go straight to the Patriot [missile system], THAAD, or anywhere else, who has communication with that platform,” John “Bama” Montgomery, a business development manager at Northrop’s ISR & Targeting Division, said on Tuesday.

One drawback is that unlike satellite or ground-based radar, two F-35s must be kept within detection range of the launchpad at all times. But the targeting information they could provide would be priceless.

THIS SCANDAL IS GOING TO TAKE DOWN A LOT OF PEOPLE, BUT I DON’T THINK TRUMP WILL BE ONE OF THEM: Byron York: We knew the FBI was involved in Trump dossier during campaign. Now we learn knowledge of dossier reached into highest levels of Obama Justice Department. “The Ohr revelation comes not long after word that top FBI agent Peter Strzok was removed from the Mueller investigation for anti-Trump text messages he exchanged with a top FBI lawyer who had also worked for the Mueller probe. Now, with news of Ohr’s contacts with Steele and Simpson, Republicans on Capitol Hill — and perhaps some Democrats, too — will wonder just how far the Obama Justice Department officials went in the effort to stop Trump.”

Lock them up.