JOHN ELLIS: Christians Are Bad Tippers, and That’s a Problem!

Even if you’ve never waited tables, consider calculating your tip as though you have.

2016 2017, MAN: Bids for Harambe-shaped Flamin’ Hot Cheeto approach $100G on eBay.

ONE TOUGH MOTHER: Mother Delivers Her Own Baby via C-Section, Shares Graphic Images.

IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES: Couple calls it quits over Trump – Wounds still raw after bitter U.S. election.

Burning passions over Donald Trump’s presidency are taking a personal toll on both sides of the political divide. For Gayle McCormick, it is particularly wrenching: she has separated from her husband of 22 years.

The retired California prison guard, a self-described “Democrat leaning toward socialist,” was stunned when her husband casually mentioned during a lunch with friends last year that he planned to vote for Trump – a revelation she described as a “deal breaker.”

“It totally undid me that he could vote for Trump,” said McCormick, 73, who had not thought of leaving the conservative Republican before but felt “betrayed” by his support for Trump.

“I felt like I had been fooling myself,” she said. “It opened up areas between us I had not faced before. I realized how far I had gone in my life to accept things I would have never accepted when I was younger.”

Throwing away a 22-year marriage as an act of virtue-signaling — her husband might be getting off easy.

HEH:

VIDEO: NBC Anchor Andrea Mitchell Caught Lying Again.

You’re gonna need a longer videotape.

TONIGHT WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 2001: Nancy Pelosi Says She Can’t Work With ‘President Bush’

BREAKING: Mike Pence just became the first Vice President to cast a tie-breaking Senate vote to approve a President’s cabinet nominee.

But Betsy DeVos is in at Education.

FULL STORY: Here.

[BUMPED]

“NOT ALL HATE CRIMES ARE FAKE”: Florida man sets mosque on fire, lectures Muslims at his sentencing.

The problem with hate crime legislation is that it gives legal recognition, even if punitive, to those who would use violence to make a political point. Better just to throw an arsonist in prison for arson than to give him an opportunity to grandstand — and inspire others.

MOTHER JONES: Keith Ellison Is Everything Republicans Thought Obama Was. Maybe He’s Just What Democrats Need.

The role of the DNC chairman is to run a political machine that helps to elect Democrats throughout the country, not to dictate the party’s policy priorities. But Ellison’s blueprint for defeating Trumpism is nonetheless rooted in the anti-establishment politics of Sanders. The DNC has become the “Democratic Presidential Committee,” he argues; short-sighted focus on big-dollar fundraising and swing states has weakened the party on a county-by-county level. Change starts with shifting the party apparatus toward assembling a multicultural army of organizers, focused on the communities likely to bear the full brunt of the new president’s policies. Ellison says the proof that this can work is in his district. Emphasizing door-to-door engagement over TV advertising, Ellison boasts he’s juiced turnout in his safe Democratic seat to some of the highest levels in the country. Even as the Upper Midwest goes red, Minnesota Democrats have scored victories at the state level, bolstered by Ellison’s Minneapolis machine.

Republicans are eager to take him on, because in many ways, the story of Keith Ellison is the story conservatives wanted to believe about another cerebral African American community organizer from the Midwest—Barack Obama. Raised Catholic in Detroit, Ellison converted to Islam, dabbled in black nationalism, and marched with the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan—all before his first bid for Congress in 2006. His past dogged him in that run, and it has continued to be an issue in the DNC race: Billionaire Haim Saban, one of the Democrats’ biggest donors, has trashed him as an “anti-Semite.”

As a young activist in Minneapolis, Ellison learned to build coalitions outside the scope of party politics. He also learned the limits of what such activism could achieve without political power. For Ellison, it was a time of experimentation, education, and sometimes radical dalliances that ultimately imbued in his politics a hard-edged pragmatism.

Don’t discount Ellison’s considerable organizational abilities on the basis of his radical politics.

WOMEN’S HEALTH: Former Planned Parenthood Employee Says Facilities Had Abortion Quotas.

ROBERT SPENCER: Winston Churchill, Anti-German Hate Group Leader.

SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: Twitter unveils new features to curb harassment.

Instead of just suspending abusive accounts, Twitter will now identify the individuals behind those accounts and prevent them from simply creating new ones.

Twitter’s new safer search feature, and efforts to hide abusive replies, are meant to help users targeted by abuse by making harassing content harder to find. Now, when users search for content on Twitter, tweets that have been flagged or are from accounts that are frequently blocked or muted won’t show up as easily.

Similarly, when users click the dropdown under a tweet to see replies, potentially abusive and low-quality tweets will be collapsed.

Twitter says abusive content will still be accessible for anyone looking to find it, but it won’t be as easy to stumble onto.

This new system seems ripe for abuse. I’ve been blocked by an unknown number of lefties — most I’ve never interacted with — apparently on the basis of some kind of shared, mass lists of conservatives or libertarians. Seemingly then, although I’ve done nothing to abuse or harass any of these people, my tweets “won’t be as easy to stumble onto.” In other words, invisibly blacklisted because of a leftwing social media campaign to silence voices (that’s what muting is) they don’t like.

I haven’t been on Twitter very much for almost a year; now I’ll be on there even less.

OK THEN: California Democrats Have Shrugged Off Trump’s Threat to Withhold Federal Funding.

IMPARTIALITY: Ruth Bader Ginsburg says Electoral College needs to be changed.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lamented partisanship in Congress during a talk at Stanford University on Monday and said she hoped it would return to an era when “it was working for the good of the country and not just along party lines.”

Ginsburg did not address the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia or President Trump’s travel ban, which could end up before the high court. But she did say she would like to change the Electoral College, a comment that drew applause from the packed, 1,200-seat Stanford Memorial Church. She did not elaborate.

I’m not sure she could elaborate, without then having to recuse herself from any cases involving the Trump Administration.

SENATOR AL FRANKEN: DeVos ‘fundamentally incompetent’ to lead Education Dept.

“During her hearing, Ms. DeVos proved beyond a shadow of a doubt not only that her ideology is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of the Department of Education, but that she is fundamentally incompetent to be its leader,” Franken said Monday from the Senate floor.

“This is not a job for amateurs,” the former “Saturday Night Live” comedian added.

I’ll just leave that last line lying there as we segue to Kevin Williamson:

On the merits, the Democrats do not have much of a case against Betsy DeVos, Tom Price, or Steven Mnuchin. The Democrats are making a dishonest argument, most intensely against DeVos, that being “qualified” for an office means agreeing with the Democrats on substantive policy questions. DeVos has spent most of her adult life working on education-reform projects, and the fact that these projects are based on policy positions at odds with those of most Democrats is not a question of qualification — it is a question of whether the president is entitled to nominate to the agencies officials who reflect his views.

He is.

Elections, as the head of the previous Administration once gloated, have consequences.

AL QAEDA GUIDE: ‘Large and Violent Demonstrations’ Can Distract from Terror Operations.

They might find more useful idiots than they know what to do with.

GENDER INEQUALITY: Hillary Clinton makes a rallying cry for women to rise up against the Trump administration as she speaks on video for the first time since the inauguration to say ‘the future is female’

As the father of two young boys, it’s heartening that I don’t have to explain to them why their President says they have no future.

DAVID HARSANYI: Public School Is Often The Most Destructive Institution In American Life.

Many liberals, for instance, tell us that racism is one of the most pressing problems in America. And yet few things have hurt African Americans more over the past 40 years than the inner-city public school system. If President Obama is correct, and educational attainment is the key to breaking out of a lower economic strata, then no institution is driving inequality quite as effectively as public schools.

Actually, teachers unions are the only organizations in America that openly support segregated schools. In districts across the country — even ones in cities with some form of limited movement for kids — poor parents, most typically black or Hispanic, are forced to enroll their kids in underperforming schools when there are good ones nearby, sometimes just blocks away.

The National Education Association spent $23 million last cycle alone working to elect politicians to keep low-income Americans right where they are. Public service unions use tax dollars to fund politicians who then turn around and vote for more funding. The worse the schools perform, the more money they demand. In the real world we call this racketeering.

Why are Democrat-run institutions such cesspits of racism and oppression? Because that’s where the money is.

SO I COULDN’T HELP BUT NOTICE that Google News has devoted an entire section to Executive Orders, and the many news stories being written about them.

I don’t recall any reaction like this when President Pen and Phone threatened to circumvent congress with executive orders if that popularly elected body (and co-equal branch of government) didn’t bend to his will.

HUFFPO’s GINA M. FLORIO: Linda Sarsour’s Intersectional Mantra Is One We Need To Live By.

Sarsour’s words couldn’t have been more relevant and more true, but unfortunately, a lot of people completely missed the point. Any feminist movement that isn’t being led by at least one WOC [Woman of Color] — if not several — is a movement that isn’t worth following. For as long as women have been fighting for their basic human rights, WOC have been ignored, neglected, and mistreated to a degree that white women have never endured, and will never have to. To this day, mainstream white feminism fails to recognize these discrepancies, and as a result, minority women are left with no platform to speak up and demand change.

That’s why Sarsour has made it her life’s work to make sure no WOC is left behind in any feminist march. She’s acutely aware of the systemic injustices WOC have to face, and she speaks out about them on a regular basis.

You might remember Sarsour as the sharia-espousing leader of the recent (and hypocritical) women’s march.

I’ll leave it to others to try and explain how sharia is compatible with legal equality for women, or how race-based leadership is compatible with a color-blind society.

JACK DUNPHY: Misleading ‘L.A. Times’ Article Quotes Cops Who Don’t Want to Enforce Trump’s Policies.

Yes, after an eight-year hiatus, dissent is once again fashionable, and it is all the rage in some circles to display one’s opposition to President Trump and his policies.

I’m sorry to report that this fashion has now infected some police officers, even to such an extent that they are willing to be quoted in a newspaper saying they will defy their duty and the law. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times ran a story under the headline:

“I’m Not Going To Do It.” Police Aren’t Eager To Help Trump Enforce Immigration Laws

Like so much that appears in the media, especially in the reporting on the Trump administration, the story is at once accurate and deceptive.

It is accurate in that the reporters (the byline lists three) quoted a handful of LAPD officers and detectives who expressed reservations about the president’s proposed expanded role for local police officers in the enforcement of federal immigration laws. But is deceptive because it conveys the impression that these opinions are widely shared among the rank and file on the department.

They are not.

Read the whole thing — and marvel at the propaganda effort being put forth in Los Angeles and across the nation.

GOOD LORD: Thousands of Syrians Killed in Mass Hangings, Amnesty International Claims.

Syrian authorities have killed as many as 13,000 people—possibly more—since the start of the 2011 uprising in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as “the slaughterhouse,” Amnesty International said on Tuesday.

In a new report covering the period from 2011 to 2015, Amnesty said 20 to 50 people were hanged each week at Saydnaya Prison in killings authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar al-Assad, and carried out by military police.

The report referred to the killings as a “calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution.”

Atrocities like these are why it may prove impossible to put Syria back together.

I’D RATHER NOT: Make Way For Milk Vodka.

2016 2017, MAN: ‘Notorious’ potbelly pig named ‘Piggy Smalls’ apprehended by ‘joint task force’ in Oregon.