FEDERAL REGISTER SWAMPED BY MANDATE OPPONENTS: Proposed federal regulations are required to be published in the Federal Register in order to give the public an opportunity to express their approval. or disapproval. Most such postings are on obscure issues and so get a dozen or maybe 100 comments.

Once in a while, though, a rule is proposed that sparks a public outcry. Such is the case with His Fraudulency’s OSHA-enforced vaccine mandate on private businesses. More than 68,000 mostly negative comments were received by the Federal Register by Tuesday. By contrast, a related proposed rule that was published in July received less than 500 comments, according to Rachel Glaszer of the Heritage Foundation.

A HINT OF WHAT TO EXPECT FROM GOP HOUSE: Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) has introduced a bill requiring congressional witnesses to disclose foreign contributions to their employers. Universities and think tanks receiving Chinese funding are the primary targets, but other nations, notably in the Middle East, are also big donors to well-known foundations.

“The China-United States Exchange Foundation, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, has in recent years donated millions of dollars to the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, the Carter Center, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. CIA director William Burns, the former president of Carnegie, testified this year that he cut ties with the Exchange Foundation because of its efforts to malignly influence American policymakers,” according to The Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross.

THE STORY THAT JUST WON’T DIE: The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland claims Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s recent letter to state election officials illustrates why there remain millions of Americans convinced that the 2020 presidential election was rotten. His Fraudulency will never be rid of this scarlet letter.

GALLOPING INSANITY DOWN UNDER: Australia is now moving Covid-positive individuals in the Northern Territory to quarantine “camps,” reports Jack Phillips of The Epoch Times. Crikey!

YES, DEFINITIONS DO MATTER: Perhaps especially in the realms of politics and religion, definitions of key terms can make all the difference. To cite just one example, AOC and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) both talk a lot about “freedom,” but they may have absolutely nothing in common in terms of what they each mean by that word. Shane Morris of the Colson Center elaborates on the issue in the latest “What Would You Say” video. And if you prefer to read the transcript, the link is at the end of the post.

ANTI-MASK LEAGUE OF SAN FRANCISCO: Yes, such a group is not a fiction, though it existed years ago. Specifically, during the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19. Capital Research Center’s (CRC) Michael Watson points to the rapid manner in which San Francisco authorities reversed their mask mandate, as part of his assessment of the significance of the forthcoming “Meta Platforms.”

LEFT HAS ONLY TWO ARGUMENTS ON RITTENHOUSE: Jed Babbin explains the blinders that render these people immune to facts: The only reasons the young man was acquitted are because the system is racist and because America needs stricter gun control laws.

BE WORRIED, BE VERY WORRIED IF YOU WORK FOR CNN: Sounds like the new owner is in no mood for more of what has put CNN’s ratings in the toilet. “Actual journalists,” what a concept! Good for him and for free market competition.

INMATES IN CHARGE AT STATE: Nigeria, which is being torn apart by Islamic radicals who ruthlessly and brutally murder Christian pastors and congregants on a daily basis, is no longer on the State Department’s list of “Countries of Particular Concern,” reports Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI).

“Christians living in Nigeria face some of the worst acts of persecution. Millions of people have fled devastating violence and have become internally displaced. As a result of the violence, 13,000 churches have been closed or destroyed altogether,” according to ADFI.

“Many victims have been kidnapped, raped, forcibly converted or married, or sold into slavery. Reports show that at least 17 Christians were killed every day in the first half of 2021 alone.”

Among other things, removing Nigeria from that list cleared the way for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to hand $2.1 billion in new aid to the Nigerian regime that allows, and in many respects, assists the insurgents in their bloody attacks. It’s not like Blinken doesn’t know these facts because he was told in a private meeting by a pastor, according to The Epoch Times.

EXPLAIN THIS: HillFaith has 10 embarrassing facts about Jesus that you probably don’t know. And since it’s Thanksgiving week, let’s all be thankful we can still read Instapundit without fear of official retribution.

CALIFORNIA, WHERE THE FUTURE STARTS: HT to Arod_Lives44:

SANITY SIGHTED AT NYTIMES: Hard to believe as it surely is, Issues & Insights detects a concrete sign that sanity might actually be creeping back in at the Old Biased Lady. Guess who she’s holding accountable for the roaring inflation?

“The fact that the Times, along with others in the mainstream media, admits that inflation is a problem is in itself a noteworthy development, since for months it insisted that it was just a data anomaly – one that Republicans were trying to exploit for political gain.

“Now, with prices for many common household goods having gone up by double digits over the past few months and no end in sight for the trend, the inflation story is impossible to ignore.

“But the fact that any one of these ‘news’ outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out ‘fact checks’ that aggressively slapped down any such claim.”

Sightings of Antifa droves heading toward the Times can be expected shortly.

WHOA! NOT THE ANSWER SHE EXPECTED: Margaret Hoover of PBS interviews the son of a former Mao intimate and asks him if Donald Trump is an “authoritarian.” The answer she gets from Ai Weiwei is a priceless. Thanks to Jeff Dunetz of The Lid.

A TIME FOR CHOOSING IN 2023: If Republicans regain a Hill majority in 2022, 2023 will be what Reagan called “a time for choosing” between a constitutional republic and an elitist monocracy. Our choice.

CHINA’S LEADERS LOOK AT EACH OTHER AND SHAKE THEIR HEADS IN AMAZEMENT: There is Hunter Biden, and now it’s Neil Bush doing business with a Chinese contractor on the U.S. blacklist. Chuck Ross at Washington Free Beacon has the report.

And in related news, Ross also reports the Chinese appear headed to getting a slice of His Fraudulency’s $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” pie, thanks to former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who, coincidentally no doubt, is Biden’s new infrastructure czar as well as senior advisor to the United States China Heartland Association.

What does that group do? Among other things, it encourages business exchanges between China and 20 U.S. states. Lenin was right about the capitalists selling the rope the communists use to hang them.

SENSE AND NONSENSE ON THE ‘TAX GAP:’ Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute digs into the $80 billion extra for the IRS in His Fraudulency’s Build Back Better (BBB) spending plan and finds — surprise! — that they aren’t telling us the truth about that “tax gap.”

“The U.S. tax gap is fairly low by international standards. The official net federal tax gap of $381 billion is 2.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). One pro‐​enforcement group puts the gap at 2.5 percent of GDP. If we add in an estimated state‐​local tax gap, then the total U.S. gap would be about 3.9 percent of GDP. By comparison, this study estimated that the average tax gap in the European Union (EU) is 5.6 percent of GDP, while this study found that the average EU tax gap is 10.7 percent of GDP,” Edwards writes.

And did you know Biden’s BBB repeals an important requirement that an IRS analyst who wants to assess the agency’s steep under-payment penalty against a taxpayer must first get a sign-off from a superior?

Edwards has much more. No wonder Biden, Yellen, Schumer, Pelosi, et. al. aren’t talking much about this part of the BBB.

NOT QUITE MAN BITES DOG: More like Philosopher Bites Conventional Wisdom. William Lane Craig is one of the “50 most influential philosophers” in the world, and he says it is indeed quite possible to know God. Something to think about as the holiday season approaches.

WORST POSSIBLE TIME, OF COURSE: His Fraudulency’s vaccine mandate for federal workers could leave the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) without hundreds of much-needed agents, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

BIDEN AI ACTIVIST AT FTC: Never heard of Meredith Whitaker? Neither have 99 percent of the rest of us, but she illustrates the enduring truth of the Reagan Era maxim: “Personnel is policy.” How so? Let me count the ways.

Whitaker announced Friday, according to Santi Ruiz of the Washington Free Beacon, that she is headed to the FTC as a “senior advisor” on Artificial Intelligence (AI). But guess what, AI is not Whitaker’s forte. She got the boot at Google, Ruiz reports, because:

“Although Whittaker has presented herself as an expert in artificial intelligence ethics, some former colleagues have accused her of inflating her credentials, noting that she has no formal training in the field and has done no peer-reviewed research. One manager described her impact inside Google as ‘nonexistent in the AI bias space, if not negative’ and said that ‘there is not a lot of value’ in the work she touted.”

No matter as Whitaker shares other Biden FTCers “obsession” with using anti-trust policy to advance the far-left agenda. Personnel is policy. Democrats understand this. Trump didn’t, neither do many Washington GOPers, still, after all these years.

HERE COME AL GORE’S CLIMATE SPIES IN THE SKY: The former Veep says he and his Climate Trace compatriots are a year away from being everywhere, as reported by  Jeff Dunetz at The Lid, quoting an MSDNC interview with Andrea Mitchell:

“We get data consistently from 300 existing satellites, more than 11,000 ground-based, air-based, sea-based sensors, multiple internet data streams and using artificial intelligence,” Gore explained.

“All that information is combined, visible light, infrared, all of the other information that is brought in, and we can now accurately determine where the greenhouse gas emissions are coming from.

“And next year we’ll have it down to the level of every single power plant, refinery, every large ship, every plane, every waste dump, and we’ll have the identities of the people who are responsible for each of those greenhouse gas emission streams.”

You know what comes next, right?

“If investors or governments, or civil society activists want to hold them responsible, they will have the information upon which to base their action and holding them responsible.” Just like the KGB’s neighborhood informants, only much more sophisticated.

UPDATE: Apologies, my friends, for failing to include the link when this post first went live. It’s there now.

NO MORE TALKING THE TALK BUT NOT WALKING IT ON SCHOOL CHOICE, GOP: Republicans have been talking about school choice for decades, but, at least at the federal level, such talk is cheap and little has changed.

Writing in The Federalist, Jonathan Tobin looks at the Virginia election of 2021 and concludes it was “a clarion call for Republicans to understand that an education platform that includes choice is a political winner, not the afterthought it has largely been for the party these past 20 years. As former Obama aide Stephanie Cutter said after the Virginia vote, the greatest danger for Democrats is for Republicans to become the ‘party of the parents.’ She’s right.”

Republicans, are you listening?

KRISTALLNACHT 83 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jeff Dunetz at The Lid reminds us that Kristallnacht was the public launch of the Holocaust. One cannot help but wonder if this is where Cancel Culture leads.

CHECK OUT JOB BOARD FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE FREEDOM: Andrew Crapuchettes lost his job as CEO of a highly profitable tech firm because of his religious views. So he went out and started RedBalloon.work, a job board for connecting “employers who value freedom with employees who value it too.”

The web site adds that “we envision a world beyond cancel culture, where employees are free to work… without fear that they will find themselves on the wrong side of their employer’s politics. That’s it. No agendas, politics, or drama. Just work. Interested? Let’s create that world together.”

What a concept, a world where free people can work freely!

MAYBE THERE’S YET HOPE FOR THE ‘FIRST BRANCH:’ Congress was intended by the Founders to be the center of the federal government. They gave it all the “ultimate weapons” in the Constitution in any showdown with either of the other two branches.

But for decades, Congress under majorities of both political parties has given away its authority and delegated prerogatives to the unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy. Along the way, the idea of congressional oversight became little more than grandstanding for the cameras.

Now perhaps there is hope for a revival. It’s got to start somewhere, so why not with “the investigative arm of Congress,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

TYRANTS HATE TRUTH-TELLERS: And so they arrest them, throw them in jail, convict them in kangaroo courts, and punish them for the crime of telling the truth. Pray for Epoch Times Nigerian reporter Luka Binniyat.