MASSED LEFTY PANIC:  Oh Noes! Supreme court, Aieeeee!

SURE, BUT REALIZING THAT REQUIRES UNDERSTANDING ECONOMICS AT A LEVEL THAT “A STAR FOR BEING A FEMALE MINORITY” OCCASIONAL CORTEX WAS NEVER EXPECTED OR TAUGHT TO:  Raising the tax rate versus raising the effective tax rate.  The biggest injustice in this country right now, the greatest waste of potential is created by the “social justice A”.

OH, DEAR LORD:  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Does 60 Minutes.

OF COURSE THEY DO:  Andrew Cuomo And Hillary Clinton Push NY Bill That Will Legalize ALL Abortion.

WELL THEY DO LOVE THEM OCCASIONAL CORTEX!  Ahh – the New Year!  Can’t wait for the episode in the chocolate factory.

AND THIS IS WHY CHINA RATTLES ITS SABERS:  A Forest of Bare Branches.

OKAY, THE QUESTION IS HOW MANY OF THEM ARE REALLY THERE AFTER ALL THE FRAUD AND THE DIRTY DEALING IS REMOVED?  Democrats Engaged in More False-Flag Election Interference In Jones-Moore Race Than First Reported.

WAR ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT: Two Reporters Ejected from Newsom Inauguration.

AT AMAZON, bargains on bestsellers in Beauty.

Plus, deals on DVDs.

IT’S AS IF ALL THE LEFT’S EXISTENTIAL CRISES ARE JUST MADE-UP SHAMS: One Year Later, ‘Net Neutrality’ Zealots Proved Dead Wrong.

Net neutrality mania was so intense that one year ago FCC Chairman Ajit Pai had to cancel his appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show because of death threats he’d received. That was the same day the FCC published its final rule repealing “net neutrality.”

So-called experts predicted that removing this cumbersome Obama-era regulatory scheme — which granted the FCC virtually unchecked power over internet providers — would lead to the demise of the internet.

Repealing “net neutrality” regulations “would be the final pillow in (the internet’s) face,” said The New York Times. The ACLU said it “risks erosion of the biggest free-speech platform the world has ever known.” CNET declared that “net neutrality repeal means your internet may never be the same.” CNN labeled repeal the “end of the internet as we know it.”

One of the Democratic commissioners on the FCC claimed that repealing “net neutrality” would “green light to our nation’s largest broadband providers to engage in anti-consumer practices, including blocking, slowing down traffic, and paid prioritization of online applications and services.”

There were protests and lawsuits. The biggest companies on the internet mounted online campaigns. Democrats vowed to make “net neutrality” a major campaign issue.

A year later, none of the horror stories came true. In fact, average internet speeds climbed by roughly a third last year. The number of homes with access to fiber internet jumped 23% last year, according to the Fiber Broadband Association.

Oh, and “net neutrality” was a nonissue in the Democratic midterm campaigns. One party official said that Dems didn’t campaign on it because: “It’s not something that people bring up in their top list of concerns.”

Who could have seen that coming? Well, not me, because I died from the tax cuts.

TED CRUZ, TEXAS RANGER: Chuck Norris Backs Great Ted Cruz Idea To Fund Border Fence.

GAVIN NEWSOM AS CALIFORNIA’S EMMANUEL MACRON? “The national media may see us as a blue state paradise, but most Californians express concern about future economic conditions, particularly for the next generation. What Californians lack is the French skill of knowing when they are being crushed by the well-heeled ruling class and their political running dogs. With any potential political opposition all but dead, and the state GOP something of a joke, any protests will have to start at the grassroots level, as happened with the gilets jaunes in France. To achieve the changes secured by their French counterparts, middle- and working-class Californians need to rediscover their repressed insurrectionary, defiant spirit.”

Stock up on these before California bans them!

OPEN THREAD: Keep the 2019 momentum going.

SECOND DEAD BODY FOUND IN HOME OF PROMINENT DEMOCRAT DONOR ED BUCK.

THESE ARE THE CRAZY YEARS: Young mother is barred from her local pub for wearing a T-shirt saying ‘Woman: human female’ after a complaint that it discriminated against transgender people.

MORE PHONY GREEN POLICY FAIL: The Lessons of ‘Dieselgate:’ Insane amounts of political capital were spent trying to wring meaningless CO2 reductions from cars.

The air-quality lawsuits were the work of a small group known in English as Environment Action Germany, which goes by the German acronym DUH, and is funded mainly by donations from Germany’s central and regional governments (and Toyota).

It doesn’t help that DUH was itself once a proselytizer for “clean diesel,” even pushing the technology on U.S. environmental groups as a quicker way to bring down carbon-dioxide emissions than waiting for electric cars to catch on.

Diesel does deliver a tad less CO2 per mile than gasoline but produces more smog and particulates, a detractor that turned out not to be fixable. Remember the Volkswagen scandal of 2015, when U.S. regulators ended the charade by discovering that emissions from imported VWs were 400% worse than advertised?

To this day, though, nobody in Europe is willing to acknowledge the biggest flaw in the continent’s now-defunct regulatory fetish for diesel.

However you slice it, cars just aren’t that big a part of an ostensible CO2 problem. Personal cars sit idle 95% of the time. Planes, trains, ships, trucks, buses and other commercial vehicles account for well over half the emissions associated with the transport sector globally. And the transport sector itself accounts for only 14% of all emissions.

Now for the knee-jerk response from groups like Union of Concerned Scientists: Yes, but road-vehicle emissions are a significant share of total emissions in the U.S. and Europe.

This is a perfect example of the politics of the meaningless gesture, the dominant motif in climate policy. The planet doesn’t care where the emissions happen. The U.S. and Europe could ban driving altogether and it wouldn’t make a sizable difference. For real leverage over CO2, the target has to be heavy industry, electricity generation, and home heating and cooking.

So why the car obsession? It’s a mental legacy of the air-pollution fights of the 1970s. To many voters, the car remains a sinful object. Eco groups, for purposes of self-promotion, can’t go wrong by portraying themselves as fighting against the automobile. Yet they get virtually nowhere on the alleged problem of CO2 by doing so.

Maybe controlling CO2 isn’t the goal.

#JOURNALISM:

Yeah, it’s like their instincts are purely political or something.

FALSE FEMINISM:

The sexual revolution presented itself as an embrace of nature, a liberation from social convention, and a “bold affirmation” of doing what comes naturally, Bloom wrote. Feminism’s watchword, by contrast, was “biology should not be destiny.” Feminism presented itself as a “liberation from nature,” which required “not so much the abolition of law but the institution of law and political activism.”

Put simply, you might say that when a woman goes upstairs with a young man after a frat party, she’s acting under the influence of the sexual revolution. The next morning, when he doesn’t call and she feels violated, feminism kicks in.

Read the whole thing.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Second Black Man Found Dead at Home of Ed Buck, Democrat Donor.

Wehoville reports law enforcement has yet to release the identity of the deceased male who died in Buck’s West Hollywood apartment. Buck was investigated — and later cleared — following the death of Gemmel Moore, a young man who died of a drug overdose at the 65-year-old’s home in July 2017. Following Moore’s death, Buck has been accused of having a “fetish” for inserting drugs into black men he meets through dating websites. Before his death, Moore wrote of Buck injecting him with drugs during their encounters.

Local activists have said the Los Angeles Police Department declined to press charges against Buck due to his sizeable financial contributions to then-California Gov. Jerry Brown and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Nonsense, that sort of thing never happens.

JERRY BROWN: The Last Adult in Sacramento?

I GUESS IT’S TIME FOR THE MEAN GIRLS TO PUT THE NEW GIRL IN HER PLACE: Whoopi Goldberg to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Before you start pooping on people and what they’ve done, you got to do something too.” And then Abby Huntsman makes clear that she knows her place.

FROM MY COLLEAGUE MAURICE STUCKE AND OXFORD’S ARIEL EZRACHI: Sustainable and Unchallenged Algorithmic Tacit Collusion.

DONALD TRUMP CONTINUES TO LEAD THE LIBERTARIAN REVOLUTION: Private Companies Are Paying to Keep Yellowstone Clean During Shutdown: They have a profit-based incentive to keep the tourists coming.

UPDATE: Funny, that:

SCHIZOPHRENIC HOLLYWOOD: Enough Already. The Golden Globes Should Just Host a ‘Naked’ Show Next Year:

I guess the #MeToo movement has turned into #THOTSrUs. Do they want to be ogled and sexualized now? I can’t keep up. Here’s Taylor Swift, the queen of being offended when someone reaches out and grabs what she has nakedly on display.

I thought this sort of thing was banned in Mike Pence’s America.

UPDATE: Golden Globes: Anti-Gun Hollywood Surrounded By Security Walls and Armed Guards.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The “Taco Cleanse” is a real diet consisting of nothing but tacos. When I raised this with the Insta-Wife, she was . . . skeptical.