NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Please Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Haven’t The Jews Suffered Enough?

SPENGLER: Did the Deep State Sandbag President Trump with the Huawei Arrest? “The United States took the utterly unprecedented step of arranging the arrest of a prominent Chinese national in another country, namely Canada, over sanctions violations, which until now have been addressed with economic penalties, and attempting to extradite the Chinese national to face criminal charges in the United States. And the person in question is the daughter of the founder of Huawei, one of China’s most prominent business leaders. Nobody told the president as he sat down to negotiate with Xi Jinping? That doesn’t wash.”

LEFTY POLITICS IN A NUTSHELL: Why ‘No Hate Here’ signs are actually pretty hateful. “Vice signaling is a defense mechanism, meant to displace liberal guilt. There was a moment, shortly after the 2016 election, when liberals realized that ordinary Americans had turned against them, and that they had reason to do so.”

GEORGE KORDA: In praise of capitalism (and why cell phones were invented).

RAND PAUL: Barr Nomination ‘Very Troubling’ as Far as Patriot Act, Civil Asset Forfeiture.

CHANGE: Average US price of gas drops 22 cents per gallon to $2.51.

Have you hugged a fracker today?

DANIEL MCCARTHY: The Case for Trump is Stronger Than Ever.

Look—what has really happened this past week is that Flynn, supposedly a key figure in the collusion conspiracy (after all, he talked to the Russians about sanctions during the presidential transition), has come through Mueller’s inquiry without being recommended for a jail sentence. He lied to investigators, which is a procedural crime. But Mueller apparently did not find anything more serious that would justify a prison term. Treason usually gets you at least that much.

Liberal pundits who have no way of knowing what’s going on inside Mueller’s investigation insist that Flynn’s virtual acquittal is actually really bad news for the president because it means Flynn is cooperating. Robert Mueller says so, and a federal prosecutor would never fib or hype his investigations in a politicized manner. What cooperation may mean, if anything, is anyone’s guess. But again, the president’s critics don’t need to guess: they know, with all the passion in their partisan hearts.

And that’s why the New Democratic Congress won’t be able to help but overplay their hand.

Related: Top House Democrats raise prospect of impeachment, jail for Trump.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U. North Carolina teaching assistants hold grades hostage over ‘Silent Sam’ statue plan. They’re actually holding students hostage. It’s a disgraceful dereliction of duty. Should they do it, students should file suit. The university, surprisingly, seems to have a grip on reality here: “Such actions have been interpreted as coercion and an exploitation of the teacher-student relationship and in fact are a violation of students’ First Amendment rights as well as federal law.”

BUT THE NARRATIVE: I can’t vouch for the robustness of these results, but according to this Morning Consult poll from August, 11% of liberals and 3% of conservatives have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of neo-Nazis.

TRADE: Deflation threat returns to haunt Chinese economy as risks from US trade war linger. “A fall in both consumer and producer price indexes was a result of weakness in demand from both Chinese consumers and investors and reflected their reluctance to spend as confidence in future growth is undermined by the trade war with the US. The figures add the challenge faced by the Chinese leadership in keeping economic growth on track ahead of the annual central economic work conference, where policies for next year will be determined.”

All this is happening as President Xi has set himself up as the one-man solution to China’s prosperity and security.

WELL, THAT’S CERTAINLY THE GOAL: Harvard frat student says same-sex club policy ‘undermines’ individualism.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Mueller/Comey Mania and Much, Much More. “Victoria Toensing has an op-ed over at FNC asking important questions that should should not get lost in the sheer volume of anti-Trump spinning over the weekend: who leaked the classified content of the Flynn/Kisylak phone call and who leaked Flynn’s name to the media? These are gross civil liberties violations and it seems like Mueller and the DOJ do not care. Maybe they don’t.”

SHENANIGANS: European Court of Justice rules UK can unilaterally revoke Article 50 and halt Brexit.

THAT’S MORE MARKET SHARE FOR NORTH AMERICAN FRACKERS: OPEC and non-OPEC nations agree on 1.2M barrel per day production cut.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which starting in January will have 14 members after Qatar pulls out, will be responsible for reducing 0.8 million barrels per day. Participating non-OPEC members, of which Russia is the biggest producer, will reduce 0.4 million barrels, it added.

Saudi Arabia and Russia are two of the world’s three biggest producers. The United States, the world’s biggest crude oil producer, did not participate in the talks.

Huh. It’s almost as though the White House figures we can drill our way to lower prices.

YES, BUT TO BE FAIR, THEY ONLY PLAN TO DO THIS TO REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS: Rand Paul: We Will Become a ‘Banana Republic’ If Every President Is Investigated by Special Prosecutors.

Related thoughts from Andrew McCarthy. And Peter Morgan and I have some further thoughts here.

AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: America’s war in Afghanistan is now Trump’s increasingly bloody problem. Is it time to declare defeat? “Thus far three U.S. presidents, six secretaries of defense and five chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have presided over a war in which no one has been able to define victory, let alone remotely succeed in winning. The Soviets tried the same decades ago, with equally catastrophic results.”

Comparing our endeavor to the Soviet’s is a bit silly — their Afghanistan war exposed the fragility of the Communist state and helped to bring it down. We’re in no such danger. But there’s nothing we can realistically hope to achieve there that we can’t do with a radically smaller footprint on the ground, following our anti-ISIS model in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Vive La French Revolution 2.0 – And Our Own!

CARL CANNON: A LOOK BACK AT THE WILLIE HORTON AD:

Ailes forbade the campaign from releasing Horton’s photograph. When the campaign produced its now-famous Massachusetts prison “revolving door” ad, it was filmed in Utah, in sepia tones, and the inmates appeared to be white, black, and Hispanic. Earlier, two conservative provocateurs, Larry McCarthy and Floyd Brown, produced a low-budget ad showing Horton’s picture and mentioning his name. Democrats pounced. This is racist, they said. Some of the media followed suit and some didn’t, although with each passing year, the “vile” Willie Horton ad narrative entrenched itself more deeply in the collective memories of Democrats and the media.

Those closest to the case were the most nonplussed by this characterization. Dane Strother, a former Eagle-Tribune reporter who became a Democratic political consultant, told me race was never an issue when Dukakis’ furlough program came under scrutiny. “It wasn’t about racism,” he said. “That didn’t come up. Not ever.”

One reason was that as the paper dug deeper into the story, they found other victims of crimes, not all of them white, and other furloughed prisoners who’d committed violent crimes, not all of them black.

Among the details unearthed by the Eagle-Tribune was that of the 80 prisoners listed as “escaped” by the state, all but four were on furlough when they disappeared.

When pressed as to why they deem the Bush campaign’s 1988 treatment of this topic racist, critics cite a litany of factoids and arguments.

What made it racist was that it hurt Democrats, and it was effective.

CHANGE? A lawsuit is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a Massachusetts rule that prohibits companies from campaign contributions while exempting unions from similar restrictions.

The pro-free market Goldwater Institute and Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance petitioned the high court to review the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s unanimous ruling approving campaign finance restrictions placed on for-profit businesses. The state court ruled in 1A Auto, Inc. and 126 Self Storage, Inc. v. Sullivan that the law did not infringe on the First Amendment rights of employers by preventing them from making contributions directly or indirectly on behalf of state or local candidates. While acknowledging that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a federal ban on independent expenditures inn Citizens United, the Massachusetts justices said it did not overturn the 2003 Beaumont decision affirming limits on corporate contributions.

“The Court reaffirmed the key distinction between contributions and independent expenditures, emphasizing that contributions present a special risk of quid pro quo corruption because, unlike independent expenditures, they are coordinated with candidates,” the September ruling says. “Experience confirms that, if corporate contributions were allowed, there would be a serious threat of quid pro quo corruption.”

It’s a good thing our public- and private-sector unions are completely free from corruption and always have been.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Was Fully Aware That Tracking Who People Call and Text Is Creepy But Did It Anyway.

The business team wanted to get Bluetooth permissions so it could push ads to people’s phones when they walked into a store. Meanwhile, the growth team, which is responsible for getting more and more people to join Facebook, wanted to get “Read Call Log Permission” so that Facebook could track everyone whom an Android user called or texted with in order to make better friend recommendations to them. (Yes, that’s how Facebook may have historically figured out with whom you went on one bad Tinder date and then plopped them into “People You May Know.”) According to internal emails recently seized by the UK Parliament, Facebook’s business team recognized that what the growth team wanted to do was incredibly creepy and was worried it was going to cause a PR disaster.

In a February 4, 2015, email that encapsulates the issue, Facebook Bluetooth Beacon product manager Mike Lebeau is quoted saying that the request for “read call log” permission was a “pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.”

I’ve had a question for a while now, but have never found an answer to it. When you give the Facebook app permission to open your photo library so you can post a picture to your timeline, exactly how much access does Facebook get and for how long?

JOEL KOTKIN ON PARIS: The First Shots In The Climate Wars:

In launching their now successful protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s gas hike, the French gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) have revived their country’s reputation for rebelling against monarchial rule. It may well foreshadow a bitter, albeit largely avoidable, battle over how to address the issue of climate change.

Macron’s approach may have made him a favorite of editorial writers, who see him as the new “sun king,” but he is far more disliked by his own people than Trump is by Americans. The new French rebellion parallels the revolutionary resentments that ultimately overthrew aristocratic and clerical privilege that allowed them to live in splendor while the Third Estate, the middle class, suffered.

Macron’s policies rest on the notion on-going climate catastrophe embraced by media, the academy and the intelligentsia. Every time weather takes a nasty turn as it often does — heat waves, downpours, forest fires, floods — it’s often attributed to climate change.

This leads to the notion that we need to embrace climate “hysteria,” as one New York Times reporter suggested recently. This does not seem the best basis to create an enduring and workable policy. Like other pressing issues, environmental concerns need to be addressed in a rational and equitable manner. The mainstream media has become the biggest obstacle here, as evidenced by coverage of a recent report suggesting a huge economic hit from climate change. As President Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science, physicist Steven Koonin, suggests, these projections reflected only highly improbable worse case scenarios based on such things as ever growing coal usage and no significant technological improvement.

Who pays for environmental virtue?

The gilets jaune revolt begs the issue: who pays to save the planet? The Paris accords absolved the very countries driving emission increases — China and India — from mandating emissions cuts until 2030, leaving the burden largely on the backs of the West’s own middle and working classes.

Yet many of these people need fossil fuels to get to work or operate their businesses. Tourists may gape at the high-speed trains and the Paris Metro, but the vast majority get to work in cars. More than 80 percent of the Paris metropolitan area population lives in the suburbs and exurbs, in an area nearly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.

Like the revolutionaries of 1789, people are enraged by the hypocrisy of their betters. In pre-revolutionary times, French aristocrats and top clerics preached Christian charity while indulging in gluttony, sexual adventurism and lavish spending. Today they see the well-off and well-connected buying their modern version of indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices. Meanwhile, as many as 30 percent of Germans and as many as half of Greeks are spending 10 percent or more of their income on energy, the definition of “energy poverty.” This is occurring while these policies prove sadly ineffective in reducing emissions while the much disdained US leads the large countries in cuts.

It’s as if the whole thing was just a giant con all along.