NOW COMES THE MORNING-AFTER HEADACHE: Two of the 47 House Republicans who voted for the Respect for Marriage Act in July have now recanted that vote, according to The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson.

“My record shows that I am a long-standing advocate against discrimination of all types. I, however, cannot support any effort that undermines religious liberties by failing to provide legitimate safeguards for faith-based organizations that object based on their deeply-held religious beliefs,” Johnson quotes Rep. Mario Diaz-Belart (R-Fla.) announcing Monday.

The first of the recanters was Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who attributed his original vote to confusion and how Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rushed the bill through to the floor vote.

READER REQUEST: Diguo Belgian/Belgium Family Balance Siphon/Syphon Coffee Maker. #CommissionEarned

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Will Trump really run in 2024? “Usually, Insanity Wrap is about the Left’s big crazy — but this week, maybe I’m the crazy one. But don’t worry, I still have all of the usual lefty nuttiness you’ve come to love and expect.”

• Woke teacher needs to put that clicker where the sun don’t shine
• Antifa is objectively — and violently — anti-women
• Meet Microwave Head Man

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

COLD WAR II: The Pentagon’s report on the Chinese military notes an expanding nuclear arsenal – and a sophisticated integration strategy.

There is much to ponder in this latest report on the Chinese military. The sources of Chinese future military effectiveness lie less in numbers of missiles or ships than in how they intellectually and organisationally prepare for war. They have long been thinking about weaknesses in Western military systems, and ways they might influence or destroy the West’s military and national security systems.

But just as we possess weakness, so too do the Chinese. Their reforms, as a recent Japanese report makes clear, are not yet complete. And the Russo-Ukraine War has shown fragilities in pre-war assessments about Russian military prowess. These factors need to be kept in mind when reading the report.

Therefore, there is no need for despair in reading about significant improvements in Chinese military capacity in the 2022 Pentagon report. The nations of the West have proven before that they can find and target weaknesses in large authoritarian nations.

Our weakness is that much of our leadership is in the tank for Beijing, or at the very least admires and tries to emulate their authoritarian regime.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM: Med school ‘stigmatized white people’ during all-day DEI ‘retreat’: report. Some doctors were ‘subjected to seven hours of stereotyping and shaming.’

That’s a violation of federal civil rights laws, and quite possibly state civil rights laws. The accreditors should also hear about this.

YES: Is Expressing Support For Dobbs A Firing Offense In BigLaw?

Rather than just accepting this, attorneys and activists on the right should lobby for regulatory/ethics/tax changes that will make really big law firms much harder to operate. The laws were changed to favor them, and there’s no reason why that should remain the case except for big-firm domination of bar associations. Now that there are no neutral institutions left in our society, it’s important to put pressure on any institution that’s on the other side. That’s what the left does, and it’s what the right will need to do if it wants things to change. But hey, maybe it doesn’t really.

STARLINK: The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty Dang Impressive. “Just because folks in Allan Hills, Antarctica (and my location on Monument Hill) are delighted to have nearly weather-proof, high-speed internet available doesn’t mean that Starlink isn’t without its problems.”

IF WHITE PRIVILEGE IS A THING, WHY DOES EVERYONE WANT TO BE A MINORITY? Professor admits no Native American tribal affiliation after decades of claiming otherwise. I should note, though, that tribal descent is not necessarily the same thing as current tribal affiliation.

MARGOT CLEVELAND: If A Legitimate Free Press Existed, The Twitter Files Wouldn’t.

The projection from these supposed reporters couldn’t have been any more ironic because had there been a widespread outbreak of journalism following the Post’s bombshell coverage of the Biden family scandal, Twitter’s censorship would not have happened — or, if it did, it would not have mattered.

Had journalists from legacy outlets and especially the supposed standard-bearers of journalism, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, approached the story with the seriousness it deserved, it seems unlikely Twitter would have dared censor the story. Or such censorship, had it occurred, would have been futile because journalists would be falling over themselves to report the latest details in a political scandal that suggested the Democrat candidate for president had participated in a pay-to-play enterprise with his son while vice president.

Real journalists would have tracked down and authenticated the laptop materials, as they did a belated two years later. Real journalists would have questioned Bobulinski and reported his collaborating statements. Real journalists would have demanded answers from Joe, Hunter, and James Biden, the president’s brother who also profited from the many deals; they would have sought answers on every detail suggesting corruption discussed in the emails and other materials recovered from the laptop. And real journalists would have pushed intelligence agencies, and the former members of them who signed on to a letter casting the laptop as Russian disinformation, on the basis for that claim.

I’m reminded of what Harry Reid said when he got caught lying about Mitt Romney’s taxes during the 2012 presidential campaign: “It worked, didn’t it?”

EPIC HOLIDAY DEALS are here. #CommissionEarned

SOMEHOW IT’S ABOUT GRAFT OR GRIFT: The absurdity of California’s reparations proposal.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Republicans Need to Avoid a RINO Stampede in 2023. “As soon as Mitch McConnell had secured another stint as Senate Minority Leader, he went into surrender mode, indicating that he was willing to cave to the Dems on some hot-button issues. Whatever conservative inclinations or fortitude McConnell picked up during the Trump years is long gone and he’s back to being Mitch the Useless Squish.”

YET ANOTHER BIDEN CRISIS-BY-DESIGN: Vaccine Mandate Is Hurting Recruiting, Top Marine General Says.

I TRUST CAR SALESMEN MORE: Trust in media at all-time low.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Team Biden is using the IRS to attack the gig economy.

COMING TO TERMS: The COVID lockdowns were all for naught.

How different it feels this time around. Broadcasters are lustily cheering anti-lockdown protesters in China. Members of Congress offer unqualified support. President Joe Biden, although more guarded, is sympathetic.

No Western politician, as far as I can see, is insulting the protesters. They are not dismissed as selfish or sociopathic, nor as dupes of conspiracy theories. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) captured the mood: “To the people of China — we hear you and we stand with you as you fight for your freedom.”

Broadcasters and columnists who spent 2020 calling anti-lockdowners kooks and criminals are now uncomplicatedly applauding their Chinese counterparts. They see ordinary people standing up against an authoritarian government the anti-COVID policies of which were crushing liberty. . . .

Guess which developed country had the lowest excess mortality between 2020 and 2022. Go on, have a guess. That’s right. Sweden, which refused to close shops or schools or to impose a mask mandate, saw cumulative excess deaths rise by 6.8%, the lowest figure in the OECD. By way of comparison, the equivalent figures were 18% in Australia, 24.5% in the U.K., and 54.1% in the U.S.

At this stage, various authoritarians, hypochondriacs and mask fetishists trot out bizarre arguments about Sweden having a low population density, as if Swedes were evenly spaced across their birch forests rather than living mainly in cities comparable to ours. What is striking about this argument is not so much its dishonesty (in March 2020, lockdowners claimed that Sweden faced total catastrophe, not that it might end up with a slightly higher mortality rate than Finland ) as its desperation.

The lockdowns were not for really naught, however. They facilitated an enormous transfer of wealth and political power from the middle- and working-class to big corporations and the professional/managerial class.

ABOUT THAT PALE BLUE DOT: Is it proof Earth — and every one of us — are here by chance or by design? Which one, Carl Sagan, astronomer/scientist, or J. Warner Wallace, cold-case detective/Christian apologist, got it right, based on the evidence?

2024 PREVIEW: Trump Clarifies Statement Misrepresented as a Call to End to U.S. Constitution. “Donald Trump is sometimes his own worst enemy but, as we know from Russiagate, he is also grossly misrepresented in the media.”

MUSK BOOTING CHILD PORN PURVEYORS OFF TWITTER: As expected, the Left is up in arms about Elon Musk exposing the activities of the Democratic censors who formerly controlled Twitter. But guess who else is getting unwanted exposure, thanks to Musk? Child pornography distributors, according to Issues & Insights:

“This is what the left and woke companies are freaking out about? Cybersecurity firm Ghost Data reported over the weekend that Twitter had nearly doubled the number of accounts it is suspending each day that were sharing child pornography.

“’In the past 24 hours, Twitter started to step up its efforts and took down 44,000 suspicious accounts, including over 1,300 profiles that tried to bypass detection using codewords and text in images to communicate. Zero tolerance,” said Ghost Data founder Andrea Stoppa, who has been monitoring this, in a tweet.”

And it turns out that Twitter knew more than a year ago that child pornography being distributed via Tweets was growing “exponentially,” but the company’s investment in resources needed to counter that growth was all but nil. Expect the Left screaming to get louder in the days ahead as Musk continues sweeping the piles of manure out of the stalls.

Transparency is great when it’s applied to the Right, but now we see what the Left actually believes about transparency as it is being applied at Twitter.

COMMUNIST TOOL: Meet the Beijing-Aligned Group That Branded a Republican’s Tough-on-China Rhetoric ‘Racist.’

THEN THERE’S JENNIFER GRANHOLM: Biden’s energy secretary is lauding her department for awarding $200 million to Microvast Holdings to aid its construction of a new lithium battery factory in Tennessee. Hooray for the emerging American clean-energy industry, Granholm said, promising that the grant and factory will  “supercharge the private sector to ensure our clean energy future is American-made.”

But guess what Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon found after a little perfunctory digging?

“While the DOE described Microvast as a ‘majority U.S.-owned company, traded on NASDAQ’ and ‘headquartered in Stafford, Texas,’ financial records show the company operates primarily out of China.

“Microvast itself says the Chinese government ‘exerts substantial influence over the manner in which we must conduct our business activities and may intervene, at any time and with no notice.’ The company was also recently added to a Securities and Exchange Commission watchlist of Chinese companies that are on track to be delisted from NASDAQ for failing to comply with U.S. auditing requirements.”

In other words, Granholm (and, unless he fires her, her boss as well) just plain flat-out lied to America.

HARD TIMES AHEAD FOR ABRAMS: Turns out that somebody has been asleep at the wheel in the compliance department of the foundation founded by twice-failed Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams.

“State laws across the country prohibit charities that have not filed required financial disclosures with the IRS from soliciting donations. But the New Georgia Project, which missed the Nov. 15 deadline to file its Form 990, is still raising money through a nationwide campaign hosted by the online fundraising platform ActBlue,” report the Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr and Joseph Simonson.

“Representatives at the relevant agencies in Tennessee, Mississippi, and North Carolina, where the New Georgia Project’s charity license has expired, told the Free Beacon that the group could face fines ranging from $25 dollars to $25,000 for violating their state’s charity laws. Some of those fines could be issued for each donation the group accepts,” Perhaps Abrams will claim those registrations were stolen.

COLORADO: Denver considers one-time pandemic bonuses. “City employees in Denver might see a one-time, $600 bonus for staying put.”

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: Wikipedia editors considering deleting the article on the Twitter files.

But Wikipedia was one of the first.

CONGRATULATIONS TO REP. KHANNA: A Democratic member of Congress laments how Twitter handled the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.