OF COURSE IT DOES: Conn. college promotes David Hogg for ‘Social Justice Month.’

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Manafort Plea Deal Broken and Much, More More. “Yeah, why am I skeptical that Manafort had any info on treasonous Trump campaign collusion with RUSSIA? According to Mueller, ‘Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters.’ We don’t know what Manafort lied about yet, that will be revealed before sentencing.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Venezuela Pays Miner $425 Million in Move to Safeguard Citgo.

Venezuela made an partial payment of a settlement designed to resolve a $1.2 billion arbitration award to a bankrupt Canadian gold miner that’s laying claim to the assets of the parent of refiner Citgo Holding Inc. if it’s not paid in full.

Crystallex International Corp. received $425 million in November, and will suspend all enforcement efforts until at least early next year, according to Canadian court documents. Venezuela is now required to pay the remaining balance in installments by early 2021, and deliver an “acceptable security interest” or collateral to ensure payments its outstanding obligations, according to the documents.

The payment helps Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA hold onto Citgo Holding Inc. for the time being, even as the line of creditors that could lay their hands on the U.S. refiner grows.

I’m very curious about where they got the cash.

STEVE SCALISE: No forgiveness for shooter, Trump ‘motivated’ recovery.

Rep. Steve Scalise is a good Catholic who won the prayers of many church leaders as he recovered from a bullet fired by an angry liberal while he and his Republican baseball team practiced in June 2017.

“God was there on that ball field and he performed little miracles to save all of our lives,” said the Louisiana lawmaker, who fought death off several times with deep prayer and determination.

“The shooter was dead set on taking everybody out and would have been successful if not for the miracles of God and the acts of heroism on the ball field,” he added.

But while he is a faithful follower of Jesus, there is one Christian teaching that he is not ready to accept when it comes to the shooter, James Hodgkinson of Belleville, Ill.

“At some point I’ll have to deal with the issue of forgiveness,” he said in an interview, “but for now I’m focused on my recovery.”

Scalise has written in a new book, Back in the Game, about the difficulty of recovering and seeing three others shot.

He said in the interview that knowing that police shot and killed Hodgkinson helped him focus on getting better. “Because he ultimately didn’t make it, it made it easier to close that chapter and to focus on my recovery,” said Scalise, the GOP whip.

And eventually he might consider forgiveness. “It’s something to struggle with. I’m Catholic. I’m probably not there yet. That’s something I’m going to have to work with my priest on,” he said with a laugh.

For now he’s focused on thanking everybody who helped in his comeback, especially President Trump who, with first lady Melania Trump, visited Scalise on the night he was hit with the bullet that would shatter bones and rip through vital organs.

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.

Plus:

● Hillary: ‘You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.’

● Former Attorney General Eric Holder: “Michelle [Obama] always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ No. No. When they go low, we kick them.”

● Politico: After failing to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Democrats wonder if it’s time to be more ruthless.

● Democrat Doxxer Threatened To Reveal Senators’ Children’s Health Information.

● DC restaurant: We’ve received death threats after Ted Cruz, wife forced out by protesters.

● Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ): We Are Less Than 60 Days From Totally ‘Kicking the S–t Out of the Republicans.’

● Networks Silent On Attempted Stabbing of GOP Candidate By Anti-Trump Attacker.

● Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) Jokes About Threatening Trump Supporters ‘All The Time.’

SPEAKING OF BORDER GASSING, THEY GAS YOU IN THE ARMY, TOO: The Daily Caller’s Virginia Kruter explains in vivid detail what it was like.

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Chile sends planeload of Haitians home, with return stop for Chileans in Venezuela.

REPORT: Trump Eyeing John James for UN Ambassador.

SHE’S AN OPPORTUNIST OF THE FIRST ORDER, BUT THAT DOESN’T ALWAYS WORK OUT: Heh: Al Franken fans ready to punish Kirsten Gillibrand in the primaries for turning against their favorite senator.

HUH: MSNBC: Majority of Caravan Members Are Men, Some Not Talking About Asylum. The pictures I see in the news are mostly women and children. Actually, they’re mostly the same woman and children.

MEGAN FOX: Media Orgasmic Over Pitiful Photograph of Woman with Children Storming the U.S. Border. “I have a few questions, like why are those kids half-naked and in diapers?”

FROM TWITTER’S ‘THINGS YOU CANNOT SAY’ DEPARTMENT: Megan Murphy is a Canadian feminist who has the audacity to make such outrageous claims as “men aren’t women.” Can you believe anybody would say such a thing? Well, Murphy won’t be saying it on Twitter any more because the SJWs banned her.

Which prompts this from Murphy:

“What is insane to me, though, is that while Twitter knowingly permits graphic pornography and death threats on the platform (I have reported countless violent threats, the vast majority of which have gone unaddressed), they won’t allow me to state very basic facts, such as ‘men aren’t women.’”

Over at The Federalist, Nicole Russell strips Twitter’s argument down to its bare essentials in the course of explaining why Jack Dorsey’s nose is as long, or maybe even longer, than Mark Zuckerberg’s.

WELL, GOOD: With rising US pressure, Iran worries about losing ground in Iraq.

The United States is trying to pressure Iraq on all levels to distance itself from Iran and curb Iranian influence in the country. It also gave Iraq 45 days to stop importing gas and electricity from Iran. Iraqi officials revealed to Reuters that Iraq plans on submitting a proposal to the United States to continue importing gas and energy supplies in exchange for medication and foodstuff.

In line with US pressure and sanctions, Iraqi Minister of Oil Thaer al-Ghadban asserted during his first press conference that Iraq will put its national interest first in regards to sanctions on Iran. He said Iraq will stop exporting oil from Kirkuk fields to Iran, estimated at less than 30,000 barrels a day.

Iraq is also gradually looking to Turkey to bridge the gap stemming from reducing its dealings with Iran.

Keep up the pressure. Although I can’t help thinking that if Bush had given Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a well-earned bloody nose back in 2004 or ’05, when they started blowing up US troops in Iraq, there’d be a lot less Iranian influence everywhere today. Of course, you could say something similar about every American President going back to Carter.

WHAT IF THIS RESURRECTION STUFF ABOUT JESUS WAS JUST FAKE NEWS? I hear it in D.C. often, from people on the Right and Left — “Oh, what do you expect Fox/CNN/MSNBC to say.”

The Poached Egg’s Erik Manning and J. Warner Wallace, NBC Dateline’s “cold-case detective,” consider whether the bias of an argument’s source or advocate is sufficient ground, irrespective of the particular evidence offered, to reject an opposition claim. I offer my own humble contribution to the discussion, too!

HE’S A DEM SO HE GETS A PASS: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Lied Under Oath To Congress. Shouldn’t That Matter? “Before Kelly’s ban, I knew Jack Dorsey lied to Congress about how Twitter reacts to threats against conservatives – and anyone willing to lie to Congress, especially about something so easy to not lie about, had real problems. What I did not realize until recently is that Jack Dorsey was also lying to his users. Dorsey presents Twitter as a place where a combative and reactive conversation that would just police threats of violence and targeted abuse. But the media and Silicon Valley have compelled him to become something different: a shrinking public square, with rules increasingly defined by the loudest aggrieved voices he wants to listen to. So Louis Farrakhan can still tweet that Jews are termites, but Jesse Kelly can’t make jokes about liberal tears.”

BILL SCHER: The Pathetic Pelosi Putsch.

All year, Rep. Seth Moulton has insisted it was time for a “new generation of leadership” who would put “people over politics.” The Massachusetts Democrat created the Serve America PAC to endorse candidates he felt fit that bill, starting with military veterans like himself, then broadening to other “service-driven leaders.” He not only raised $8 million for the people he endorsed, he also forged relationships with them by stumping in their districts and providing strategic counsel.

Moulton’s electoral agenda for the midterms ran alongside his long-standing goal of ousting Nancy Pelosi from the House Democratic leadership. He kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism throughout the year, and just before the election, he dismissed the idea of Pelosi serving a few more years as a “transitional speaker” if Democrats won the House. And when 20 of his candidates won, within hours he was burning up the phone lines to assemble his network of candidates, organize a revolt and block Pelosi’s reclamation of the gavel. Two days after the election, Moulton declared that his crew was committed to voting against Pelosi on the House floor, where only a handful of renegade Democrats would be needed to deny her a winning majority. The following week, he said he was “100 percent confident” he had the votes, and Pelosi’s time was up.

And yet she’s still here.

All is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen.

Well, me and pretty much everybody else.

IT’S AS IF LEFTY JUDICIAL CRITICISM IS UNSERIOUS OR SOMETHING: The nominee to replace Kavanaugh, Neomi Rao, once used dwarf tossing to explain dignity vs. government coercion. Her argument is formidable, but her opponents treat it like she just likes dwarf tossing.

Writing in The Volokh Conspiracy in 2011, Rao discussed the predicament of a man named Mr. Wackenheim. By her description, Wackenheim was a dwarf living in France who allowed others to throw him for sport. This was his source of income. After several French cities banned the practice, he “challenged the orders on the grounds that they interfered with his economic liberty and right to earn a living.” Higher courts eventually upheld the bans, ruling that the practice of dwarf tossing offended human dignity.

As Rao explained, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy used similar justifications to support the country’s ban on burqas. The former president, she noted, said that the religious wear “runs counter to women’s dignity.” But as Rao rightly responded, “the debate focuses little on what Muslim women think about the full veil or why some of them wear it in public. Instead of associating dignity with religious choice, those who would ban the veil treat dignity as a different social ideal—one that measures up to majority standards of individual self-expression.”

“Respect for intrinsic human dignity, however, would favor individual choice,” the now-D.C. Circuit nominee added. “As with other similar theories, it is a short step from having substantive ideals of dignity to coercion of individuals in the name of these ideals.”

Rao’s argument is a serious one. Her point is that one can disagree with another’s choices, but dignity is about the right to make those choices instead of having the government make them for us.

If you only read about Rao’s work in Mother Jones, however, you might have thought that Rao simply has a niche affinity for dwarf tossing.

Well, Mother Jones.

JACK SHAFER: The Conservative Revolt Against Twitter. “Wake me up when this sad little uprising is over.”

“Twitter’s gone crazy banning people on the right, so I’ve deactivated my Twitter account,” he wrote in his Instapundit blog on Sunday night. Calling Twitter “the most socially destructive of the various platforms,” Reynolds accused the “crappy SJW types” – social justice warriors – who run it of breaking promises to users and stifling free speech. “So I decided to suspend them, as they are suspending others,” Reynold wrote.

Seeing as we don’t yet know why Twitter banned Kelly, there is some murk to the dispute. But no matter what the underlying cause, the ban gives conservatives cause to believe that Twitter has singled them out for eviction. Earlier this month, Twitter gave the permanent boot to Laura Loomer, a conservative writer and agent provocateur. Other conservatives or far-right figures Twitter has banned or suspended include Roger Stone, Chuck Johnson, “Sabo,” Milo Yiannopoulos, James Allsup, Richard Spencer, David Duke, “Baked Alaska,” Robert Stacy McCain, Candace Owens, David Clarke, Gavin McInnes and James Woods. In an August piece in the Federalist, Kelly predicted that the banishment of Alex Jones from Facebook presaged the de-conservatization of social media. “They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they’re coming for you,” Kelly wrote.

Kelly’s slippery slope argument sounds ominous, but how much truth is there to it? My Twitter experience account would say otherwise.

Here’s a question Shafer should have asked early on, and which might have resulted in a much different piece: Why don’t we know why Twitter banned Kelly?

Or as Ben Domenech wrote last night in a multipart tweet:

Jack Shafer’s piece unintentionally illustrates why his suggestion for conservatives on Twitter utterly misses the point.

Shafer suggests conservatives ought to “Drive Twitter insane by playing by their rules, expressing yourself right up to the boundary-line of the company’s standards in a way that will invite inspection and self-criticism of those standards.” That is exactly what Jesse Kelly did! We know that because in the two years since he was verified he received not a single suspension or even a warning. Jesse Kelly engaged in iconoclasm and teased without threatening people or violating any rules. If he had, Twitter would’ve gone after him for it. Instead, his lack of a clear violation clearly caused frustration – so at the end of the day, they just pulled the plug on him, permanently, without justifying it under any rule or citing any activity whatsoever.

That is because of something Shafer either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to acknowledge: that for Twitter, there are no rules.

My take is that Shafer was in such a hurry to condemn Glenn’s self-removal from Twitter as “sad,” that he missed the real story.

Or if you’d like an even shorter take on Shafer’s latest for Politico: Fake news.

YEAH, BUT IT GOT OBAMA THROUGH THE NEXT ELECTION AND THAT’S ALL IT WAS EVER MEANT TO DO: Romney Was Right, the GM Bailout Goes Bust, and Taxpayers Pay the Price.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN ON THE DOWNSIDES OF PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION. “Did you think the ballot design in Bush v Gore and the 2018 Florida elections were complex…too complex for the voter? In first-pass-the-post elections, the voter picks a single candidate for each election. But in proportional representation with the automatic transferable vote, the voter has to rank order all the candidates. That makes ballot design more complex. The Irish can do that because they tend to only have one set of offices on the ballot paper–the national parliament, or local councils. But in the U.S., we have multiple federal, state, and municipal executive and legislative positions (and sometimes judges) on the ballot. Our ballots would have to grow in size and complexity, or we would have to hold more elections. If we go down the latter route, voter turn out may be a problem, particularly where national races are not on the ballot.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Cops: Woman Battered Man Over Rejection. “Phelps’s arrest was the second time in 14 months that she was busted for allegedly battering a man who did not want to have sex with her, records show.”

SCIENCE/NOT SCIENCE:  On this day in 1955, Bill Nye, the man who somehow convinced many Americans that he is a science guy, was born.

WATCH: SIX YEARS AGO OBAMA PROMISED TO BUY A CHEVY VOLT. NOW IT IS DEAD. “General Motors announced Monday that it would cease production of the hybrid electric plug-in Volt and its gas-powered sister car the Cruze. The announcement came as part of a larger restructuring by the car company as it seeks to focus production around the bigger vehicles in favor with U.S. consumers.”

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