REPUBLICANS POUNCE! George Lopez under fire for joking about rumored $80 million bounty on Trump.

Don’t ever change, CBS News — or I might be out of a job.

ERIC HOLDER TARGETS FOUR RED STATE LEGISLATURES: Florida, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina are in the cross-hairs of major lefty campaign marked by Obama’s attorney general. Interesting parallel to the Soros and Bloomberg efforts aimed at state and local offices.

HIGHER EDUCATION HAS TAKEN SIDES: Political harassment: See what conservatives had to face on campus in 2019.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Bernie Says His Dumbest Thing Yet. “I’m starting to get a nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach about Sanders. After the last election we know that anything can happen. My New Year’s fear is that Joe Biden will finally implode on the campaign trail and show up on stage at a rally wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and carrying a chicken. That’ll probably be too much for even the Democrats and they’ll start looking to the next in line, which has been Sanders since the beginning of the year.”

The really nagging thought is: Did the chicken consent?

AN APT DESCRIPTION OF MOST OF OUR RULING CLASS: To Hell With These Gilded Charlatans.

One of the most poignant moments came after he made a joke with the punchline that convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein obviously didn’t kill himself. The crowd immediately booed.

“Shut up,” Gervais commanded, “I know he was your friend, but I don’t care.”

That was not the only time that evening that Gervais made it abundantly clear that he didn’t care what these pampered and glorified entertainers thought or how they felt. Each time he said, “I don’t care,” he was rejecting the power of an out-of-touch cultural elite and the vested corporate interests to which they have sold out.

Because ultimately, Gervais’ audience for the night was not the actors, directors, producers, and executives in that star-studded hall. His audience was the people. The people who have started souring on the garbage that their self-appointed overlords produce. The people who harbor far more populist notions than most in Hollywood would care to admit.

Well, the ruling class would have a better reputation among the people if it weren’t awful.

DAVID HARSANYI: Attacks on the Babylon Bee Are Attacks on Free Expression. “If the only brand of political humor permitted is vapid enough for even the dumbest or most humorless person to comprehend, we’re going to end up in a world with a lot more Andy Borowitzes.”

I know it’s early, but that’s got to be the best line of the day.

NEED A LAWYER IN CHATTANOOGA? Check out my former research assistant Meredith Mochel, who’s just rolled out her new website. She’s a terrific lawyer — just last year I was down that way talking to a public defender who told me she had taken over a difficult murder case from them and done an outstanding job. And she’s a smart, good person.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: ABA 509 Report Data: 73% Of Law Students Receive Scholarships (Up From 49% In 2012). This is just a disguised form of tuition discounting, and it’s something I predicted years ago.

LUCKILY, THAT’S A PLACE THAT’S ALWAYS VERY WELL-PREPARED FOR DISASTERS: 6.4 & 5.8 quakes strike Puerto Rico one day after a 5.8 strikes.

I BLAME CLIMATE CHANGE: 24 Australians arrested for deliberately setting fires this season.

UPDATE: I’ll see your 24 and raise you: Nearly 200 People Arrested In Australia For Deliberately Lighting Bushfires.

FRANK MIELE: Are Dems Crazy? How Can Biden Still Be Their No. 1 Choice?

So yeah, I thought Biden would stay safely retired throughout the 2020 campaign. And when he got in, I thought the luster would wear off quickly and the radical Dems would throw him under the bus. Instead, he has hovered between 25% and 30% in the national polls and has never left first place. How can this be?

Isn’t this the candidate who called an octogenarian voter “fat” and challenged him to a push-up contest? Isn’t he the same “Creepy Joe Biden” who bragged about letting children stroke his leg hair and jump on his lap when he was a lifeguard? Didn’t Biden just do his best Hillary impression by telling coal miners that they should forget about their hefty paychecks and instead go to night school to learn how to code software? Heck, couldn’t he have just been honest and told them that everyone will eventually wind up working at an Amazon warehouse anyway, so get used to it?

In any normal campaign year, Joe Biden would have preceded Eric Swalwell and Bill de Blasio to the exit. All right, maybe not Swalwell. But this is not any normal political campaign.

I guess you might say that Biden has been fortunate in his choice of enemies.

That last part is certainly true, but only until and unless he captures the nomination. Then I’m guessing he’d rather face almost anyone but Trump.

NICE: Ethiopian Airlines launches new Boeing 787 Dreamliner named ‘Tel Aviv.’

That’s the first time a foreign airline has named an aircraft after an Israeli city.

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Some men really are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to save Gaia. Including: Joaquin Phoenix Urges Celebrities Not to ‘Take Private Jets’ to Award Shows. Which didn’t go down well at all with his fellow leftists on Sunday night: Joaquin Phoenix gets played off the stage at the Golden Globes after he tells Hollywood no more private jets.

WHAT “PRIVILEGE” LOOKS LIKE: Chelsea Clinton reaps $9 million from corporate board position.

LEFTIST PROJECTION, EXHIBIT #1,000,006: Notorious antifa doxing activist accused of racism and predatory behaviour.

By day, Christian Michael Exoo is a 38-year-old library supervisor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. However—online—Exoo uses the moniker “AntiFashGordon.” He has gained a large following in left-wing networks for his activism with antifa and by releasing “doxes,” or personal information, of his ideological opponents to his 25,000 followers on Twitter.

Exoo proudly boasts on his Twitter biography that he has gotten people fired from jobs, removed from schools and kicked out of homes.

Before becoming an online antifa activist, Exoo contributed to Salon, Alternet, Truthout, and other left-wing media outlets. Exoo also worked for Weave News, a left-wing citizen-journalist and activist group that was founded at and funded by St. Lawrence University, where his father, mother, and brother are employed as professors. Exoo was also a one-time aspiring actor.

With an undergraduate degree in information science, Exoo teaches doxing training seminars under the euphemism of “open-source intelligence research.” In 2017, he trained students at St. Lawrence at a conference organized by Weave News. In one presentation slide to his class, it read: “In this exercise, we are going to find the Facebook profile of our subject, and find all of the posts he’s ‘liked.’”

In other words, take away the substantial charges of racism and sexual predation, and you’re still left with a horrible person.

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Iran Was Obama and Biden’s Mess, Trump is Cleaning it Up.

Flashback: Mattis: You won’t believe how Obama and Biden bungled Iraq and allowed the rise of ISIS.

Related: ‘Ignoring reality’: Biden got it wrong on Iraq, Mattis says. “‘He was past the point where he was willing to entertain a ‘good idea.’ He didn’t want to hear more; he wanted our forces out of Iraq. Whatever path led there fastest, he favored. He exuded the confidence of a man whose mind was made up, perhaps even indifferent to considering the consequences were he judging the situation incorrectly.'”

Mattis winds up basically blaming Biden for the rise of ISIS, adding, “It would take many years and tens of thousands of casualties, plus untold misery for millions of innocents, to break ISIS’s geographic hold. All of this was predicted — and preventable.”

Related item here. (Bumped).

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC Says Joe Biden Is Too ‘Conservative’, Would ‘Not Be in Same Party’ Outside of America.

Flashbacks:

● Joe Biden Just Lost Any Claim to Being a Moderate With His Embrace of the Green New Deal. As Brandon Morse warned at Red State, “At this point, America has two options in 2020. It’s either Donald Trump or socialism. There doesn’t seem to be an option outside of these two.”

● Ruthless Joe Biden Admits He’ll Sacrifice Hundreds of Thousands of Blue-Collar Workers for His Green Dream.

● Jill Biden Hands Out Christmas Gifts at Mexico Border Camp.

● Biden ‘100 percent’ supports nationwide plastic bag ban.

● Biden Obliviously Tells Press that Fossil Fuel Execs Should Be Jailed.

UH-HUH: Interminable Gas Bag Michael Moore Asks Wrong Ayatollah Not to Hurt Him, Vows to ‘Get Rid of Trump.’

NORTHWESTERN UNIV. LAWPROF STEPHEN PRESSER: McConnell Channels Hamilton to Save the Republic.

The Framers’ greatest fear was that the delicate balance of powers among the three branches would be upset, and that a corrupt faction would come to dominate the government. McConnell made clear his belief this had come to be the Democrats whom he said were “the intemperate or designing majority in the House of Representatives,” that Hamilton “warned might abuse the impeachment power” for partisan gain.

McConnell decried the misguided nature of the Democrats’ hypocritical claim that some Senators, who, like McConnell himself, had clearly indicated their belief in the insubstantial nature of the impeachment charges, could not participate in a fair trial.

McConnell pointed out that Hamilton, in “Federalist 65,” had said that impeachment was not simply a legal proceeding, but was a political one as well, calling for judgements, McConnell said, “about what the common good of our nation requires.”

In a blistering indictment of the Democrats — who certainly did not shed their political partisanship in the trial of President Clinton on impeachment charges 20 years earlier— McConnell declared that senators did not need “condescending lectures on fairness from the House Democrats who just rushed through the most unfair impeachment in modern history . . . or lectures on impartiality from senators who happily pre-judged the case with President Clinton and simply change their standards to suit the political winds.”

Once the United States Senate was regarded as the greatest parliamentary body on the planet, and one could sense an echo of that time, when McConnell trumpeted that “The Framers built the Senate to provide a check against the short-termism, the runaway passions, and the ‘demon of faction’ that Hamilton warned would ‘extend his sceptre’ over the House of Representatives ‘at certain seasons.'”

The Senate exists, explained McConnell, “because the Founders wanted an institution that could stop momentary hysterias and partisan passions from damaging our Republic.”

And we need just that, now.

KIND OF. WHEN NARRATIVE IS ALLOWED TO BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN REALITY, THE RESULT IS MUCH LIKE THAT OF BRAIN DAMAGE, YES:  Is the corrupt moral culture in Hollywood causing actual brain damage?

THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS! ALSO, EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF: Defending Obama: Washington Post Says Only TWO Americans Were Killed In Benghazi.

THIS IS WHY THERE IS A PRICE FOR COMING OUT POLITICALLY. DESPITE THAT, THIS IS WHY WE MUST:  The Multi-Front Attack on Free Speech.