DAVID STEINBERG: To Fix the White House Press Briefing, Spicer Should Think ‘Art of the Deal’

SCRUTINY: Free Beacon Barred From Covering Jon Ossoff Campaign Event.

Numerous reporters gathered inside the campaign office for Ossoff’s speech, during which he said that “politics does not have to be about … division,” according to the Associated Press, one of the outlets granted access to the event.

It is unclear whether any other outlets were restricted from covering the event. Ossoff’s campaign declined to answer whether any other outlets had been barred.

The Ossoff campaign’s decision to restrict press access to its event has been criticized widely, including by reporters from CNN, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times. Ben Jacobs of the Guardian, who ended up in a physical altercation with a Republican candidate on the eve of last month’s special election in Montana, was also critical of the decision.

Ossoff isn’t very good at this stuff, and I get the feeling that all the money in the world — or at least California — won’t be quite enough to put him over the top.

NBC NEWS: Once Champions of Sunlight, GOP Pens Health Care Plan In the Dark.

Funny, but I can’t recall anyone at NBC News ever crediting the GOP with being “champions of sunlight” before now. Although to be fair, I might be thinking of the wrong NBC News.

JIM GERAGHTY: A Brutal North Korean Crime That Must Not Be Forgotten.

The reason you’ll see adults referring to Warmbier as a ‘kid’ is because most of us over 21 look back at our 21st year and marvel at everything we thought we knew and everything we later realized we still had to learn. We had adult bodies but not necessarily adult judgment. Plenty of us made foolish decisions at age 21 or a little before or a little after, but none of those foolish decisions warranted such pain and death.

Warmbier’s guilt cannot be taken for granted, considering what we know of the arbitrary North Korean justice system. The regime sentenced him to fifteen years hard labor. His confession was beaten out of him; he claimed that he stole the banner on behalf of the United States government. The Obama administration had no qualms about accusing the North Korean regime of arresting Warmbier for political purposes, in other words, as a negotiating pawn.

The Obama Administration certainly seemed to have qualms about actually doing anything for Warmbier.

PRIVACY: EU may outlaw the kind of backdoor access the FBI wanted Apple to create for iPhones.

FEDERALISM: Booker, Paul Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Shield Marijuana States from DOJ. ‘For far too long the federal government has overstepped the boundaries of common sense, fiscal prudence.’

DAVID BROOKS: Let’s Not Get Carried Away.

I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces “raising serious questions” (as we say in the scandal business) about the nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in Arkansas.

Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.

In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.

In this case, it would seem that where there’s smoke, there’s a Democrat-Media Complex blowing it up into places.

FILL ‘ER UP? Fattened, Genetically Engineered Algae Might Fuel the Future.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Number Of Conservative Events Disrupted By Protestors Has Tripled Since Trump’s Election.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! In another transparent attempt to distract the American people from his treasonous collusion with the Russian government, the Trump administration today announced new sanctions on Russia and on Ukrainian separatists.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Architecture of Regime Change.

The problem with the election of President Donald J. Trump was not just that he presented a roadblock to an ongoing progressive revolution. Instead, unlike recent Republican presidential nominees, he was indifferent to the cultural and political restraints on conservative pushback — ironic given how checkered Trump’s own prior conservative credentials are. Trump brawled in a way McCain or Romney did not. He certainly did not prefer losing nobly to winning ugly.

Even more ominously, Trump found a seam in the supposedly invincible new progressive electoral paradigm of Barack Obama. He then blew it apart — by showing the nation that Obama’s identity-politics voting bloc was not transferrable to most other Democratic candidates, while the downside of his polarization of the now proverbial clingers most assuredly was. To her regret, Hillary Clinton learned that paradox when the deplorables and irredeemables of the formerly blue-wall states rose up to cost her the presidency.

And now?

We are witnessing a desperate putsch to remove Trump before he can do any more damage to the Obama project. Political, journalistic, and cultural elites of a progressive coastal culture aim at destroying the Trump presidency before it can finish its full four-year term.

Read the whole thing.

DEVIN NUNES: ‘We Have to Stop Chasing Russian Ghosts Around the Closet and Actually Get to Real Work!’

Russiagate is a huge triple lay for the Democrat-Media Complex — deflecting from Hillary’s humiliation, keeping the GOP Congress tied up in knots, and helping to delegitimize the Trump Administration.

Why would they let up now?

OBSTRUCTION: Democrats to halt Senate business over Obamacare repeal.

As I recall, the Democratic Senate majority pulled out all the stops to run roughshod over the GOP minority to pass ObamaCare in 2009-10.

LIFE UNDER THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: Take a look at this real-life tax horror story.

The taxpayers were a married joint-filing couple who owned a Michigan ticket sales company called Ultimate Presales. The husband started the business in 2006 and was the proprietor. The business involved buying and reselling tickets to sporting events, concerts, and other events. The business was intended by the taxpayers to be treated as a sole proprietorship for tax purposes. So all the federal income tax results from the business should have been reported on the taxpayers’ Form 1040. Simple!

Unfortunately, one of the taxpayers’ sons incorporated Ultimate Presales in the state of Michigan in July of 2006, using an online legal service. This was done without the parents’ permission and while the son was still a minor. Not surprisingly, the son was unaware of the important tax differences between a sole proprietorship and a corporation. When the corporate paperwork from the state arrived in the mail, the husband (the proprietor) did nothing to unwind the unintended incorporation. In fact, he compounded the son’s error by filing annual corporate reports for Ultimate Presales with the state of Michigan.

The taxpayers used their personal credit cards to pay for expenditures related to the business. All income from the business was deposited into the taxpayers’ personal bank accounts. For 2008 and 2009 (the tax years in question), the husband prepared and filed the couple’s federal income tax returns (Form 1040). The returns included Schedules C (Profit or Loss from Business) showing losses from Ultimate Presales of $41,610 for 2008 and $44,066 for 2009.

In 2010, the IRS issued the taxpayers a bill for unpaid taxes for 2008 and 2009. The notice reflected the disallowance of the taxpayers’ Schedule C losses on the grounds that Ultimate Presales was a separate incorporated taxpayer. The unhappy taxpayers took their case to the Tax Court, but the husband passed away before they got there.

Keep your paperwork in order, comrade.

BUT IT’S A DRY HEAT: Phoenix flights cancelled because it’s too hot for planes.

OH: Democrats Block Witnesses from Testifying in House Intel Probe.

House Democrats are continuing to block testimony from about a dozen witnesses who sought to appear before the intelligence oversight panel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Congressional officials said one of the key witnesses, former informal adviser to the Trump campaign Carter Page, was scheduled to testify at a closed hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

But Democrats on the committee blocked the testimony, asserting they needed more time to prepare.

“He’s the guy that many Democrats have been pointing to as the supposed mastermind and you would think they were interested hearing his story,” said one Capitol Hill official.

Mustn’t upset the Narrative, dear.

DEMAND, MEET SUPPLY: UPS to Add Delivery Surcharges for Black Friday, Christmas Orders.

The surcharges, announced Monday, are a shot across the bow for retailers, including giants such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Macy’s Inc., that have been ramping up their e-commerce businesses as they seek to offset declining foot traffic to shopping centers. It also adds to the costs of Amazon.com Inc. and other online players, which rely on UPS and rival FedEx Corp. to handle a surge in holiday shipments.

The fees will force retailers to decide over the next few months whether to raise shipping prices—something that is difficult to do when online shoppers are reluctant to pay shipping fees—increase the prices of goods or eat the extra costs themselves. Some may seek to avoid the surcharges by spreading holiday deals to other weeks during the season.

In an engineering laboratory near Seattle, an Amazon-branded drone smiles.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UPenn Students Study ‘Denial And Unconscious Bias’ in Summer Course.

A year of on-campus living at Penn costs an average of $72,584.

OIL WARS: The pipeline feeding billions to Putin … evading sanctions on the way.

Nord Stream 2 was concluded after the annexation of Crimea by Putin’s Russia, the war against Ukraine, and the shooting down over Ukraine of the MH17 passenger plane. European consumers will pay for the gas, and the money will go to the Putin regime, strengthening it. There is a high probability that, as usual, the Kremlin will spend the proceeds on propaganda, repression, new wars, and annexations – and Europe will be paying for it.

A Nord Stream representative brushed off these concerns, saying it was all “political speculation … we have already been working with Gazprom for 19 years and are going to continue mutually beneficial cooperation”.

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s energy sellout to the Kremlin is still paying dividends.

OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD: Can China Actually Restrain Kim Jong-Un?

As part of upholding a UN Security Council resolution, China announced in late February that it would no longer receive coal imports from North Korea. Over the course of March and April, China eliminated North Korean coal imports, depriving the North Korean regime of foreign currency. In 2016, these exports generated nearly $1.6 billion for North Korea and accounted for 40 percent of its trade revenue.

While China has upheld its commitment to the coal ban, it has purchased greater quantities of iron ore, low-end manufactured goods, and seafood – goods not strictly banned by the UN – resulting in an overall increase in trade revenue for North Korea compared to 2016. While this demonstrates commitment to UN-enforced international sanctions, it does not contribute to the ultimate goal of sustained economic pressure on the North Korean regime.

Beijing may also be dissuading Chinese businesses from contracting North Korean labor, a practice the UN identifies as exploitative, and it estimates 50,000 workers worldwide may generate as much as $1.5 billion for the state. As many as 19,000 of these workers are in China. According to the Nikkei Asian Review, beginning in March of last year, Chinese officials began informally telling firms in the provinces bordering North Korea not to contract North Korean workers. While this measure is useful to Beijing for registering “its displeasure with Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear testing,” as an informal policy, it could be easily reversed and does not demonstrate a strong commitment to the sustained pressure needed to demonstrate cooperation to the U.S. and to bring North Korea back to negotiations.

So despite public appearances, it’s really “Can but won’t.”

THE OLD GUARD: Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Sentinel Accidentally Stabbed. Carries on With Inspiring Composure.

Video at the link.

PARENTING: Camille Paglia Says Puberty Blockers for Transgender Kids Are ‘Criminal Violation of Human Rights’

A number of articles have appeared in recent years detailing the experiences of parents whose children undergo hormone blocking therapy in order to stop the onset of puberty. Slowing these changes, the thinking goes, gives the child more time to think about whether he or she truly wants to transition and can make any feelings of gender dysmorphia milder. One doctor compared a child who blocks puberty as starting from “a blank slate.”

Paglia disagrees. Citing the fact that the “long term effects [of puberty blockers] are unknown,” she told TWS‘s Jonathan Last that the transgender fad is in part a marketing ploy by the pharmaceutical industry “in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.”

The immediate effect — a drug-induced postponement of adulthood — is bad enough.

TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Things to Know About the Georgia 6 Runoff.

NOAH ROTHMAN: Otto Warmbier, Moral Perversion, and the Social Justice Left.

It wasn’t the extrajudicial nature of Warmbier’s capture that caught the attention of the liberal commentary class. Nor was it the triviality of his supposed “crime.” In fact, the only thing that appeared to intrigue some influential members of the identity-obsessed left was Warmbier’s background.

“It’s just tough for me to have much sympathy for this guy and his crocodile tears,” said former Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore amid what was billed as a comedic monologue on his now-cancelled show in March 2016. He noted that, according to reporting, Warmbier had committed the “international crime” of poster stealing as part of an initiation into his UVA fraternity. “You’ve got to read the fine print on your American frat bro warranty,” Wilmore noted mockingly. “It says, ‘Frat Bro Privilege not valid in totalitarian dystopias.’”

It’s not easy for an American to offer himself up to the regime in Pyongyang as a bargaining chip. It takes considerable effort to be that reckless. Wilmore’s invocation of Warmbier’s “privilege” is, in this instance, inadvertently telling. Willmore was cautious, but the adoring write up of his remarks in Salon was less coded. “This might be America’s biggest idiot frat boy,” the post was headlined.

White men deserve whatever happens to them, because justice.

RICHARD POLLOCK: Soros, Clinton-Linked Teneo Among Donors to McCain Institute.

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain in 2012 turned over nearly $9 million in unspent funds from his failed 2008 presidential campaign to a new foundation bearing his name, the McCain Institute for International Leadership.

The institute is intended to serve as a “legacy” for McCain and “is dedicated to advancing human rights, dignity, democracy and freedom.” It is a tax-exempt non-profit foundation with assets valued at $8.1 million and associated with Arizona State University.

Conservative and liberal critics, however, believe the institute constitutes a major conflict of interest for McCain, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

Ya think?

Read the whole thing.