A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: Lee Edwards was my first boss in the nation’s capital way back in 1975, a mentor in the decades thereafter and an admired friend through it all. My tribute in PJMedia.

THE FACTS ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP: James Agresti of Just Facts Daily explains how totally wrong is the media narrative that birthright citizenship protects the children born to illegals in this country:

“In reality, the legislative history of the 14th Amendment is clear that it only grants birthright citizenship to the children of people who are legally and permanently living in the United States. This does not apply to the children of illegal immigrants, temporary residents, visitors, or tourists,” Agresti writes.

TERRIFYING QUESTION ABOUT THOSE DRONES: How many of the 36K+ young Chinese men who have entered the U.S. illegally under President Joe Biden are drone operators? Check out my latest PJMedia column.

UPDATE: Everything you ever wanted to know about drones, quad-copters and other UAVs.

JOLLY OLD ENGLAND IS NO MORE: Roger Kimball laments the passing of the England that gave the world the English Bill of Rights, Maggie Thatcher and C.S. Lewis.

MOST HILL STAFFERS THUMBS DOWN ON BOSSES’ PAY RAISE: It’s only one percent below half in the latest CNCT Capitol Pulse survey, but even that razor-thin margin is amazing.

And check out the partisan agreement on this issue. Maybe more of the staffers are accurately assessing the significance of the November election than are the senators and representatives for whom they work?

ERNST DEMANDS FEDS END TELEWORK DEALS: Whistleblowers are making themselves heard at HUD, letting Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) know that Biden officials there are dickering with the local AFGE chapter to extend teleworking for another five years. Ernst has been raising the roof about teleworking abuses for more than a year and the DOGE twins are listening very closely now.

HANNIBAL LECTER SAID THAT? Well, no, actually it’s the guy who portrayed Lecter so frightfully well, the Academy Award-winning Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins. What Hopkins says in this short video on HillFaith is a series of antithetical analogies that, whatever else you may think about Jesus, you likely didn’t expect to hear such things ever uttered by Lecter, I mean Hopkins. And taken together, they remind all of us of just how deeply unique is the former Jewish carpenter from Nazareth.

AL-ASSAD FAMILY’S WORST GENOICIDE: Richard Pollock details how the father of the now deposed Syrian dictator, Baashar Al-Assad encircled, starved, then executed residents of Hama, Syria, en masse in 1982.

“To this day, the name Hama stirs trepidation and rage among the country’s citizens. And it should be listed among one of the al-Assad family’s worst crimes while the deposed leader now apparently enjoys refuge in Russia.

“Certainly, the al-Assad dictatorial family is notorious for carrying out many atrocities. In 2011, it’s estimated Bashar killed 500,000 and displaced half of the country’s 23 million. He also is believed to have killed as many as 1,400 by nerve gas in 2013.”

Tragically, there is more, much more, to this record.

IF YOU TAKE A FALL IN THE FUTURE: And your treatment includes spending some time with a Neuropsychologist, don’t be surprised if your views on race issues become a topic of analysis. Seems the American Psychology Association (APA) is seriously considering revising standards based on Critical Race Theory (CRT)/Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) agit-prop.

“The guidelines are the latest example of how DEI has captured the credentialing apparatus of American health care, transforming what once seemed like an ideological fad into a formal requirement of medical licensure,” Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reports.

HARD TRUTHS FOR GOP FROM CHIP ROY: The Texas Republican reminds GOP colleagues in both chambers of Congress that they were elected to change Washington, D.C., top to bottom. If they don’t, if they continuing merely paying lip service to draining the swamp, then they will soon go the way of the Whigs.

HOW HILL AIDES VIEW BIDEN PARDON: Might not be quite as expected, given the intense partisanship, as seen in the latest Capitol Pulse results on HillFaith.

WHY THE SPECIAL PAYMENTS TO MICHAEL BYRD? Byrd is the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbit during the January 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol grounds.

Just the News’s Steve Richards reported earlier this week that Byrd received substantially more financial and other assistance than any other USCP officer on duty during the riot. Byrd got a $37,000 retention bonus, help with $160,000 in private fundraising, housing, and a promotion to captain.

Today, Richards quotes the head of the USCP Union asking some very tough questions for which the incoming-House GOP leadership should demand answers from Democratic leaders of the 117th Congress, including most especially then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

First question: Why did Pelosi, then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) pressure the USCP leadership to go to extraordinary lengths to keep Byrd quiet?

“Not sure what makes Mike Byrd so special that he thinks he needed to be ‘taken care of’ by the Department. USCP should give every officer a $37k bonus or have Mike Byrd pay it all back,” USCP Union Chairman Gus Papathanasiou told Just The News.

THE ‘IMMOVABLE OBJECT’ DOGE MUST CONQUER: Having covered waste, fraud and abuse for three decades, I know full well why President-elect Donald Trump calls the Elon Musk/Vivek Ramaswamy DOGE initiative the biggest challenge since “the Manhattan Project.” My latest Special Report for The Epoch Times lays it out in great detail today.

DON’T EXPECT THANKSGIVING FACTS FROM AXIOS: Just Facts illustrates yet another example of why two-thirds of Americans don’t trust journalists.

LEFT BASHING BLUE COLLARS ISN’T NEW: Go back to the 1960s and the “New” Left and there you find Neo-Marxist intellectual Herbert Marcuse. He basically told his comrades to stop looking to the downtrodden working class to lead the Revolution.

Instead, Richard Pollock writes in his latest column, Marcuse pointed to the newly emerging class of college-educated upper middle class twit-brains we know today as Harris/Sanders/AOC enthusiasts.

But don’t assume things will remain as they are, with elitists like Alex Baldwin and Sharon Stone driving every last working class stiff out of the Democratic Party. Pollock tells us there a few lonely voices on the Left who see this path as a huge mistake.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR: Have you noticed it? Something different in the air since November 5. People smiling more, happier. It’s called optimism, something that became a rare commodity between 2021 and this year’s elections.

Issues & Insights (I&I) certainly noticed and they present multiple measures demonstrating it’s not our imagination. To cite but one such example, I&I points out that “the RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index jumped 13.4 percent in November to 53.2, the highest in more than three years. Anything over 50 indicates a positive for optimism, and this is the first time the index has been positive since September 2021.

IMPOUNDMENT FACTS THAT CAN’T DOGE’D: Democrats and their Mainstream Media allies are in full cry against the prospect of Donald Trump reviving the presidential practice of “impoundment.” To hear them tell it, no prior chief executive, except possibly that previous evil one, Nixon, ever refused to spend money appropriated by Congress.

Don’t believe that nonsense for a second. As Issues & Insights (I&I) puts it, “while the Constitution forbids the president from spending more money than Congress has appropriated, there’s nothing in the Constitution that forbids the president from spending less. And lo and behold, the nation survived and thrived for nearly 200 years while the president had this authority.”

OH, THE OUTRAGE! THEY CAST A JEW TO PLAY MARY!!! The absurd lengths to which anti-semites go to find justifications for their rotten malice are on full display in the gathering protests of the coming Netflix film about the Mother of Jesus. Rod Dreher documents demented stench today on The Free Press.

LINCOLN’S THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION: The Tapscotts, then of Scottsville, Va., were, like the nation, deeply divided when the Civil War came in 1861. Some of them fought for the North, more for the South. And yet look how far we as a nation have come in the decades since the war.

Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation of Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday is a remarkable document considering the circumstances surrounding its issuance. The battlefields were strewn with the dead and everywhere the issue of the war remained unresolved, stalemated even. But Lincoln pointed Americans to the blessings we enjoyed even in such a hellish midst.

A century and more later, Ronald Reagan often talked of America as the City on the Hill. It’s become increasingly difficult in the present times to recall how deeply felt that vision was and could be again. Take a few moments today and share Lincoln’s Proclamation with family and friends.

FOUR AD FIRMS GOT RICH ON HARRIS LOSS: Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr dug into the FEC reports and found four ad firms that collectively received almost $600 million of the $1 billion+ raised by Vice-President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

“The latest available FEC data show the Harris campaign exceeded $880 million in total spending as of October 16, though that number is expected to balloon to $1.5 billion after the Harris campaign files its post-election FEC report on December 5,” Kerr reports.

“Seventy percent of the campaign’s known total spending flowed through four firms: Media Buying & Analytics, Gambit Strategies, Bully Pulpit Interactive, and Dupont Circle Strategies.

“Together, these four Democratic firms were largely responsible for distributing Harris’s campaign messaging across the nation—an effort that ultimately saw Harris lose all seven swing states and the popular vote but directed huge sums of donor money the firms’ way.”

Perhaps as Harris sits on the beach in Hawaii contemplating her campaign and why she lost, the word “refund” may well keep recurring in her mind regarding those four firms.

MIXED REVIEWS FOR DOGE AMONG HILL AIDES: One might expect a roughly 50-50 split among Republican and Democrat congressional aides in terms of their view of the forthcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to be headed by Elon Musk and Vivik Ramaswamy.

But the latest Capitol Pulse CNCT informal survey finds a big split, with Senior GOP policy aides very much in favor, but the younger ones not so much. Not surprisingly, opposition among Democratic aides was all but unanimous.

The age split is the reverse of what might typically be expected among GOP Hill staffers, with the “cooler heads” of the older aides cautioning about taking a $2 Trillion spending cut leap and younger aides pushing for radical action now.

WISE ADVICE FOR TRUMPERS FROM A REAGAN VETERAN: Donald Devine served for more than four years as “Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword” at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

That’s the federal agency that manages the career civil service. It’s not a cabinet-level position, but OPM can be among the two or three most powerful tools for a president intent on fixing things rather than merely talking about them.

Devine led the team of Reagan appointees at OPM (of which, yes, I was proudly one) that eliminated more than 100,000 unnecessary government jobs, reduced the cost of civil service health benefits while expanding the choices available, made pay dependent upon job performance for career workers, increased accountability among career senior executives, and changed federal retirement from a defined benefit program with an unfunded liability of more than $560 billion to a defined contribution program.

Achieving those goals required daily hand-to-hand political combat with the Mainstream Media, Democrats who controlled Congress and federal employee unions and professional associations. But Devine had Reagan’s support, he stood fast and fought the hard fights, and won most of them. The first major steps toward fundamental reform of the workforce were accomplished.

These matters are even more central in the Washington about to enter the second Trump era. The career bureaucracy is the foundation of the Administrative State that has been weaponized by the Left and turned the federal government into a sprawling behemoth the Founders would instantly recognize as an enemy of individual liberty and republican governance. Trump didn’t appreciate how important personnel was in his first term. There are signs today that Trump learned some hard lessons in that regard and is proceeding accordingly.

The incoming Chief Executive, his White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles (with whom I worked for a time in the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign), and all of his principal assistants would do well to sit down and carefully read Devine’s latest contribution to The American Spectator, “Controversial Appointees, Clay Pigeons, and Successful Government Politics.”

And Wiles and Stephen Miller in particular will find much wise insight and practical smarts about how to manage political bureaucracies at every level of the federal establishment in Devine’s other book of note in these matters – “Political Management of the Bureaucracy: A Guide to Reform and Control.”

FEDS SPENT $273 MILLION RESEARCHING ‘MISINFORMATION:’ Another way of describing what Open the Books found in their analysis of federal grants in which the word “misinformation” appears at least once would be “laying censorship groundwork.” It’s my latest PJMedia column.

HE ‘KILLED’ ZACHARIAH, THEN MET HIM 25 YEARS LATER: It’s usually not a good idea to give away the ending of something you are encouraging folks to watch, but this HillFaith post today is simply amazing.

MEET THE FORGOTTEN AUTHOR OF ‘WOKE:’ Richard Pollock is absolutely essential reading whenever he digs into the history of the New and Far-Left movements in this country since the 1960s. He knows this history because he was an insider participant in it for many years before recognizing the Right reality.

In his latest Substack column, Pollock reminds us of the crucial role of the Marxist Professor Herbert Marcuse in developing the theoretical background for what developed into the oppressive contemporary Wokeness.

“One of Marcuse’s most virulent and dangerous legacies was his ardent advocacy for censorship in America, which I describe in detail below. His dark sentiments regrettably influenced a whole generation of progressives who today largely lead our mainstream media, our movie studios, publishing houses, ad agencies and our educational institutions. We now can see Marcuse’s ugly theories and handiwork in real time in America,” Pollock explains in his latest Substack.

This Pollock contribution is longer than usual but then he has so much knowledge and insight to share on these topics because, as he informs us, he knows “a bit about Marcuse because I was a New Left activist and was exposed to Marxist ideas as the roommate with the late Rennie Davis, one of the Chicago 8 defendants.

“I became friends with such radicals as Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman. In the 1970’s, I also participated in a number Marxist-Leninist study groups in Washington, D.C. In fact, I once was in a Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse Tung study group. Yes, they existed!”

PROMOTED FROM LATE YESTERDAY