LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Manafort Plea Deal Broken and Much, More More. “Yeah, why am I skeptical that Manafort had any info on treasonous Trump campaign collusion with RUSSIA? According to Mueller, ‘Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters.’ We don’t know what Manafort lied about yet, that will be revealed before sentencing.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Venezuela Pays Miner $425 Million in Move to Safeguard Citgo.

Venezuela made an partial payment of a settlement designed to resolve a $1.2 billion arbitration award to a bankrupt Canadian gold miner that’s laying claim to the assets of the parent of refiner Citgo Holding Inc. if it’s not paid in full.

Crystallex International Corp. received $425 million in November, and will suspend all enforcement efforts until at least early next year, according to Canadian court documents. Venezuela is now required to pay the remaining balance in installments by early 2021, and deliver an “acceptable security interest” or collateral to ensure payments its outstanding obligations, according to the documents.

The payment helps Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA hold onto Citgo Holding Inc. for the time being, even as the line of creditors that could lay their hands on the U.S. refiner grows.

I’m very curious about where they got the cash.

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Chile sends planeload of Haitians home, with return stop for Chileans in Venezuela.

MEGAN FOX: Media Orgasmic Over Pitiful Photograph of Woman with Children Storming the U.S. Border. “I have a few questions, like why are those kids half-naked and in diapers?”

WELL, GOOD: With rising US pressure, Iran worries about losing ground in Iraq.

The United States is trying to pressure Iraq on all levels to distance itself from Iran and curb Iranian influence in the country. It also gave Iraq 45 days to stop importing gas and electricity from Iran. Iraqi officials revealed to Reuters that Iraq plans on submitting a proposal to the United States to continue importing gas and energy supplies in exchange for medication and foodstuff.

In line with US pressure and sanctions, Iraqi Minister of Oil Thaer al-Ghadban asserted during his first press conference that Iraq will put its national interest first in regards to sanctions on Iran. He said Iraq will stop exporting oil from Kirkuk fields to Iran, estimated at less than 30,000 barrels a day.

Iraq is also gradually looking to Turkey to bridge the gap stemming from reducing its dealings with Iran.

Keep up the pressure. Although I can’t help thinking that if Bush had given Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a well-earned bloody nose back in 2004 or ’05, when they started blowing up US troops in Iraq, there’d be a lot less Iranian influence everywhere today. Of course, you could say something similar about every American President going back to Carter.

BILL SCHER: The Pathetic Pelosi Putsch.

All year, Rep. Seth Moulton has insisted it was time for a “new generation of leadership” who would put “people over politics.” The Massachusetts Democrat created the Serve America PAC to endorse candidates he felt fit that bill, starting with military veterans like himself, then broadening to other “service-driven leaders.” He not only raised $8 million for the people he endorsed, he also forged relationships with them by stumping in their districts and providing strategic counsel.

Moulton’s electoral agenda for the midterms ran alongside his long-standing goal of ousting Nancy Pelosi from the House Democratic leadership. He kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism throughout the year, and just before the election, he dismissed the idea of Pelosi serving a few more years as a “transitional speaker” if Democrats won the House. And when 20 of his candidates won, within hours he was burning up the phone lines to assemble his network of candidates, organize a revolt and block Pelosi’s reclamation of the gavel. Two days after the election, Moulton declared that his crew was committed to voting against Pelosi on the House floor, where only a handful of renegade Democrats would be needed to deny her a winning majority. The following week, he said he was “100 percent confident” he had the votes, and Pelosi’s time was up.

And yet she’s still here.

All is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen.

Well, me and pretty much everybody else.

JACK SHAFER: The Conservative Revolt Against Twitter. “Wake me up when this sad little uprising is over.”

“Twitter’s gone crazy banning people on the right, so I’ve deactivated my Twitter account,” he wrote in his Instapundit blog on Sunday night. Calling Twitter “the most socially destructive of the various platforms,” Reynolds accused the “crappy SJW types” – social justice warriors – who run it of breaking promises to users and stifling free speech. “So I decided to suspend them, as they are suspending others,” Reynold wrote.

Seeing as we don’t yet know why Twitter banned Kelly, there is some murk to the dispute. But no matter what the underlying cause, the ban gives conservatives cause to believe that Twitter has singled them out for eviction. Earlier this month, Twitter gave the permanent boot to Laura Loomer, a conservative writer and agent provocateur. Other conservatives or far-right figures Twitter has banned or suspended include Roger Stone, Chuck Johnson, “Sabo,” Milo Yiannopoulos, James Allsup, Richard Spencer, David Duke, “Baked Alaska,” Robert Stacy McCain, Candace Owens, David Clarke, Gavin McInnes and James Woods. In an August piece in the Federalist, Kelly predicted that the banishment of Alex Jones from Facebook presaged the de-conservatization of social media. “They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they’re coming for you,” Kelly wrote.

Kelly’s slippery slope argument sounds ominous, but how much truth is there to it? My Twitter experience account would say otherwise.

Here’s a question Shafer should have asked early on, and which might have resulted in a much different piece: Why don’t we know why Twitter banned Kelly?

Or as Ben Domenech wrote last night in a multipart tweet:

Jack Shafer’s piece unintentionally illustrates why his suggestion for conservatives on Twitter utterly misses the point.

Shafer suggests conservatives ought to “Drive Twitter insane by playing by their rules, expressing yourself right up to the boundary-line of the company’s standards in a way that will invite inspection and self-criticism of those standards.” That is exactly what Jesse Kelly did! We know that because in the two years since he was verified he received not a single suspension or even a warning. Jesse Kelly engaged in iconoclasm and teased without threatening people or violating any rules. If he had, Twitter would’ve gone after him for it. Instead, his lack of a clear violation clearly caused frustration – so at the end of the day, they just pulled the plug on him, permanently, without justifying it under any rule or citing any activity whatsoever.

That is because of something Shafer either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to acknowledge: that for Twitter, there are no rules.

My take is that Shafer was in such a hurry to condemn Glenn’s self-removal from Twitter as “sad,” that he missed the real story.

Or if you’d like an even shorter take on Shafer’s latest for Politico: Fake news.

YES/NO/MAYBE: Can the iPad Pro Replace Your Laptop?

After a week with one I put my MacBook up for sale on eBay, but that definitely isn’t for everyone, or even for very many — yet.

GOOD LORD: Video shows driver trying to run over Jews near Los Angeles synagogue. “The driver, who has been identified as 32-year-old Mohammed Mohammed, reversed and tried to hit them again, according to the the local outlet.”

ASHE SCHOW: Virginia City That Gave Millions To Amazon Now Hassling Restaurant Over Mural.

A spokeswoman for the Department, Helen Duong, told Arlington news outlet ARLnow that zoning inspectors “concluded that the artwork is considered a sign under Arlington County’s zoning ordinance because the artwork relates to the advertisement of a business and its services.”

This means, according to ARLnow, that Goody’s had to get a permit before painting the mural. Duong told the outlet that the restaurant “did not receive prior approvals from the county.” She also said the County has so far only issued the restaurant a “courtesy notice” about the mural, which included how Goody’s could square itself with Arlington officials (which no doubt includes some form of payment to the County).

Arlnow spoke to Glenda Alvarez, who owns Goody’s. Alvarez says, as of November 20, that she had not sought county approval for the mural yet and did not know she needed a permit before adding the mural. She said she commissioned the painting because the outside of her restaurant “was not attractive enough.”

“We just wanted to get a little more attention from people walking by,” she said.

Arlington has previously gone after Wag More Dogs, a dog daycare that painted a mural of puppies chasing bones on the side of its wall back in 2010. As with Goody’s, Wag More Dogs was found to have violated Arlington’s onerous “sign” requirements because the dogs were considered an advertisement for the business. A self-service dog wash across the street was allowed to keep commissioned graffiti on its walls because it did not contain any references to dogs.

Advertising is OK so long as you don’t reveal what you’re advertising?

THEY DO EXIST: Ten Great IPAs for Craft Beer Lovers.

MICHAEL LEDEEN: The Anti-American Americans. “So here we are, at Thanksgiving, surrounded by a crowd of arrogant, ignorant, self-proclaimed superior people who proclaim, as was once declared about Vietnam, that the only way to save the country is to destroy it. That the European welfare state is the proper model for us, and that our electoral choices are mostly wrong. And evil. The first anti-American president put it bluntly in an interview with with one of his cronies, saying Americans are ‘confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.’ In Obama’s view, we’re unworthy of him and his ruling class.”

Read the whole thing.

OUCH: GM to slash jobs and production as U.S. sedan sales sink.

GM plans to halt production next year at three assembly plants: Lordstown, Ohio; Hamtramck, Michigan; and Oshawa, Ontario. It will also stop building several models now assembled at those plants, including the Chevrolet Cruze, the Cadillac CT6 and the Buick LaCrosse. The Cruze compact car will be discontinued in the U.S. market in 2019.

Plants in Baltimore, Maryland, and Warren, Michigan, assembling powertrain components will have no products assigned to them after 2019 and are at risk of closure, GM said. It will also close two unidentified factories outside North America.

“We are right-sizing capacity for the realities of the marketplace,” Chief Executive Mary Barra said, adding that GM will double resources dedicated to electric and self-driving vehicles over the next two years.

Cost pressures on GM and other automakers and suppliers have increased as demand has waned for traditional sedans.

It looks like Ford was ahead of the curve.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING SEEN: Why Advanced Stealth is Still “Very Hard to Hit.”

“Static radar can help detect low observability aircraft, and acquire it. Now, an intercept requires a smaller aperture. When you transfer from acquisition to the weapons system you will need at long ranges, that dramatically reduces the ability for intercept. Detection is not what it is all about, you have an entire kill chain needed to eliminate a low-observable threat,” Ret. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Warrior Maven in an interview.

Deptula explained that moving beyond a ground based radar with a roughly 10-meter aperture to a 6-inch signal from a smaller “engagement” radar presents substantial challenges for attackers.

“Even if a radar can detect, I now have to track, and when I engage I will have to shoot a missile using much smaller detection. Also, a fusing mechanism can be affected by low observability technology,” Deputla said. “At every level, low observability can help.”

Nonetheless, Air Force developers are pursuing a new generation of stealth technology with a sense of urgency, in light of rapid global modernization of new Russian and Chinese-built attack systems.

Faster, please — you want to stay far enough ahead of the Other Guy that war never looks like an attractive option to him.

EVERY BUBBLE POPS: Desperate Homebuilders Offering $100,000 Discounts, Free Vacations Amid Cooling Market.

ANY OF IT: What part of “shall not be infringed” do these tireless busybodies not understand?

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Venezuelan Ex-Treasurer Admits He Took $1 Billion in Bribes.

In a statement, the U.S. Justice Department said Alejandro Andrade pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering under seal last December in federal court in Miami. The statement said that Mr. Andrade, a former bodyguard for the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, accepted millions of dollars in bribes from Raúl Gorrín, the president of Globovision, a Venezuelan pro-government television channel, to allow him and others to make foreign-currency transactions at favorable rates. An indictment of Mr. Gorrín on charges of money laundering and bribery was unsealed Monday in Miami.

Lawyers for Mr. Andrade and for Mr. Gorrín didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Andrade was Venezuela’s treasurer between 2007 and 2010. After leaving the government, he moved to Florida, where he owns a large estate and horse stables. As part of his plea agreement, Mr. Andrade agreed to a forfeiture money judgment of $1 billion and all assets, including real estate, vehicles, horses, watches, aircraft and bank accounts.

It’s good to be the nomenklatura — until you have to flee the hellhole you helped create, and get busted by a decent country where the rule of law mostly holds.

YOU DON’T SAY: Those Of The Migrant Caravan Attempting To Storm The US Border Aren’t Asylum Seekers.

CHANGE? Congress to make determination on F-35s for Turkey.

SUNSHINE IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Gowdy Says to Avoid ‘carnival’ by taping Comey interview for public to see.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Fed Up Gamers Report Intrusive Sex Workers to the IRS for Tax Evasion.

It seems that THOTs on Snapchat and other platforms are using PayPal to charge men to see “premium snaps,” which are nudes or pornography. It’s also possible that these ladies of social media are not reporting their earnings to the IRS. In an effort that can only be described as hilarious, the anons at 4chan have launched a full-scale war on THOTs across all platforms. Women who fish for lonely and susceptible beta boys are the bane of many gamers, whose platforms are being taken over by the sex trollers. These women solicit in male-dominated platforms and many of the men who use the platforms are sick of it.

Bonus: “In a surprising twist, the #ThotAudit also serves the purpose of spreading the truth that taxation is theft.”

Added bonus: “4chan vs the Cam Girls” would make an excellent b-movie title.

STAY THIRSTY, MY FRIEND: ‘Most Interesting Man in the World’ Slams Trump, Misses Obama: ‘I Love the Guy.’

ANY DAY NOW: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We’re All Going To Die From Climate Change.

The report seems extreme on its face, and critics were quick to point out that the computer models used to predict the “thousands” of deaths may be outdated, but leftists, including Ocasio-Cortez, soaked up the report without question, inciting mass panic.

“People are going to die if we don’t start addressing climate change ASAP,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “It’s not enough to think it’s ‘important.’ We must make it urgent. That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, & why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy.”

The U.S. Global Change Research Program makes no recommendations on how to curb “climate change,” but it’s quite clear that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the only way to make real in-roads on the subject is to enact a massive, socialistic environmentally focused legislative package, using taxation and other “incentives” to help Americans cut down on fossil fuel usage, while pouring millions into “green jobs” and “alternative energy.”

The newly elected, far-left, Congresswoman-elect wants to vastly increase the scope, power, and expensive of government on flimsy pretext? I did not see that coming.

OH: Internal documents Facebook has fought to keep private obtained by UK Parliament.

Six4Three, which has been engaged in a yearslong legal battle with Facebook, were the makers of “Pikini,” a controversial app that allowed users to find pictures of their friends wearing bikinis.

The app did not breach Facebook’s terms and conditions when it was released in 2013. But in 2015 Facebook changed its policies about how it shared information about its users with third-party app developers such as those behind Pikini.

Prior to the change, Pikini and other app developers were able to access information not only about their users, but also about their users’ Facebook friends, including users’ friends’ photos.

When Facebook restricted access to friend data, it destroyed Pikini’s businesses, Six4Three alleges.

While a crude app that searched out bikini photos, and which shut down years ago, might not be noteworthy on its own, the fact that Six4Three has access to internal Facebook documents — currently under court seal — is.

Facebook ought to know better than to trust sensitive information to Facebook.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Amnesty Gone Wild and Much, Much More. “Mexico says it will deport the 500+ invaders who tried to breach the US-Mexico border. Good, try breaching a border in another country and see what happens to you. After you land in De Gaulle or Heathrow airports and just run right past customs and see if they let you into their country once they catch you and lay you flat.”