BUT THE NARRATIVE! How Income Taxes Increase Economic Inequality.

ALLIGATOR TEARS: France24 reviews French attitudes on free speech three years after the Islamic terror attack on Charlie Hebdo’s journalists in which 12 people — including a policewoman — were murdered. One resident parrots the new liberal fascism, anti-free speech line that turns the very concept of free expression on its head:

“I’m not fond of Charlie Hebdo, neither its form nor its function (…) They are targeting the Muslims and, if we talk about freedom, I feel they are criticizing the Muslims’ freedom to believe,” Brunacci told FRANCE 24.

This logic is so very strange. How does mocking or challenging something reduce another’s ability to “believe” something, let alone raise their own voice? What’s even stranger yet is that French President Emmanuel Macron, a strong proponent of censorship, (See, liberal fascism, supra) is planning to attend a ceremony honoring the fallen. This is either cluelessness, hypocrisy, or a bizarre display of a lack of self-consciousness. Perhaps it’s that “intersectionalism” I keep hearing about, where core human rights principles are subjugated by political correctness. In either case, he’ll be weeping alligator’s tears.

JAMES BOVARD: Cliven Bundy-FBI debacle: Another example of why the feds need to be leashed. The FBI’s sordid history of withholding and destroying key evidence deserves a reckoning.

CHANGE IT BACK: U.S. sanctions five Iranian entities, signals more measures.

SO THERE’S THIS NEW MICHAEL WOLFF BOOK OUT, AND IT’S VERY UNFLATTERING TO TRUMP. And yet Trump had his lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter to the publisher, guaranteeing it huge attention. And as a result of some of the stuff in the book, he’s now in a WWE-like shouting match with Steve Bannon, who’s out.

So what’s going on? Well, unless you’re dumb enough to believe the Gorilla Channel parody, you’ve got to know that Trump understands PR, and must have known that the cease-and-desist letter would call attention to the book and give it credibility. So why do that?

Pure speculation here — as rank as speculating that the Clintons’ mysterious house fire was somehow connected to the near-simultaneous announcement of a new FBI investigation — but what if (as Jack Goldsmith suggests) Trump has never been the focus of Mueller’s investigation, and now it’s zeroing in on Bannon? The feud over the book establishes lots of space between Trump and Bannon, and if Bannon’s indicted Trump can say “hey we fired him already.” And since everyone seems to think Bannon’s the main source for Wolff, an indictment helps discredit the book. Happily for Wolff, not until after he’s hit the bestseller list. Bonus point: Trump and Wolff seem to have been pretty friendly for quite a while.

As I say, this is rankest speculation, but stay tuned. Or if you have an alternative explanation as to why Trump would act in a way he knew would boost the book, add it in the comments.

ELI LAKE: What a Soviet Dissident Sees in Iran’s Unrest.

Now would be a good time for Macron and other European leaders to seek new counsel and listen to Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and Israeli politician. In an interview this week, Sharansky told me Macron’s response to the Iranian unrest reminded him of the appeasement crowd during the Cold War. It was the kind of thinking that led former president Gerald Ford to refuse a meeting with the Soviet author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

“It reminds me of the arguments against Reagan,” Sharansky told me. “All those battles we thought we already won, we have to fight them again.”

For Sharansky, Macron and the other European leaders have gotten the Iran moment backward and once again failed to understand the nature of the Iranian regime with whom they desperately want to deal — just as some in the West were motivated to see the Soviet regime as reasonable.

Macron believes that Western solidarity with Iranians who seek an end to their tyranny will anger the tyrants and lead to war. Engagement with the regime instead will, theoretically, create opportunities for Iranians to gradually open up their society over time.

But what did engagement with Iran actually get us?

Don’t answer that — it’s unseemly to cry over your lunch.

NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: This Inflatable Irish Pub Turns Your Backyard Into a Bar.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ON: At Least 18 Classified Emails Discovered On Anthony Weiner’s Laptop.

According to conservative-leaning transparency group Judicial Watch, those 798 documents–and the 18 classified emails–were released as part of the FBI’s on-again-off-again-on-again investigation into Hillary Clinton‘s private email server.

Weiner, the disgraced former New York congressman, was served divorce papers by former Clinton confidante Huma Abedin in May of last year.

The new tranche of emails on Weiner’s computer appear to emanate from Abedin’s use of a non-State Department email address located on Clinton’s private server as well as from Abedin’s personal Blackberry.

Let the investigation go where it will.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Support for Anti-Israel BDS Movement ‘Virtually Nonexistent’ Among College Students, Study Finds.

Maybe the kids are all right, after all.

HMM: China Admits 2016 GDP Was “Miscalculated” After “Routine Verification.”

According to SCMP, China’s economic figures for 2016 were revised lower by 54.2 billion yuan (US$8.34 billion) to 74.36 trillion yuan following a “miscalculation” revealed after a routine verification of the numbers, the National Statistics Bureau said on Friday.

While the amendment was not large enough to affect the earlier reported year-on-year growth rate of 6.7% for the world’s second-largest economy, the bureau said in a statement, the truth is that nobody knows – and certainly nobody can verify – any numbers coming out of China where there already are glaring discrepancies between GDP data reported at the province and national levels.

You can’t trust numbers from Beijing, especially now that growth has slowed but the regime must continue to purchase its own legitimacy.

DIVERSITY: Virginia Tech features 12 separate LGBTQ organizations.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuelan criminals have begun using food to recruit children into gangs.

The critical food shortages pummeling Venezuela have started to change the nature of crime in the country, at times increasing what some experts have started to call “hunger crimes” and at other times turning food into a valuable item to be taken by force.

“This is a new phenomenon because it’s something that we never had in this country, crimes committed because of hunger,” said Roberto Briceño León, director of the Caracas-based Venezuelan Observatory for Violence (VOV).

“This type of crime has been increasing, and now we see how criminal groups are starting to steal food, how individuals who before did not steal have now started to steal food,” Briceño added in a telephone interview.

Criminal gangs are also using food to recruit children and teenagers in Venezuela, a country with one of the world’s highest crime rates.

And kudus to El Nuevo Herald’s Antonio Maria Delgado for including this line: “Even though it has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela is suffering one of the most severe economic crises of its modern history as a result of the policies imposed by the socialist regimes of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro.”

STEPHEN COLBERT TAKES OUT A ‘FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION’ AD FOR TRUMP’S FAKE NEWS AWARDS: On a billboard in Times Square, no less. Mind you, any free market person would say, “hey, it’s his money to do with as he pleases” but you have to wonder if the caring, humanistic, more-virtuous-than-you crowd who make up his demographic have asked how many children that money would feed, or how many homeless could have been fed hot meals in a city where the wind chill is currently 14 below zero.

The intertubes says that an ad like that costs about $250,000 a month. A lot of money to just scream “ME! ME! ME!”

BOOM: Federal Judge Deals HUGE Blow To Fusion GPS In Bank Records Battle.

Judge Richard Leon shot down all four of Fusion’s arguments against the release of 70 records of transactions involving some of its clients as well as journalists and researchers it has paid since Sept. 2015.

Fusion sued its bank, TD Bank, in October, to prevent it from complying with a subpoena issued by the House Intelligence Committee, which has been looking into Fusion’s role in putting together the dossier.

That subpoena, issued by committee chairman Devin Nunes on Oct. 5, prompted Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the Clinton campaign and DNC, to reveal that it had hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to investigate Trump.

Fusion, which was founded by three former Wall Street Journal reporters, later hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy with experience in Moscow.

All the “collusion” still seems to be located on the other side.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student op-ed: academic freedom is ‘oppressive to the minority.’

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Latest on the Trump Book, Another Anon RUSSIA NYT Hit and Much, Much More.

NOT-SO-INDEPENDENT COUNSEL: Mueller’s “Pit Bull” Andrew Weissmann under scrutiny as Rosenstein agrees to turn over documents to Nunes.

OUTSOURCING CENSORSHIP: Ve have vays of making you not talk!

So not only is the German government forcing social media companies to block their political opponents under the guise of counteracting online “hate speech”, the people doing the blocking are too dim to spot a parody account. How the Germans can’t see that such a law, in the hands of the wrong party, could be devastating is a mystery. I can only conclude such occurrences have no precedent in their country from which they could draw obvious lessons.

Titanic said on Wednesday its Twitter account had been blocked over the message, which it assumed was a result of a law that came into full force on Jan. 1 that can impose fines of up to 50 million euros ($60 million) on social media sites that fail to remove hate speech promptly.

A lot of people will rightly ask who defines hate speech. What they should be asking is how easy is it to change that definition.

Elasticity in the law — the ability to shut down anybody at will — is the whole point.

MICHAEL BARONE: The 2010s look more like Trump’s ideal America than Obama’s.

Who are the big population gainers? Some small units: the District of Columbia at 15 percent (big government, gentrification), North Dakota at 12 percent (fracking, which liberals failed to stop), Utah at 12 percent (1950s-style high birth rates).

Those with the largest impact, however, are Texas at 13 percent and Florida at 12 percent. Together, their population increase was 5.3 million, nearly one-third of the national total. Why? No state income taxes, light-touch regulation, and the resulting private sector booms. Immigration? Not so much this decade, with their 1.6 million immigrants outnumbered 2-1 by 3.5 migrants from other states.

Three states actually lost population. Two are small and easily explainable. West Virginia, minus 2 percent: Obama’s war on coal. Vermont, minus 1 percent. Woodstock-era migrants — Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean — liberalized the state’s culture and politics. But with high taxes and stringent environmental bans, no one is following.

The third loser is Illinois, minus 0.3 percent. It takes some doing to get people to flee one of mankind’s greatest artifacts, Chicago. But Michael Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House for all but two years since 1982, has proved up to it.

High and rising taxes, to pay for hugely underfunded public pensions, have done the trick. Net domestic outmigration from Illinois in 2010-17 was 642,000, more than any other state but New York’s 1,022,000.

The nexus between high taxation and domestic outflow is plain when you look at percentages. . . .

All of which suggests a counterintuitive hypothesis: The patterns of internal and immigrant migration of 2010-17 looks less like Barack Obama’s ideal America and more like Donald Trump’s.

The flight from high-tax to low-tax states, diminished by higher-skill immigration, the fracking boom in North Dakota, and the decline in hip Vermont: You might even say Trump started winning even when Obama was still in office.

The Dems will be pivoting from “demographics ensure our victory” to “it wasn’t Hillary’s fault, the demographics were against her!”

ON THE OTHER HAND…: ‘Economists Say’ A Lot Of Things. But They’re Mostly Wrong.

David Harsanyi:

For eight years we were persistently hearing about how “economists say” everything Democrats were doing was great (even when hundreds disagreed). Unsurprisingly, “economists” were wrong about a lot. The rosy predictions set by President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers regarding the “stimulus” weren’t even close to what happened, nor were any other of their forecasts, for that matter.

In 2009, when Democrats ran everything, the administration predicted 4.6 percent growth by 2012. It turned out to be half that. The Congressional Budget Office’s predictions about Obamacare were even less accurate. Once these prophecies were no longer politically valuable — suddenly more art than science– we were offered counterfactuals: Without Obama’s bailouts, everything would have been much worse.

Perhaps the weakest recovery in American history could have been worse; perhaps not. There are thousands of unknowns that can’t be quantified or computed, including human nature. But after decades of using data to help us think about goods and services, jobs and consumption, and our choices, “economists say” is now used to coat liberal policy positions with a veneer of scientific certitude. And since Democrats began successfully aligning economics with social engineering, we’ve stopped seriously talking about the tradeoffs regulations bring.

Getting people to “stop seriously talking” was probably the only way to get many of those scientifically progressive policies in place.

(Classical allusion in the headline.)

FROM KEN WHITE: Lawsplainer: Attorney General Sessions’ Threatened Action on Marijuana.. “Under the Supremacy Clause to the United States Constitution, the states can’t immunize people from federal prosecution — they can make things legal under state law, but can’t make things legal under federal law.”

You know who changes federal laws? Congress, not the Executive.

I’M WAITING TO SEE IF THEY’LL RETRY SEN. MENENDEZ (D-NJ): Prosecutors Seek 30-Year Sentence for Doctor Tied to Menendez Case.

I figure they’ll get rid of Menendez once they can be sure he’ll be replaced with a Democrat.