WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Tool de Force: CNN’s John Harwood Defends Biden, Insists Inflation Pain Is a GOP ‘Charade.’

Flashbacks:

● CNBC Hack John Harwood Is Really, Really Upset That Al-Baghdadi Was Killed.

● NYT/CNBC’S John Harwood Advises Hillary Campaign, Gloats About Provoking Trump At Debate.

● CNBC’s John Harwood Has No Business Moderating A GOP Presidential Debate.

● CNBC Alters Transcript of John Harwood Question About Hillary’s Email.

● “Everyone in the [CNBC] newsroom knows [John Harwood is] extremely far left.”

UPDATE: CNN’s John Harwood used to think that higher inflation was a bad thing (guess what changed).

(Updated and bumped.)

JEFFREY CARTER: “We are in a bear market. In early December, we tested it. Omicron happened in mid to late December. We have fundamentally turned a corner.. Instead of a big crash, we are losing .5% to slightly over 2% per day. That is death by a thousand cuts. Meanwhile, look at Crude Oil. Let’s go Brandon! . . . The market was frothy and everyone knew it. We just didn’t know where. However, when you look at the carnage in crypto, in stocks, in bonds, and commodities there is nowhere to hide from it. By the way, neither gold nor bitcoin is an inflation hedge. Otherwise, they’d be rallying. How frothy? We haven’t found a bottom yet. Capitulation hasn’t happened yet. The other thing that is different is we have President Biden.”

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: America Tried the Biden Recovery Plan in the 1970s—It Was a Disaster.

Fed by those new taxes and deficits, spending rose across the board. Billions went to city-scale housing projects and urban development, with mass public transit cutting swathes across urban moonscapes. The nation’s railroads were bailed out, with passenger lines nationalized as government-owned Amtrak. Millions of new welfare recipients were created, social security beneficiaries massively expanded, and Washington was abuzz with talk of a “guaranteed annual income” mirroring today’s universal basic income.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the income distribution, crony payments went out to influential lobbyists; $1 billion for the supersonic transport (SST) Boeing 2707 boondoggle that supposedly would compete with the doomed Concorde, then an outright $700 million grant to keep contractor Lockheed in business. The Chrysler Corporation, once a crown jewel of the American economy, received $1.5 billion in taxpayer loan guarantees. Influential Senator Jacob Javits (R–NY) proposed bailing out any company that suffered losses at all.

The second ingredient that created the economic crisis was the explosion of the regulatory state. President Nixon, with the support of Congress, created entire regulatory agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Regulatory budgets at the federal level went from $6.8 billion in 1967 to nearly $20 billion (adjusted for inflation) by 1980—nearly tripling in just 12 years. Over that period, the number of regulatory staff grew from 78,000 to nearly 150,000 bureaucrats, a veritable army dedicated to handicapping the American economy.

Earlier: What Happened in 1971? Edward Snowden and Jack Dorsey Want to Know.

LARRY KUDLOW: Is Jimmy Carter Back, or What?

What a minute, though conservatives might hate me for this. President Carter really, truthfully, factually did not launch double-digit inflation of the 1970s. He was merely captured by it, and his presidency was destroyed. I don’t think he really ever understood it. It wasn’t just about oil prices. He did, though, appoint Paul Volcker to run the Fed.

Volcker was my former boss at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. I was his executive assistant 46 years ago. It was Paul Volcker, under President Reagan, who slew inflation. Reagan gave Volcker the ground to stand on. The truth, though, factually and analytically is that the president who unleashed double-digit inflation was Richard Nixon.

That’s right. It was unfortunately the 37th president who closed the gold window where the dollar was exchangeable for gold at a 35th of an ounce. That went back to the post-war deal reached at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. It restored to the world economy the gold exchange standard with the dollar at the center of that system.

As Amity Shlaes wrote in her 2019 book, Great Society, “Nixon and [John] Connally would now present a policy package containing most of or all their ideas, a package so sudden and revolutionary, like Nixon’s decision to go to China, that it outclassed either the New Frontier or the Great Society for sheer drama. [George] Shultz and Connally got in the spirit. ‘I think it’s the biggest thing in economic policy since World War II,’ Shultz concluded, accurately enough. Nixon had always known he could out-Kennedy Kennedy and out-Johnson Johnson, and now he was going to do it.”

More from Kudlow:

Nixon was worried about trade deficits and a deteriorating balance of payments. He rejected the advice of Volcker, then treasury undersecretary, and the Fed chairman at the time, Arthur Burns. Instead, Nixon closed the gold window, meaning foreign governments could no longer exchange dollars for gold. The value of the greenback fell like a stone.

So as the value of our currency declined, prices denominated in dollars sky-rocketed. We printed bad money and too much of it, and that’s the definition of inflation. Excess money in relation to demand will do it every time. Lack of value will do it every time. In 1973, Nixon abolished all remaining remnants of the gold dollar exchange system.

Inflation soared, first hitting double-digits while Nixon was president. All commodity prices, including oil, sky-rocketed along with just about everything else. On top of that, income tax rates were not indexed to inflation in those days. So higher and higher inflation drove middle-class Americans into higher and higher tax rate brackets. That had a huge braking effect on the economy.

In other words — stagflation. Intermittently from then until Reagan, inflation would pop up to double-digits. Interest rates peaked at about 15% in the market in government bonds. The prime rate peaked at around 21.5%. Reagan came in and squelched it all. As a hard money gold advocate and friend of Milton Friedman, Reagan, who was also my former boss, gave Volcker carte blanche to restore dollar value and vanquish inflation.

Then Reagan slashed tax rates to 28% from 70%, providing fresh after-tax incentives to rejuvenate the economy and give folks back their real income lost during the Nixon-Carter years. Really since the early 1990s, inflation in America has averaged about 2%. That’s for almost 30 years.

One last point on inflation. It is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman taught us, and, as Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Art Laffer and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell taught us, the optimal policy mix was stable money and low tax rates.

But Biden is determined to prove Friedman incorrect, telling interviewers that “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” And we’re all paying for Biden’s rejection of sound economic policies. “The irony is that Biden’s rejection of Friedman’s teachings on money, taxes, and spending may bring about the same circumstances that established Friedman’s preeminence. In a year or two, the American economy and Biden’s political fortunes may look considerably different than when Janet Yellen blurted out the obvious about inflation. Voters won’t like the combination of rising prices and declining assets. Biden’s experts might rediscover that it is difficult to control or stop inflation once it begins. And Milton Friedman will have his revenge.”

And thus, Welcome Back, Carter.

RIP: Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s vice president, dead at 93.

TO BE FAIR, HE’S DONE THIS IN THE FACE OF RESISTANCE FROM ALL THE BEST PEOPLE IN THE WASHINGTON FOREIGN POLICY ESTABLISHMENT: A friend on Facebook comments: “Donald Trump is the first American President to not send Americans into a new war since President Jimmy Carter. That’s an interval of forty years or so. It’s remarkable, really — and under appreciated.”

TO BE FAIR, HE COULDN’T MANAGE IT AT 50: Jimmy Carter: I couldn’t have managed presidency at 80. “Weeks shy of his 95th birthday, former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday he doesn’t believe he could have managed the most powerful office in the world at 80 years old. Carter, who earlier this year became the longest lived chief executive in American history, didn’t tie his comments to any of his fellow Democrats running for president, but two leading 2020 candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, would turn 80 during their terms if elected.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Watergate, By Any Other Name. “Over the last few days, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other anti-Trump outlets have revealed, and reveled in, something that many observers suspected for a long time. That the investigation into various figures associated with the Trump campaign—not only Carter Page, but also George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen—was just a pretext. The main target all along was Trump himself. As Andy McCarthy observed, ‘following the firing of FBI director James Comey on May 9, 2017, the bureau formally opened an investigation of President Trump.'”

To revive an old Democratic trope, I question the timing. But read the whole thing.

Plus: “’Spying on the opposition campaign in the absence of corroborated evidence of a crime.’ ‘Controversial?’ You think? How about nefarious and probably criminal? Richard Nixon is unavailable for comment.” It’s different when it’s done to Republicans because shut up.

THE VOGUE SEPTEMBER ISSUE IS DEAD:

In years gone by, the September issue was the Super Bowl of fashion magazines.

Fat with ads and glossy shoots cherry-picking the best looks of fall — the most important season in the fashion calendar — the annual issue heralded the pinnacle of a magazine’s influence and success.

Days before the issue hit newsstands, usually in early August, executives from Vogue, InStyle, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Glamour and W would brag about the thickness of their telephone book-sized glossies. They’d boast of the “thud” the issues made when dropped on a coffee table. The louder the thud, the more powerful the magazine.

Now that thud is more of a whimper.

As I wrote in 2011 when I reviewed the documentary about the making of the 2007 September issue:

It’s a fascinating time capsule of a film, sort of the Titanic or Last Days of Pompeii of the New York magazine industry. And beyond the world of Vogue depicted in the movie itself, of a supremely competent insular liberal Masters of the Universe worldview just before the lights went out on the world’s economy, and elites got what they wanted in the years that followed — good and hard, as Mencken would say. President Obama likes to say that Americans have been pretty soft in recent years; he need only watch this film to see how right he was about his core constituency. When Occupy Wall Street complains of “The One Percent” and their enormous wealth, well, come and see the plutocratic excess inherent in the system.

The dismantling of the Condé Nast empire, and other slick glossy magazines has implications beyond merely fashion, as Lee Smith wrote in his perceptive October 2017 article on the fall of Harvey Weinstein, “The Human Stain:”

A friend reminds me that there was a period when Miramax bought the rights to every big story published in magazines throughout the city. Why mess with Weinstein when that big new female star you’re trying to wrangle for the June cover is headlining a Miramax release? Do you think that glossy magazine editor who threw the swankiest Oscar party in Hollywood was trying to “nail down” the Weinstein story? Right, just like the hundreds of journalists who were ferried across the river for the big party at the Statue of Liberty to celebrate the premiere of Talk—they were all there sipping champagne and sniffing coke with models in order to “nail down” the story about how their host was a rapist.

That’s why the story about Harvey Weinstein finally broke now. It’s because the media industry that once protected him has collapsed. The magazines that used to publish the stories Miramax optioned can’t afford to pay for the kind of reporting and storytelling that translates into screenplays. They’re broke because Facebook and Google have swallowed all the digital advertising money that was supposed to save the press as print advertising continued to tank.

Look at Vanity Fair, basically the in-house Miramax organ that Tina failed to make Talk: Condé Nast demanded massive staff cuts from Graydon Carter and he quit. He knows they’re going to turn his aspirational bible into a blog, a fate likely shared by most (if not all) of the Condé Nast books.

Si Newhouse, magazine publishing’s last Medici, died last week, and who knows what will happen to Condé now. There are no more journalists; there are just bloggers scrounging for the crumbs Silicon Valley leaves them. Who’s going to make a movie out of a Vox column? So what does anyone in today’s media ecosystem owe Harvey Weinstein? And besides, it’s good story, right? “Downfall of a media Mogul.” Maybe there’s even a movie in it.

It’s no coincidence that unlike the old days, when dead-tree magazines like Esquire and New York served as the launching pad for big budget movies, today, ambitious writers are gaming Internet publications to sell their script proposals, as editors of once-mighty dead tree magazines feel increasingly cerulean blue.

LOOKING PRETTY SHADY: The FISA Documents Used To Wiretap Carter Page Just Dropped.

Until now, both Democrats and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have sent out memos trying to characterize the Page warrant in their respective favors, but now The New York Times and other news outlets have obtained the warrant applications through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). . . .

Of particular note are a couple footnotes in the third FISA renewal application. One footnote mentions that Steele was paid by the FBI for his information, but “suspended its relationship” with Steele after it learned he had disclosed information to the media. “Subsequently, the FBI closed [Steele] as an FBI source,” according to the documents. Yet still, the FBI determined Steele’s information to be reliable because his previous reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings,” according to the application. The FBI states in this footnote that the “incident that led the FBI to terminate its relationship with [Steele] occurred after [Steele] provided the reporting that is described herein.

A later footnote claims that Steele said he only provided information from the dossier to his business associate (believed to be Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that was paid by Perkins Coie, the law firm used by the DNC, for Steele’s information), and not to the media, though information from the dossier was the basis for a September 23 Yahoo! News article about Page’s surveillance. But in late October 2016, the FBI learned that Steele had since contacted another media source because he was “frustrated” by former FBI Director James Comey’s letter about more Clinton emails found on the laptop of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Steele, according to the FISA documents, “told the FBI that he/she was frustrated with this action and believed it would likely influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.” So he gave media outlets compromising information about a different candidate.

The FBI, even after learning what Steele had done, “continues to assess [Steele’s] reporting is reliable, as noted above, the FBI closed [Steele] as an active source.”

The original document is here.

Plus:

That multiple warrants could be issued against an American citizen on such shaky evidence calls into question the entire FISA process.

UPDATE: More from John Hinderaker. “The application relies to an astonishing degree on anti-Trump news stories published in the Democratic Party press. Does the FBI really get surveillance warrants on the basis of partisan press accounts? Apparently so. . . . Amazingly, the FISA application relies on ‘speculation in U.S. media’ for the proposition that Russia was behind the phishing of DNC emails.”

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Cash-Strapped DNC, DCCC Pay Hillary Clinton’s ‘Resistance’ Group Nearly $900,000 Combined for List Acquisitions. “DNC’s $300,000 payment was made as state Democratic parties were waiting on promised funding.”

The DNC, which is in the midst of facing financial hardships, conjured up $300,000 on Jan. 8 to pay Onward Together, Clinton’s group, for “list acquisition,” according to the FEC filings. The payment was made to Clinton’s organization as state Democratic parties were waiting on $10 million in funding for rebuilding efforts that was initially promised last July.

As of early January of this year, the money had never made its way to the parties, and the DNC did not even have $10 million on hand. In late January, after reports surfaced of its inaction in relation to the state parties, the DNC finally announced it would begin disbursing $1 million to 11 different state parties, with grants going to Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, and West Virginia.

The DCCC also paid hundreds of thousands to Clinton’s “resistance” group for “generic committee list rental” between mid-December and late January.

It says something about today’s Democratic Party that it is still in thrall to its losing presidential candidate — who is no longer an elected official holding any office.

I don’t recall Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, or John Kerry having much or anything to do with the party’s day-to-day affairs after their losses.

THE CARTER PAGE PILE-ON:

A frisson of gleeful anticipation greeted the news in fall 2017 that charges were being brought against Paul Manafort and his protégé Rick Gates, and that Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and were cooperating with the authorities. Amid the satisfaction and self-congratulation about Trump’s impending downfall, no one seems to have paid much attention to the fact that none of the charges had anything to do with collusion with Russia, nor did they suggest that any of the damning allegations in the Steele dossier had been verified. Rather, there was an assumption that Trump’s associates, nabbed by the long arm of the law, would start “singing,” and that their chorus would quickly and undeniably implicate the President in impeachable wrongdoing.

But the hopes of autumn are giving way to a silent spring. Is this deafening silence from Manafort et al. a token of their undying loyalty to The Donald—the omerta of mafia thugs? Or is it just possible that there is simply no song to sing—no collusion, no payoffs, no information-sharing—maybe not even any “golden rain?” And what did the FBI, armed with its FISA warrant, learn about Page during the months its agents were surveilling him? Did this unlikely hypostatic union of awkward geek and master of intrigue manage to cover his tracks so well that the Feds could not even muster the risible amount of evidence required for a conspiracy charge?

It’s hardly a secret that, for a broad swath of the U.S. political classes and the American press, the removal of Trump has become the Holy Grail, the goal to which all other things must be subordinated. In this sacred endeavor, Carter Page is useful in ways that even the most cynical Russian handlers could hardly have imagined. And if his dignity and reputation must be utterly trashed in the process—well, so much the worse for Page.

Responsible journalism dies in darkness. Or is it dankness?

Indeed.

ELI LAKE: We Should Care About What Happened to Carter Page: The former Trump aide’s reputation has been ruined — not by a conviction, not by any charges, but by a warrant that was supposed to be secret.

The current debate over Page is whether the FBI overreached by seeking a warrant to spy on him from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the end of 2016. Republicans claim the FBI improperly relied on the opposition research dossier. Democrats say the Republican memo omits information that would discredit the GOP’s case.

But that misses a broader and more important point. It’s a scandal that the public has known for more than a year that the FBI suspected Page of being a foreign agent in the first place. He has yet to be charged with a crime, but his reputation is in tatters because an element of the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s influence over the 2016 election has been publicly reported.

This started when Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff broke the first big story on Page’s meetings in Moscow with Putin aides in September 2016, allegedly to discuss the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia. Isikoff was tipped off by Steele, who was commissioned through an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to dig up dirt on Trump’s ties to Russia on behalf of the Clinton campaign. In a podcast this week, Isikoff confirmed that Steele told him he had “taken this information to the FBI and the bureau is very interested.”

Last April, the Washington Post reported, based on information from “law enforcement and other U.S. officials,” that the FBI had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, warrant on Page in the summer of 2016. As the Post reported at the time, the existence of the warrant was “the clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in touch with Russian agents.”

That was an important piece of news that any journalist would publish. But the officials who leaked and confirmed it violated the public’s trust in two important ways.

This didn’t just happen. It was a partisan hit job.

HMM: Sara Carter: Sources in FBI Tell Me More Resignations To Come.

More:

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forced to resign Monday, just as the House Intelligence Committee is expected to vote on the public release of a classified memo this afternoon revealing extensive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse under the Obama administration, sources told this reporter.

McCabe apparently lashed out to his colleagues when he was told he would be asked to resign, according to sources. FBI Director Christopher Wray viewed the four-page memo on Sunday, sources familiar with the discussions said.

McCabe, who is facing three federal inquiries for conflicts-of-interest during his time at the FBI, is one of the numerous names mentioned in the classified memo detailing FISA abuse, according to sources who reviewed the memo.

The federal inquiries into allegations against McCabe, who was expected to resign in March, are based on documents and interviews conducted by this reporter over the past year and range from sexual discrimination to improper political activity.

McCabe, a central figure in the ongoing Russia investigation against Trump, is also part of the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s ongoing review into the FBI’s handling of former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to send classified information.

Current and former FBI officials said McCabe’s resignation is the beginning of more resignations to come.

“There are people lining up in the bureau to go after McCabe,” said a former FBI official, with knowledge. “There will be a clean up at the Bureau of his cronies.”

Good.

CAN A CASE BE MADE THAT TRUMP IS OUT-GIPPERING THE GIPPER? Check out these five ways President Donald Trump shook up Washington in 2017, then compare them with President Ronald Reagan’s first-year record. Reagan cut taxes, scared the Iranian Mullahs so much they quickly released 52 American hostages they’d held hostage for more than a year, began reversal of the Carter-era defense readiness decline and launched major spending and regulatory reforms. Speaking as a former Reagan political appointee, I have to say Trump is, at the very least, following very closely in the Gipper’s hallowed footsteps.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Fire and Fury of Presidents.

“We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.” —Barack Obama, April 2016

The media recently went ballistic over President Trump’s impromptu promises of “fire and fury” in reply to the latest North Korean threats—and even more so when he later doubled down under criticism and claimed he had not been tough enough. But American leaders have always resorted to such blunt talk in exacerbating circumstances such as the current one.

Recall Bill Clinton’s now widely quoted remark that it would be “pointless” for North Korea to develop nuclear weapons because using them would mean “the end of their country.” Likewise, President Harry Truman once promised Japan a “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth” after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Japan apparently got the message that there was no way out but unconditional surrender. President John F. Kennedy referred publicly to an “abyss of destruction” during the Cuban crisis.

And President Ronald Reagan was the master of the apocalyptic allusion. Remember his hot mic quip: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes”? Or his “evil empire” reference to the Soviet Union, delivered to a group of Florida evangelicals? George W. Bush was channeling Reagan when he dubbed Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an “axis of evil”—“axis” was a World War II allusion that left no ambiguity, especially when married to the Reaganesque use of “evil.”

The media seems to have also forgotten the (now prescient) 2006 Washington Post joint op-ed by former Defense Secretary William Perry and future Defense Secretary Ash Carter. The two former Clinton administration officials called for a preemptory U.S. strike on a North Korea missile site. They mostly discounted the threat that North Korea would hit Seoul in response: “Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not. . . .But diplomacy has failed, and we cannot sit by and let this deadly threat mature.”

Later, Perry and Carter backtracked somewhat from such calls for nuclear brinksmanship. But in retrospect, given North Korea’s new nuclear capabilities, their idea of limited preemption might have been right. Regardless, publishing their preemptive call for war did not enrage North Korea to the point of no return.

That’s different because shut up. Actually I think that it’s just that the press — which is enraged beyond all reason every time Trump opens his mouth — finds it hard to imagine that that reaction isn’t universal.

ANOTHER REASON WHY MUELLER SHOULD RESIGN: Yale Lawprof Stephen L. Carter: Leakers Mess With the Trump Investigation: Insiders need to shut up if they want the public to trust the results.

A presidential obstruction of justice would constitute a serious challenge to both the rule of law and the proper functioning of democracy. But this column is not about that doleful thought. It’s about a different threat to democracy: the fact that the leak occurred at all. That fact, except among partisans, does not seem to me to be eliciting sufficient outrage.

In my earlier column, I argued that leakers are essentially liars. They want the benefit of being trusted with confidences without suffering the cost of keeping what they know to themselves. They sit in meetings and review documents and implicitly promise to keep the secrets, but their actual plan is to decide for themselves which juicy nugget to share with others. In philosophical terms, the leaker always does a moral wrong to the person who entrusted him with the secret.

But like most moral wrongs, the leak can be excused if the cause is sufficiently vital. Consider the corporate whistle-blower who brings to the authorities details of horrific misfeasance by his employer. I argued last time that one might plausibly excuse, for example, the leaks by former FBI Director James Comey, who explained his conduct as an effort to force the appointment of a special counsel to look into links between Russia and the Trump campaign. 1 Perhaps others in the rash of leakers in recent months had the same motive.

You can decide for yourself whether the motive is sufficient to justify the underlying lie. In any case, now that special counsel Robert Mueller III has begun his investigation, that rationale no longer exists. The individual who leaks what’s going on inside the investigation has no excuse. To share the special counsel’s secrets with a reporter is self-indulgence. To go to work the next day is to intensify the underlying wrong. . . .

If Mueller believes there is a case to be made we will find out soon enough. At the moment there is no way to tell whether he is thinking “It looks like there’s probably a crime” or “I don’t see much here, but I have to cover all the bases.” To whisper to a reporter that an investigation is under way only feeds the view among many on the right that the bureaucracy is partisan and unworthy of trust.

This being the season of La Résistance, I am obliged to add that I am by no stretch of the imagination a Trump supporter. I do, however, believe that maintaining the rule of law and the integrity of our governing institutions protects knight and knave alike. And if the answer is that Trump must be taken down by extra-institutional means, then I’m heading for the hills, because America is over.

We increasingly have a Third World political class, so. . . .

STEPHEN CARTER: I Side With the ‘Bad Guys’ on Encryption: Law-enforcement agents want the power to break into secure devices. Why should we trust them?

One of the more intriguing pearls in FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week was his disclosure that the Bureau has been unable to penetrate the encryption on about half of the 6,000 cell phones seized in the course of various investigations between October and March. To Comey and the senators, this was plainly a problem. I will confess that my own feelings are more mixed. . . .

When the head of the FBI says to the tech companies, “Please help us,” he is in effect saying to ordinary users, “Please trust us.” And that’s where the problem lies. Little in recent history — or, for that matter, not-so-recent history — offers any particular reason to believe that government officials, once granted a power, will use it sparingly.

Moreover, a warrant requirement offers little protection. The courts rarely say no, and recent administrations, including those of President Donald Trump’s two predecessors, have found ways to get around judicial scrutiny. Nor has Trump himself given the impression that his use of such powers would be sparing. But even if we imagine a government run entirely by angels, we live at a time when intelligence agencies can hardly protect their own secrets, including their hacking tools. If the tech companies yield to official pressure and begin to build backdoors into their encryption, how long will it be until the details show up on WikiLeaks, and the actual methods are being bartered in various corners of the Dark Web?

Actually, the Dark Web is used these days by journalists, who try to evade the vast networks of official surveillance by offering sources the ability to remain anonymous while sending encrypted communications via SecureDrop. SecureDrop uses the Tor network of hidden servers to allow sources and reporters who never meet to exchange untappable messages. Among the many news outlets that have signed on are the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

Now suppose that the U.S. government demanded that a backdoor be built into SecureDrop. After all, in the view of law enforcement, to disclose classified information to the news media is a crime. Under the Obama administration, more leakers were prosecuted for espionage — espionage! — than in all prior administrations combined.

Well, sure but that was okay because he was a Democrat.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Newsflash: Obama Was A Historically Unpopular President, According To Gallup.

That poll found that Obama’s overall average approval rating was a dismal 47.9%.

Only three presidents scored worse than Obama since Gallup started doing these surveys in 1945: never-elected Gerald Ford (47.2%), one-termer Jimmy Carter (45.4%), and Harry Truman (45.4%).

Obama even did worse overall than Richard Nixon, whose average approval was 49%, and was less popular overall than George W. Bush, who got an average 49.4%.

Well, he was a historically bad president. If he hadn’t had the press propping him up he’d have been in the 30s.

SCOTT JENNINGS: Obama Should Give Back His Nobel: Tired of saluting those who serve, the president slapped them in the face on the way out the door.

The last major decision of President Barack Obama was to commute the sentence of a traitor whose most recent accomplishment since giving battlefield secrets to Osama bin Laden was undergoing a taxpayer-funded sex change transition. It was a fitting end to a failed presidency that leaves President-elect Donald Trump mess after mess to clean up on the world stage. . . .

Manning helped our enemies by leaking sensitive information to a foreign organization. Period. He was arrested, confessed, and subsequently sentenced to 35 years in a military prison. His actions put America at risk and endangered the lives of “foreigners in dangerous countries who were identified as having helped American troops or diplomats,” according to The New York Times.

Afghans, Syrians, and Iraqis — brave people who continue to live in treacherous places — were put in extreme danger by Manning. These people helped America with the understanding that their actions would be kept secret. Because of Manning, their lives and the lives of their families are forever in peril. In future battles, when our military is looking for allies among local populations, who will trust that America can keep their secrets or can guarantee their safety?

Somewhere along the way, his days of trying to destroy America safely behind him, Brad decided he was Chelsea and demanded the government pay for his conversion from man to woman. And we did, as taxpayers ponied up $50,000 for a traitor to receive everything from “counseling to hormone therapy, and…gender reassignment surgery”.

Fast forward to Tuesday, when Manning’s strange tale ended with Obama commuting his sentence over the objection of Defense Secretary Ash Carter. A “former intelligence official described being ‘shocked’ to learn of Obama’s decision, adding that the ‘entire intelligence community is deflated by this inexplicable use of executive power.’ The official said the move was ‘deeply hypocritical given Obama’s denunciation of WikiLeaks’ role in the hacking of the (Democratic National Committee),’” a CNN report said.

He came in like a messiah, he’s leaving like a bum.

BLOOMBERG NEWS EDITORIAL: Obama’s Betrayal of Israel at the UN Must Not Stand.

Flashback: Candidate Obama: “Any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Plus, Tom Maguire emails:

Since you were early and accurate with your Obama administration prediction that “Jimmy Carter is a best-case scenario”, shouldn’t you be taking a Bold Stand on Obama’s likely behavior as an Ex-Pres?

I think “Jimmy Carter is a best case” will apply to Future Obama as well. And that was before this UN Security Council clown show.

I think that Obama will far surpass Jimmy Carter in both sanctimony and support to America’s enemies. I believe that he will set a new standard in awfulness for ex-Presidents. But sadly, I don’t think this counts as a particularly bold prediction.

CHINA MAPPING OUT STRATEGY FOR AN AMERICA LED BY TRUMP: President-elect Trump has already replaced President Ash Carter as Beijing’s bete noire.

From North Korea to Iran to a closely entwined business relationship worth $598 billion in 2015, the two countries have broad common interests, and China expects Trump to understand that.

While China was angered by Trump’s call this month with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, and then casting doubt over the future of the “one China” policy under which the U.S. recognizes Taiwan as being part of China, it was also quite restrained, said a senior Beijing-based Western diplomat

“China’s game now is to influence him and not antagonize him,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Yup. The Donald’s Taiwan phone chat was a wake up call for the Chinese government. And it was supposed to be.

ALL SIGNS POINT TO YES: White House Report Card: Will Obama Oust Jimmy Carter As Worst Ex-President?

“SO, ABOUT LAST NIGHT …” In his column at the Washington Post, Sonny Bunch of the conservative Washington Free Beacon writes:

There’s something to be said for the idea that Trump rode a wave of white resentment into the White House. But this is, at best, a half-truth. I’ll discuss the demographics in a moment; for now, let’s focus on the resentment. “Family Guy”‘s Seth MacFarlane made the totally reasonable point that “the Left expended so much energy over the last several years being outraged over verbal missteps, accidental innuendo, ‘tasteless tweets’ … in the name of clickbait, that when the REAL threat to equality emerged, we’d cried wolf too many times to be heard.”

This is a variation on the “But he fights!” defense/critique of Donald Trump. He gives voice to people who have spent the social media age watching viral outrage after viral outrage consume news cycles and destroy lives, to people who look at the silliness on college campuses and recoil at the thought of giving such institutions tens of thousands of dollars to fill their children’s heads with nonsense ideas. As Robby Soave noted at Reason, “Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness.”

* * * * * * * *

Twitter created a series of impenetrable bubbles this cycle, and bubbles of this sort are not healthy for members of the media. They’re not healthy for anyone, really, but they’re doubly unhealthy for those of us who would dare to think they can or should shape the national narrative. If Democrats’ takeaway from last night is “the people of this country are filled with hatred,” as my own bubble suggests it might be, they will learn no lessons and gain no weapons with which to combat Trump and his successors going forward.

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that it was Twitter that created those impenetrable bubbles, or if it was simply one of the many platforms available to amplify and broadcast them.

During the 1960 presidential election, at the height of mass-media, mass-production, and the concomitant federal government shaped by the socialist New Deal, Nixon and Kennedy shared remarkably similar midcentury centrist views on most issues, from civil rights to the role of religion in America to the Cold War. But virtually every election since has seen pitched battles between two diametrically opposed worldviews: the radical chic anger of the McGovernites versus Nixon’s Great Society-esque foreign and domestic policies. Jimmy Carter’s big government malaise versus Reagan’s Goldwater-inspired conservatism. Al Gore’s radical environmentalism as religion versus George W. Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism. Etc., etc.

Until now. This election offered a plethora of worldviews slugging it out: a Northeast Corridor-based overculture that believes a radical chic-inspired failed community organizer and failed health care reformer in a bespoke suit is the second coming of God. And that his designated successor, whom they previously denigrated as a reactionary racist, whose biggest achievement was making a hash of the Middle East while pointlessly racking up nearly a million air miles (all the while railing against “climate change”) deserves to be president simply because of her gender.

Their reality was opposed by the alternate media bubble created by Trump’s most loyal media supporters, such as Dilbert creator Scott Adams, an increasingly surreal Drudge Report, and a Breitbart.com that would likely be unrecognizable by its late founder.

Their reality in turn was opposed by the #NeverTrump crowd at the Weekly Standard and National Review. Who at times arguably seemed more angry with Trump himself and his mixed legacy in business than his Democratic opponent.

Ultimately though, the reality that prevailed was that of Trump’s working class base of supporters. Who tried to send a message to Washington in 2009 with the surprise election of Scott Brown to block Obamacare. And when that failed to stop the Democrats, tried to send a message in 2010 by sweeping a wave of Republicans into the House to block its implementation. And when that failed to stop the Democrats (and its rollout turned out to the debacle that everyone on the right insisted it would be) sent a wave that recaptured the Senate. A group that’s angry at being called homophobic bigots and racists. Angry at a never-ending war in Iraq after victory was in-hand. Angry at a stagnant economy. Angry over possibly the biggest lie told repeatedly by an American president: “If you like your plan you can keep your plan,” only to discover no, you can’t – and if you want any health insurance at all, you might need a second mortgage to cover the premiums.

Is Trump a perfect messenger for such anger? Of course not. But like Bill Clinton in 1992 and Obama in 2008, he showed up to play, mentally decided that he had more star power and cable media savvy than his opponents in his party’s primary, and rode a populist message to success. I hope he can deliver on some of his promises, but the fact that he won’t begin his administration by launching a culture war against half the nation, as both Obama and Clinton did, will give us all room to breathe.

HEY, REMEMBER HIM? Barack Obama, the incredible shrinking president:

While presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump loom horrifyingly larger, can we spare a little horror as U.S. President Barack Obama looms ever smaller? No, I’m not sorry he’s leaving. I’m alarmed at a series of recent foreign policy humiliations showing just how badly the incredible shrinking president has damaged America’s standing in this turbulent world of ours.

First, emerging from the back door of Air Force One at the G20 in China after local functionaries literally denied him a red carpet. Second, begging Russian President Vladimir Putin for help on Syria and getting chlorine gas. Third, being told off by the president of Turkey over American support for Kurds in Syria. Fourth, being cussed out by the president of the Philippines.

It is literally impossible to imagine any of these things happening to former presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter? Maybe one or two. But Obama managed all four. While he did cancel his meeting with the appalling Filipino president, he seemed to treat the rest as no big deal.

As Glenn noted, “When Jimmy Carter Is your best-case scenario, you’re in trouble.” That was written back in 2011, but alas, voters didn’t heed the warning. Which is why our semi-retired president’s last months in office aren’t exactly occurring “unexpectedly,” even to his most die-hard loyalists.