SALENA ZITO: FAITH IS NO LONGER A VIRTUE IN AMERICA.

Last week Joy Behar, co-host of the ABC show “The View,” did something that has become an escalating trend in our popular culture over the past 10 years — she mocked religiosity.

In a segment about Vice President Mike Pence and his belief that he hears the voice of God, Behar quipped: “It’s one thing to talk to Jesus. It’s another thing when Jesus talks to you. That’s called mental illness, if I’m not correct . . . hearing voices.”

The audience of “The View” clapped and laughed along with her.

But outside the entertainment bubble, in places like Cumberland, people were horrified.

Behar’s sneer and the “clapter” it received from the studio audience is a nice in-kind contribution to the Trump 2020 campaign.

But I’m so old, I can remember a budding Democratic candidate for the senate back in 2004 saying, “The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.”

What was his name again? I’m sure it will come to me eventually.

SO AIR POLLUTION IS BASICALLY A FEMALE PROBLEM: The fumes from spray cleaners and perfumes are a major source of air pollution.

BETWEEN BERNIE AND ANTIFA, WHO CAN TELL THESE DAYS? Video: Communist Manifesto or Democratic Party Platform?

Related: The Silence of the Bern.

WE WILL REGRET LETTING CHINA STEAL A MARCH ON US: The USA is no longer guaranteed future military technology dominance.

HERE WE ARE, AGAIN. OR THE POLITICS OF OUTRAGE:

Today, as far as I’m concerned, we need to end the outrage about guns, and focus the outrage at the shooters.  We should block their names and images from news broadcasts and other outlets.  We should stop having schools listed as gun-free zones, and we should end gun-free zones altogether.  Nobody in politics has seemed to make the correlation between active shooters and these zones.  I have no problem with trained, armed, teachers or school staff.  It should be a requirement.

But I simply can’t listen to pinheads railing on removing freedoms so they can feel safe.  If I can feel safe, in spite of these events, so can they.

Read the whole thing.

IP OVERREACH? Internet rages after Google removes “view image” button, bowing to Getty.

SIT IN ON MY CLASS: Professor Glenn pointed out the unfair criticism of President Trump’s visit to the hospital in Parkland, Florida in the wake of the school shooting here.

I thought some of you might be interested in how a story like this (not slugged “Opinion” or even “News Analysis”) is analyzed in my Media Ethics classes. (Apologies for the PDF link, but that’s the only way to share it.) The yellow highlighted sections are the statements I ask students to challenge, and the red type (I use a Socratic method) reflects the questions I ask my graduate students to discuss.

If “Democracy Dies in Darkness” then we have to admit that “Editorialization is Where Journalism Goes to Die.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Fire the FBI Chief.

The FBI has a budget of $3.5 billion, almost all of which goes to salaries, benefits, and other personnel costs. Do you know how many employees the FBI field office in South Florida has? It has more than 1,000. Do you know how many employees the FBI has in total? It has 35,158 employees. It has 13,084 agents and 3,100 intelligence analysts.

And not one of them could pick up the phone to forward vital intelligence gathered by the grueling investigative work of picking up the phone and taking a tip from a tipster. Would the sheriff have taken that call more seriously than his department took the 20 other calls relating to the killer? Impossible to say.

Read the whole thing.

I CERTAINLY HOPE SO: Humanity’s Biggest Machines Will Be Built in Space.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Must Love Dogs? If You Want the Job.

“We live in such a dog-adoring culture that it’s hard to admit when you aren’t totally enamored of them. What you are supposed to feel — what you must always feel — is love,” writes former Amazon employee Corina Zappia. As the company planned its move to a fancy new complex, Zappia, who had a traumatic canine encounter as a child, hoped for an office on a dog-free floor. “I am allergic, but to be honest I don’t really love the idea of working around dogs,” she confessed in an email to her department head. “I would like to be on a dog-free floor, if that’s okay.” It wasn’t.

Even with a note from her allergist, Zappia had to settle for sharing a windowless dog-free office on a dog-populated floor. One employee regularly walked his dog around the office, while others kept their office doors shut so their dogs couldn’t escape. At Halloween, a memo went out urging everyone to dress their dogs in costume. Maybe, she thought, she’d like the dogs more “if our dog-loving culture wasn’t so weird: There were buckets of doggie treats at the receptionist desk and four-dollar gourmet sweet-potato dog biscuits in the vending machine.”

I love dogs, but I’m not sure if I’d want to share a cubicle with one. As Glenn would say, the 21st century isn’t turning out the way I had hoped.

Update: “Your office doesn’t have a ‘dog-free floor,’ but NO SMOKERS ALLOWED!”

RADICAL CHIC, THE GERITOL YEARS: Maxine Waters Attended Nation Of Islam Convention Where Farrakhan Defended Suicide Bombers. “Waters’ convention appearance is just the latest tie to emerge between Democrats and the Nation of Islam.”

Earlier:

● Three Democrats Attended Private Dinner With Iran’s President And Louis Farrakhan.

● Establishment Media Bury Obama-Farrakhan Photo.

● The deep meaning of Keith Ellison.

● Flashback: Nation of Islam activists on Obama camp payroll. Former insider worried by senator’s connection to Louis Farrakhan, members of radical group.

(Classical reference in headline.)

PETER WYNGARDE, INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY.

THE BUTTERFIELD EFFECT: Minneapolis TV Station’s Reporters Puzzled by More Guns, Less Crime in the Gopher State.

THIS VETERAN FBI INVESTIGATOR MAY KNOW KEY DETAILS ON THE CLINTON EMAILS: But he suddenly and unexpectedly retired a few months into it. Some might wonder why. Long-time Clinton Foundation exposer Charles Ortel lays it out in LifeZette.

JOHN HINDERAKER: WHY MUELLER DIDN’T INDICT THE RUSSIANS FOR MEDDLING IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

I don’t doubt that election lawyers could come up with defenses for Christopher Steele, were he to be charged with violating §30121. But that is a can of worms that Mueller didn’t want to open. Too many people know the facts behind the Steele dossier, and if he had charged the Russians with meddling in the presidential election under §30121, he soon would have faced questions about why he didn’t indict Steele–and Glenn Simpson, Perkins, Coie, Clinton campaign officials, and perhaps Clinton–for the same offense.

It was in order to avoid that pitfall, I suspect, that Mueller overlooked the most relevant federal offense that the Russians committed, and instead charged them with a vague “conspiracy to defraud,” along with wire fraud, bank fraud and identity theft. The first charge is entirely discretionary on Mueller’s part, and Steele didn’t commit wire fraud, bank fraud or identity theft.

I think that is why Mueller chose not to indict the Russians for meddling in a U.S. presidential election.

Hmm.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Former prof recounts her ‘escape’ from political correctness.

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WELL, TO BE FAIR, HE WAS WORKING OVERTIME IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, AND I THINK THAT YOU DO: Nashville Mayor Megan Barry’s ex-bodyguard received thousands more in overtime pay than other security.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Michael Barone: What’s oozing out of campuses is polluting society.

Campus administrators have famously declined to restrain or rebuke mobs of students who fancy themselves social justice warriors who press to block conservative speakers and attack them violently if they dare to appear. Charles Murray was violently attacked at Middlebury, Ben Shapiro at Berkeley, and Brown students asserted that conservative columnist Guy Benson isn’t covered by the First Amendment.

The result, says Sullivan, is that “silence on any controversial social issue is endemic on college campuses” and, he adds ominously, “now everywhere.” Last year, Google fired engineer James Damore for writing an internal memo which the CEO with pathetic dishonesty characterized as bigoted.

There is increasing evidence that Google, Facebook, and Twitter — whose leaders flatter themselves as enablers of free communication and neutral disseminators of information — are suppressing conservative opinions as ipso facto “fake news.” Those aware of campus life will not be comforted with the knowledge that the decisions about what gets downplayed or deleted are being made by social justice warriors recently hired from campuses.

Corporate human relations departments are doing their part as well. Anti-harassment rules are used to punish those uttering speech deemed politically incorrect and actions of even the most anodyne nature considered sexually improper.

Companies may have the legal right to do this. But their practices, amplified by bureaucratic empire-building, tend to undermine what Sullivan calls “norms of liberal behavior,” including “robust public debate, free from intimidation.”

I’m not sure that companies do have that legal right, or that they should. We’re long past the notion that what private enterprise does is beyond government supervision, and I think companies like Google and Facebook need a lot of adult supervision. You want a libertarian world? Fine, me too, but that’s not were we are now.

IF DEMOCRATS AND THE PRESS — BUT I REPEAT MYSELF — WANT TO MAKE 2018 ABOUT GUN CONTROL, WELL, OKAY. As Expected, Trump’s Visit To A Florida Hospital Was Criticized By The Media.

Related: Fake News: Liberals Try To Claim Florida Shooter Was “Trained By The NRA.” “What was the NRA doing hanging around at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School? Well… it turns out they weren’t. Those headlines are a bit more overblown than the way the Associated Press describes the situation, which is at least a bit more honest. The ‘rifle team’ in question was actually a marksmanship program. And it wasn’t run by the NRA, but by the Army Junior ROTC. And the “rifles” were air-powered pellet guns. They did, however, receive a grant to operate the program and purchase equipment.”

No one cares when the press tries its “have you no decency?” schtick, because the press so clearly has none of its own.

Also related: Why Didn’t Democrats Pass Gun Control When They Controlled Congress In Obama’s First Term? Because they didn’t want it to be Obama’s only term.

THE HILL: The 14 GOP senators who voted against Trump’s immigration framework.

WELL, FOR ONE THING, IF YOUR RESOLUTION IS FOR A MONTH IT’LL ONLY TAKE 28 DAYS: Why Fitness Resolutions Should Start in February.