ROGER KIMBALL: Watergate, By Any Other Name. “Over the last few days, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other anti-Trump outlets have revealed, and reveled in, something that many observers suspected for a long time. That the investigation into various figures associated with the Trump campaign—not only Carter Page, but also George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen—was just a pretext. The main target all along was Trump himself. As Andy McCarthy observed, ‘following the firing of FBI director James Comey on May 9, 2017, the bureau formally opened an investigation of President Trump.'”

To revive an old Democratic trope, I question the timing. But read the whole thing.

Plus: “’Spying on the opposition campaign in the absence of corroborated evidence of a crime.’ ‘Controversial?’ You think? How about nefarious and probably criminal? Richard Nixon is unavailable for comment.” It’s different when it’s done to Republicans because shut up.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECASUE SHUT UP: MSM Never Questioned Airing An Obama Speech Despite These 1063 Examples Of His Lies, Mendacity, Etc.

AS STEVE WOULD SAY, THE SCORPION STINGS THE FROG, EVERY TIME: Obama’s ‘new blood’ remark has different meaning for Biden.

JEW-HATERS ARE NOW A CORE DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUENCY: Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib photographed with pro-Hezbollah activist who says Israel has no right to exist.

OH: Iran exploring new uranium enrichment that could void 2015 nuclear deal.

Restarting enrichment at that level would mean Iran had withdrawn the 2015 nuclear deal it struck with world powers, an accord that President Donald Trump already pulled America out of in May.

However, Ali Akbar Salehi’s comments to state television appeared aimed at telling the world Iran would slowly restart its program. If it chooses, it could resume mass enrichment at its main facility in the central Iranian town of Natanz.

“Preliminary activities for designing modern 20% (enriched uranium) fuel have begun,” state TV quoted Salehi as saying.

Salehi said adding the “modern fuel” will increase efficiency in Tehran research reactor that consumes 20% enriched fuel.

The only thing Trump’s exit from the Iran Deal changed is that now Iran doesn’t have to put up a pretense of compliance.

WELL, THIS ISN’T GOOD: Employees at Amazon’s Ring have been spying on customers. “All that’s apparently required to tap into the live feeds is a customer’s email address. Meaning the company has been so egregiously lax when it comes to security and privacy that even people outside the company could have potentially done this, using merely an email address to begin spying on customers, according to the report. . . . It keeps getting worse from there. Those videos were also, you guessed it, unencrypted. Because, why else? Ring decided it would cost too much.”

STEP ONE: STAY AWAY FROM TWITTER. Be nice again, America, national group urges.

BE PREPARED: Military Action Explored Against Iran After September Baghdad Mortar Attack. “Pentagon said to have been ‘rattled’ by the prospect of attacking Iran.”

Bullshit. The Pentagon has a plan in a drawer somewhere for leveling Toledo, should the need arise. Somebody is playing politics, stupidly.

JOEL KOTKIN: The Democrats Finally Won the Suburbs. Now Will They Destroy Them?

Well, that’s the pattern. See, e.g., the inner cities.

Plus: “The progressive dream centers on a vision of a dense, egalitarian urban core. Yet in terms of inequality, dense core cities—notably New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco—are generally far less equal than lower density areas. As for what place attracts families, it’s not even remotely close: People living in suburbs and exurbs are far more likely to have children in their household. The 8 percent of core residents with children aged 6 to 17 is barely a third of the percentage in suburbs and exurbs. This may be critical for the political future as millennials, born between 1980 and 1999, reach their peak child-bearing years, and continue moving to the suburbs in huge numbers. While most media and academic thinkpieces focus on the glory of density and planning, over 80 percent of all purchases in 2018 by people under 37 are of single-family homes.”

LOOTERS GOTTA LOOT: De Blasio Says the ‘Wrong People’ Have All the Money. “The appalling economic ignorance of New York city’s mayor.”

I MENTIONED THIS COLUMN BY JOEL KOTKIN IN AN EARLIER POST, but this bit on immigration is worth noting:

If they wish to take power, the Democrats need to integrate Trump’s economic nationalism with an immigration policy designed not as a version of global affirmative action but something that makes the country more competitive. They should not, in their fury about Trump, go back to becoming pawns of the investment banks, tech oligarchs and others who get rich exporting jobs across the Pacific. Leaders in both parties need to recognize that the moment to press the advantage with China is now.

“Global affirmative action” is an apt descriptor.

CALIFORNIA’S LARGEST UTILITY PLANS BANKRUPTCY AS CEO MAKES FOR THE EXIT: “Geisha Williams is stepping down as the CEO of PG&E Corp., the largest utility in the U.S., while potential liability over recent California wildfires drives the company into bankruptcy. PG&E announced Williams’s departure Sunday and its plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a day later. Investigators found that the power utility had caused 17 major wildfires in 2017, and evidence suggests the company may be responsible for others in 2018 as well, The Wall Street Journal reports.”

Related: PG&E stock crashes nearly 50% as utility says it will file for bankruptcy because of wildfires liability.

LINDSEY 2.0 IS BACK: Lindsey Graham Has Harsh Words For Dems Who Might Make Next SCOTUS Confirmation Ugly.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked Graham about the potential for another disastrous confirmation hearing, saying, “if you got Donald Trump — again, this is if — you have Donald Trump replacing a liberal icon like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, isn’t that a formula for — I mean, doesn’t that make the Kavanaugh hearings look like a tea party?”

“They should have thought of that before they changed the rules,” Graham fired back, referencing former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s invocation of the nuclear option for judicial nominees.

“They try to destroy conservative judges. This decision by Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer may come back to haunt them but I am dead set on making sure it is a conservative nominee,” Graham continued, reminding Wallace that when Democrats were in power, he had voted to confirm Obama nominees Sotomayor and Kagan. “And elections have consequences. The rules of the Senate were changed not by me, by them, and we had to do it on the Supreme Court because they would not give us any votes to nominate anybody and Kavanaugh was a fine man, they tried to destroy him. All this is going to come back to haunt them one day.”

Video at the link.

NEW FRONTIERS IN DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION: California Bar Should Lower Cut Score To Benefit Students Of Color.

NOW THAT’S MEDDLING: Iran plays Hamas card ahead of Israeli elections.

“The heads of Israel’s defense establishment believe that Qatar’s financial grant to Gaza played a major role in preventing an armed conflict between Israel and Hamas, but now the third installment of that grant is at risk,” reports Shlomi Eldar. “As of Jan. 8, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given an order that the money is not to be transferred to the Gaza Strip, and Hamas is once again threatening Israel.”
…
The bottom line, adds Eldar, “is that $15 million were not transferred to Gaza this month. In response, either Hamas or some group acting on its behalf fired a warning rocket at Israel on the night of Jan. 6-7. The rocket was shot down by the Iron Dome missile defense system. This is Hamas’ undiplomatic means of declaring its intent: If there is no money, there will be rockets instead.”

And here’s the Iran angle:

The pause in Qatar’s support for Hamas provides an opening for Iran. Tehran’s police chief has offered to train members of Palestinian armed groups, as Netanyahu blamed Iran for the lack of progress in peace talks.

“Further consolidation of relations between Iran and the Palestinian factions is possible, as Hamas and the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] recognize that Iran is their main supplier of arms and money,” writes Adnan Abu Amer. “If that happens, it is likely these factions would enter a military battle in a unified front with Iran, Hezbollah and Syria against Israel. Former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman had warned of that possibility in October 2017.”

Thanks, Obama, for letting Iran out of the box.

CONSERVATIVE PROFESSORS IN THE PROGRESSIVE UNIVERSITY.

Dunn, with the help of Jon Shields, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, compiled his own research for the book. The two professors interviewed more than 150 professors who described themselves as conservative or libertarian to learn about their experiences on overwhelmingly left-leaning campuses.

Dunn described to Campus Reform how difficult it was to find conservative professors to include in their study.

“To actually find conservatives in several disciplines we had to use what’s called a snowball sample,” he said. “That method is used with difficult-to-locate populations like the homeless. I think it is both telling and ironic that we had to use it with conservatives. With a snowball sample, you find someone in the population you’re looking for and ask them where you could find more people like them.”

Read the whole thing.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Government Shut Down Continues and Much, Much More.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Game Of Pseudo-Authenticity. “We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases. One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate oneself from the assumed dominant and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males.”

THE CHEESE STANDS ALONE: American Surplus Reaches Record High.

Over the past 10 years, milk production has increased by 13 percent because of high prices. But what dairy farmers failed to realize was that Americans are drinking less milk. According to data from the USDA, Americans drank just 149 pounds of milk per capita in 2017, down from 247 pounds in 1975.

Suppliers turn that extra milk into cheese because it is less perishable and stays fresh for longer periods. But Americans are turning their noses up at those processed cheese slices and string cheese — varieties that are a main driver of the U.S. cheese market — in favor of more refined options, Novakovic tells Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson. Despite this shift, sales of mozzarella cheese, the single largest type of cheese produced and consumed in the U.S., remain strong, he says.

“What has changed — and changed fairly noticeably and fairly recently — is people are turning away from processed cheese,” Novakovic says. “It’s also the case that we’re seeing increased sales of kind of more exotic, specialty, European-style cheeses. Some of those are made in the U.S. A lot of them aren’t.”

Novakovic also notes that imported cheeses tend to cost more, so when people choose those, they buy less cheese overall. The growing surplus of American-made cheese and milk means that prices are declining. The current average price of whole milk is $15.12 per 100 pounds, which is much lower than the price required for dairy farmers to break even.

“It’s the same as it is for everything else: If you’ve got too much of something, the price has to go down until consumption rises,” Novakovic says.

So why, after ten years and 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese, have prices not come down to equilibrium?

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Cornyn offers ‘reciprocity’ for 17 million concealed carry permit holders.

The ranks of gun owners with approved concealed carry permits has swollen to 17 million, and new legislation offered in the Senate Thursday would make it easier for them to carry their weapons across state lines.

Bolstered by a larger pro-gun caucus in the Senate, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn is introducing his latest version of the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.

“This bill focuses on two of our country’s most fundamental constitutional protections — the Second Amendment’s right of citizens to keep and bear arms and the Tenth Amendment’s right of states to make laws best-suited for their residents,” said Cornyn, a top Senate GOP leader.

“I look forward to working with my colleagues to advance this important legislation for law-abiding gun owners nationwide,” he added.

He already has 31 co-sponsors.

North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson has introduced parallel legislation in the House.

One doubts that Speaker Pelosi will want to move this, but the recently elected red-state Democrats who gave her the majority may feel differently. Or may feel pressure. I would favor adding language to protect people who carry in places that one state forbids but another may permit by limiting all penalties for carry in unauthorized areas to something like a traffic ticket. In fact, I’d go farther and hold that when a person authorized to possess weapons under federal law possesses a weapon that’s legal under federal law, the greatest penalty a state can assess would be something like a $100 fine.

UPDATE: In the comments, a lot of questions about why the GOP didn’t push this when it had both chambers, summed up this way: “The GOP always gets proactive when there are enough Democrats to stop them.”

MACRON ESCALATES: French riot police are now using semi-automatic weapons with live ammunition against Yellow Vest protestors as Macron’s law and order crisis spirals.

ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE: Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaido briefly detained.

Venezuelan intelligence agents have released opposition leader and congress chief Juan Guaido after briefly detaining him on the way to a political rally, a congressional official has said.

A video posted on social media appears to show the moment Guaido was pulled from a car on a highway by the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin) on Sunday as he was travelling out of the capital, Caracas.

While it was not possible to identify the individual in the video, his wife and opposition legislators said that he had been detained.

He was released about an hour later, they added.

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