If there's ever going to be meaningful peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the onus is on the Palestinians to make it happen - Part 2

Ben Shapiro at Daily Wire provides an even more comprehensive 20th-century timeline of Arab hostility to the Jews living in Palestine / Israel:

1929. Conflict began in British Mandate Palestine after Jews made the “provocative” move of bringing chairs for the elderly and the infirm to the Western Wall for prayer purposes. In October 1928, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem decided to build atop the Temple Mount, and purposefully led mules through the Western Wall area, excreting in the holy area to spite the Jews. All of this led to a Jewish march to the wall in August 1929. The next day, Muslims marched to the wall to show their sovereignty, even though the Western Wall isn’t holy to Muslims. The following day, Arabs stabbed a Jew to death in the city. By August 23, Muslims were rioting across Jerusalem. 17 Jews were murdered and a hospital was attacked in the city in Jerusalem itself. In Hebron, Arabs massacred more than 60 Jews.

The British Shaw report described the events thusly: “Arabs in Hebron made a most ferocious attack on the Jewish ghetto and on isolated Jewish houses lying outside the crowded quarters of the town. More than 60 Jews – including many women and children – were murdered and more than 50 were wounded.” Remember, this was long before Israel existed or Jerusalem was in Jewish hands. There were also anti-Jewish riots in 1920 and in the 1930s.

1948. Israel’s creation was supposed to lead to a peaceful coexistence in Jerusalem. Instead, Arabs cut off all roads to Jerusalem and prevented Jews from reaching the city, blockading the inhabitants inside. Thousands of Israelis died attempting to reach their brethren in Jerusalem. The outcome: the split of the city between West Jerusalem, which did not include the Western Wall, and East Jerusalem, controlled by Jordan. Under Muslim rule, Jews were not able to visit Jewish holy sites; under Jewish rule, Muslims were. Muslims used gravestones from the Jewish cemetery Mount of Olives to pave their roads. During this period, while East Jerusalem was fully controlled by Muslims, the Palestine Liberation Organization (later the Palestinian Authority) was formed. It openly stated that its goal was the destruction of the State of Israel. Remember, this is before Israel controlled Jerusalem. 

1967. Israel wins control of Jerusalem and unifies the city. Muslims are not just granted access to holy sites, the Islamic Waqf is given full control over the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. Jews are still forbidden from praying at the Temple Mount to this day, despite Israel’s sovereignty over the site.

1993. In the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed to negotiate with the terrorist Palestinian Authority over a future Palestinian state. In return, the PA stated that it would acknowledge Israel’s right to exist (it never has) and cease violence (it never has). The Oslo Accords never made any statement about transfer of Jerusalem to Muslim rule. Despite that fact, the number of terrorist attacks on Israel dramatically increased in the aftermath of Oslo, with 27 Israelis murdered in October 1994 alone through Muslim terrorism.

2000. At the Camp David summit, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, of the Labor Party, offered Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat control over East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount itself. That’s according to Bill Clinton. Arafat refused the deal and walked away from the table without a counteroffer, then used Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount as a pretext to begin a terrorist wave that would result in the deaths of hundreds of Jews from terrorism (I was in Israel during the Second Intifada, and remember walking by the remains of murdered Jews in a Sbarro pizzeria).

2008. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered new Palestinian terrorist dictator Mahmoud Abbas — a man who was working hand in glove with Palestinian terrorist group Hamas — international control of Jerusalem’s Old City, which includes the holy sites. Olmert stated, “Remember my words, it will be 50 years before there will be another Israeli prime minister that will offer you what I am offering you now. Don’t miss this opportunity.” Olmert also offered near-complete withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, with retention of just 6.3% of the territory for existing settlement blocs, and even agreed to hand over Israeli land equivalent to 5.8% of the territory, as well as a land bridge between Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Abbas turned it down, and launched another round of violence instead in coordination with Hamas in Gaza. Incessant Muslim terrorism against Jews in Jerusalem has not ceased. 

This is all vitally important information, but for my money, the real centerpiece of the column is when Shapiro quotes what almighty God said to Jacob: “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying… All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.” 

Jarring realizations I came to when I embarked on a serious faith walk

God is sovereign - We are not raindrops that return to the ocean. We don't step off the wheel of death and rebirth and become one with it all. We are created beings, and God, who created us, is a being of a different order. In order for the word "love" to have any kind of meaning, it has to imply a relationship.

The person of Jesus is the proper object of worship  - "I am the way, the truth and the life" does not refer to his parables or any of the enlightening encounters he had during his 33-year mortal life. It is he Himself, the Son facet of the triune God. There is no way one can realistically regard him as just a wise teacher.

God really does insist on our spotlessness - The rest of creation, at least what we know of it, does not involve the question of free will. The laws of physics, chemistry and biology spotlessly govern the actions of all other objects and beings. We, on the other hand, can choose to knowingly defile it, and, inevitably, each of us do. The above-mentioned Son is necessary to mitigate God's profound disappointment in us for so choosing. We'd be in a world of hurt without Him.

God interacted with a particular group of people in a particular locale to begin revealing his nature to the entire species - The argument can be made that philosophically-minded ancient Hebrews, with little knowledge of the world outside a few square miles, were attuned to certain things coming onto their radar screen, making their sense of being special a self-fulfilling prophecy. Where it falls short is that, as Judeo-Christian scripture and thought made its way beyond the confines of that particular locale and people, it made sense to billions of other human beings elsewhere like no other worldview ever has. The flood, the Ten Commandments, the ups and downs of great kings like David and Solomon, the visions of the prophets, and the particular circumstances of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus happened in a certain place to a certain people. That's just the way it happened. Lots of aspects of reality are like that. Elephants aren't native to Wyoming.

All of this is deadly serious - There's a reason clergy is enlisted during the milestones of life, such as weddings and deaths. The things that occur sequentially in this three-dimensional universe have eternal implications.

People who went to a church as children where this was clearly conveyed, some of whom speak of being saved as children, may have a well-duh reaction to these realizations, but they were a big deal to me. I pretty much went all the years of serious ontological inquiry in my life concluding the opposite of each one of these.

I still kind of surprise myself publicly asserting this stuff, but less and less so all the time. That happens when you draw near to Him.

If there's ever going to be meaningful peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the onus is on the Palestinians to make it happen

Former Knesset member Einat Wilf, writing at The Atlantic, provides a much-needed overview of how the world's various interested parties came by their current views of Jerusalem:

Jerusalem was established as the capital of the newly independent state of Israel on December 13, 1949. This was Jerusalem west of the ceasefire line delineated at the end of the war for Israel’s independence, later to be known as the pre-1967 line. This part of Jerusalem included Jewish residential neighborhoods built in preceding decades. There was nothing holy about this part of Jerusalem. By the end of the war the holy and ancient sites were actually east of the ceasefire line: the entire Old City, including the sites holiest to the Jewish people. The Temple Mount, the Wailing Wall, and the Jewish Quarter all came under Jordanian control, and Jews were denied access to these sites.

The United States recognized the State of Israel upon its independence, so it should have been straightforward for the U.S. to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to establish its embassy there. If anything, it is the Jordanian annexation of the Old City and the way Jews were denied access that should have led to international consternation (it didn’t).

Why didn’t the U.S. and all other countries recognize residential, non-holy, west-of-the-armistice-line Jerusalem as Israel’s capital? At the time the U.S. was still attached to an idea, proposed in the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, that the vast area of greater Jerusalem (including residential neighborhoods) as well as Bethlehem should be a “Corpus Separatum,” a separate area that would be governed by the international community.

This fiction never existed anywhere but on paper. It never existed because the Arabs rejected the partition proposal and started a war to prevent it from being realized. When they lost that war, Jerusalem west of the armistice line became Israel’s, and Jerusalem east of the line came under Jordanian occupation and entered an extended period of disputed claims. So the U.S., while recognizing Israel within the armistice lines, chose a policy that held the status of Israel’s capital hostage to a fiction that never had a chance of existing.

When Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967, during the Six-Day War, it moved to unite the Old City to the east with the residential city to the west, and in addition annexed dozens of Arab villages to create a massive municipal area that became what many Israeli politicians call “undivided” or “united” Jerusalem. This was indeed a controversial move, especially as it was followed by massive building of Jewish residential neighborhoods in that annexed area; this move continues to not be recognized by any country to this day. It is also controversial within Israel, where many Israelis continue to support the possibility that a future Palestinian state would have its capital in the eastern part of Jerusalem. 

The idea that cities, particularly capital cities, within sovereign nation-states, ought to be under some kind of international jurisdiction, leads to very thorny developments. Berlin, for instance, from 1945 to 1991, was the source of much stickiness in relations between great blocs of countries, resulting in an airlift and a wall, among other issues that were difficult to navigate.

Then there is the matter of Judaism's holiest sites, particularly the only standing wall of the Great Second Temple, being situated in the eastern part of Jerusalem.

Wilf stresses that Trump's announcement of US policy regarding Jerusalem does not attempt tp dictate geopolitical details as foregone conclusions:

Trump’s declaration finally puts an end to this nonsensical policy. By dismissing the fiction of the “Corpus Separatum” at last, the U.S. can stop denying Israel, alone among the nations, a basic national sovereign right to establish its capital in undisputed territory.

Trump used only the ambiguous term “Jerusalem” in his speech, saying, “We are not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem or the resolution of contested borders. Those questions are up to the parties involved.” It would have been better if Trump had specified that the U.S. is only recognizing Israel’s capital in Jerusalem west of 1967 line—in other words, that the U.S. is simply ending the illogical policy that holds the undisputed status of Jerusalem west of the armistice line hostage to the ongoing dispute over Jerusalem east of that line.

Nevertheless, if the U.S. continues to declare that Jerusalem’s final borders should be negotiated (meaning that it leaves open the possibility of a Palestinian capital in the eastern part of Jerusalem), and if the U.S. refrains from describing Israel’s capital as “united” or “undivided” Jerusalem, and if the U.S. continues to refrain from taking any steps that recognize Israel’s annexation of the territories east of the 1967 line, and assuming that the new embassy will be located in Jerusalem west of that line—then Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim leaders who are not itching for violence should be able to legitimately say that Trump’s declaration effectively changes nothing.

Now, what Trump did differs from the LITD view in one significant way: It would have been fine with us if he had used the word "undivided.

Nevertheless, Wilf says we shall now see what the Palestinians and Arabs generally are really all about. If they really let loose with a destructive expression of rage, it will be clear that they don't even want Israel to exist:

if the U.S. continues to declare that Jerusalem’s final borders should be negotiated (meaning that it leaves open the possibility of a Palestinian capital in the eastern part of Jerusalem), and if the U.S. refrains from describing Israel’s capital as “united” or “undivided” Jerusalem, and if the U.S. continues to refrain from taking any steps that recognize Israel’s annexation of the territories east of the 1967 line, and assuming that the new embassy will be located in Jerusalem west of that line—then Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim leaders who are not itching for violence should be able to legitimately say that Trump’s declaration effectively changes nothing.

In fact, if Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim leaders object to the declaration and threaten violence, they should be called on to specify the cause of their anger. Which Jerusalem do they deny Israel’s right to name as its capital? If it is Jerusalem east of the 1967 line, Trump’s declaration does nothing to change that: The U.S. still does not recognize Israel’s annexation of the territories east of the line. The status of that part of Jerusalem is up for negotiations. If the anger is about residential, non-holy Jerusalem within the pre-1967 line—the capital of the State of Israel since its early beginnings—then it implies a blanket refusal to accept the legitimacy of Israel within any borders. To that, the U.S. should not bow.

Ultimately, attaining peace requires that Palestinians and the Arab world accept that the Jewish people have a legitimate right to self-determination in their homeland. This means acknowledging the deep connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. It means accepting that the Jews are not foreigners in the land and that this is the homeland of not one, but two peoples. Based on such an acknowledgement, Israelis and Palestinians can then negotiate an agreement to share Jerusalem so that it becomes the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with religious access for all. 

It boils down to whether Palestinians can recognize that Jews have the right to live in their ancient and eternal homeland. Based on their behavior over the past 70 years, we'd be wise not to bet the rent.

Pope Francis's peddling of climate-change nonsense would consign the poor whose plight he champions to continued poverty

Peter Heck at The Resurgent on the pontiff's recent trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh:

Unfortunately, cultural alliance with the Pontiff is becoming increasingly difficult as Pope Francis insists on embracing bizarre and unhelpful social doctrine that flies in the face of biblical morality. 

Incidentally, I am not referring to Francis’s recent rebuke of President Trump’s acknowledgement of Jerusalem as the rightful capital city of Israel. The Pope registering his “deep concern” over Trump’s actions seemed more overwrought and pandering than they did misplaced.

My real frustration was must recently illustrated in Pope Francis’s trip to the impoverished nations of Myanmar and Bangladesh. There, in countries where minority Muslims are being executed and where his fellow Catholics are under intensifying threat, the Pope spoke to the “real” danger they faced: climate change. Not that anyone should have been surprised at this. 

Remember it was Pope Francis who recently lectured as “stupid” all “climate deniers” who don’t acknowledge the evil inherent in fossil fuel use. He did this while sitting aboard his fossil-fuel guzzling jumbo jet. And remember it was Pope Francis who in the same month where Islamic terrorists killed almost 90 people on the streets of France, almost 30 in a bakery in Bangladesh, and over 320 people shopping in Baghdad, begged the world to join him in prayer for deliverance...from environmental threats to the planet.

But there’s a reason that the Pope’s allegiance to the religion of Warmerism is so much more troublesome. As a man who has interposed himself between man and God, the Pope pretends to be speaking with the authority of Christ. The same Christ who commanded His followers to care for the “least of these.” But Pope Francis’s commitment to warring against fossil fuels, industrialization, and carbon is doing much to imperil the “least of these.” His approach is precisely what is locking millions upon millions of people – from Bangladesh to Myanmar and beyond – in devastating poverty.

It's the same kind of arrogance we see from the UN - the insistence that developing nations leapfrog over the Industrial Revolution and go straight to the solar panels and windmills that are still not economically viable in the developed world.

The current state of the tax bill: fundamental principle is completely absent

Jibran Khan at NRO examines the current state of Congress's attempt to score a win before the year is over.

Having utterly failed at repealing and replacing the "A"CA, Capitol Hill Republicans put on a big dog-and-pony show for the public about the earnestness of their intent to drastically revamp the tax code, make it simpler and ease the burden on the middle class.

What a load of jive:

he Senate GOP’s tax bill was passed in the middle of the night last Friday. By the end of the process, the bill had changed considerably from the one that had been approved in committee before the Thanksgiving recess — and even from what had been imagined over the course of the week’s discussions. It also seems that the rushed late-night calculations of the amendments’ fiscal effects were off the mark, on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. And developments this week suggest that the deal-making process was not as stable as assumed.

Senate leadership made last-minute arrangements with seemingly every group of dissenters except for fiscal and family-oriented conservatives. From a political perspective, perhaps this made sense: All the deficit hawks but Bob Corker backtracked on their skeptical statements, with some — James Lankford, for example — dropping back into the delusion of “self-funding tax cuts.” Meanwhile, Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, perhaps because they had won an earlier concession on the child tax credit, did not threaten to vote against the bill; leadership could safely ignore their amendment boosting the credit further, and did.

We still don't have a firm answer on whether states with high state and local tax rates are going to get their subsidization by the rest of the country cut off. The alternative minimum tax has not been killed.  Apparently, Susan Collins is willing to kill the "A"CA individual mandate in exchange for the passage of two bills that will continue to "fund" the "A"CA. Jeff Flake apparently insisting on a quid pro quo: his support for the tax bill in exchange for a path to amnesty for illegal aliens.

There's still lots of talk about how tax cuts to any particular income bracket might "pay for themselves," but no one seems too alarmed anymore about the $20 trillion-plus debt that is going to cause an economic train wreck in the not-all-that-distant future.

I'm not nearly so interested in any of these pet causes of Senators or interest groups individually considered as I am the sum total of them.

Damn it, basic human freedom, such as the right to keep what is yours, ought to be driving this whole process. 

The dismaying irony of post-American legislating is that it is actually easier to come up with huge and convoluted bills than it is to be driven by principle and come up with something short, elegantly simple, and uniformly applicable to all citizens.

Those who want to cut deals to protect their pet concerns, and those who pay heed to the clamoring of interest groups because they see and hear dollars and votes when they meet with them have the "you-don't-understand-what-we-have-to-consider" argument on their side.

There's no point in "throwing all the bums out" until an understanding of the basic relationship between the individual and the state takes root in our society. You can't count on post-America's educational system to be of any help on that score.

It starts with effectively arguing the case for liberty on the one-on-one level. Any of us who cherish freedom must never pass up an opportunity to clarify what a right is, and what a right is not. The current state of the tax effort is such a mess because there are people - legislators, their staffers, think-tank wonks, foundations and activists - who insist on policy skewed in favor of things to which there is no right.

The American story tells us one thing: It requires courage to defend freedom. Those with excuses for compromising freedom do not take kindly to challenge.

We can't expect to see demonstrations of spine in the halls of Congress if we don't exhibit spine in any and every conversation amongst ourselves in which the subject of freedom arises.

And any position along the lines of "the two chambers might be able to get together on a conference-committee hammering-out of a final version if a little more is trimmed here, or boosted there" is not only useless but harmful. If some final product has nothing to do with what the ostensible original intent was, there will have been no point to any of this.

Currently, we are paying these people to waste their time.

The tricky question of whether to send athletes to the 2018 Winter Olympics

The games start in a couple of months. The State Department is saying that all precautions will be taken to ensure US teams' safety, but consider:

the administration needs to first quantify just how dangerous it might be. Not only do we have our own State Department declaring that the risk of war with North Korea is growing every day, but Kim Jong-un has already called war unavoidable. Sure, that might be written off as the usual rhetoric between hostile adversaries, but to deny the possibility is to defy reality. And let’s just assume for a moment that Kim is actually crazy enough to launch a first strike. We already know he’d love the chance to take out most of Seoul, but when you add in thousands of famous athletes from most of the western nations he despises it’s got to be a tempting target.

Keep in mind that Russia has already been booted from the games… sort of. (They may still be sending some competitors, but without their flag.) I have to wonder whether they might believe they’re dodging a bullet (literally) if they don’t show up at all. Back home in America, we already have people suggesting that maybe it’s time to pull the families of U.S. military members out of South Korea. It may be seen as yet another provocative move, but frankly, I think it’s worth considering.

Tough call.

Wednesday roundup

I tried to see Jeff Flake as a guy who acted smartly on his principles, I really did. He started out his legislative stint as a House member with a laudable voting record. Even after things began getting shaky when he moved to the Senate, I held out hope. Then came his book, Conscience of a Conservative (an unfortunate title; couldn't he have come up with something that didn't cause confusion  given the precedent of Barry Goldwater's book of the same name?). His enlisting of Bob Dole and John McCain as his examples of principled Republicans was nearly the last straw for me.

Well, the last straw is now upon us: Flake has written an albeit symbolic $100 check to Roy Moore's opponent, fetal-American-death-relishing monster Doug Jones. While Hot Air's Allapundit, in the piece to which I've linked, devotes much space to the hypocrisy of Moore fans, there's no way to spin this favorably. Flake is now dead to me. He needs to just slink out of public life and find something obscure to do that doesn't throw any more monkey wrenches into the nation's politics.

I'd love to find out that this whole series of tweets compiled in this HuffPo piece is a conspiracy of parody, but unless we find out that that is the case, this is just a case of cultural-rot perpetuation by a bunch of dweebs with no idea how to productively contribute to society:

On Saturday, HuffPost published a hit job on a 53-year-old movie, based on nothing more than unthinking animus (a.k.a. "bigotry") toward a popular children's tale. HuffPost accused the film of racism, sexism, homophobia, and every sort of bigotry — not realizing that the movie actually condemns these attitudes toward "misfits."

The HuffPost video featured a montage of tweets attacking the 1964 film "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" -- and attacking the movie's "sins." It concluded with a tweet from user Cass Martino: "Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable."

As usual, the cultural-vibrancy-haters have no sense of historical context:

What "Rudolph" presents as vindication, HuffPost decides to view as oppression. In this context, no amount of praise for formerly "marginalized" people is enough to make up for the original marginalization. The validation of having bullies apologize is nothing to these SJWs. The whole system has to be upended.
In short, these SJWs have ruined an uplifting children's tale by imposing their view of ultimate societal upheaval on a story about "misfit toys." Rather than watching the film and understanding the message as it was intended, these liberal Scrooges cherry-picked the worst parts of the film, divorced them from context, and yelled, "Bigotry! Racism, Homophobia!" (As they do for the Constitution, American history, and often Donald Trump.)
Had they taken a second to think about the movie in its context, they would have realized that the 1964 film was a cartoon version of a song written in 1949. The song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was adapted from a popular children's book.
It tells a story of a reindeer being born "different" — with the shiny, red, glowing nose. Despite bullying (a constant feature of childhood in any era), Rudolph goes on to prove himself by saving Christmas with his beacon-light nose. He receives the ultimate vindication, "You'll go down in history [like George Washington]!"

The movie adapted the song, and because it was doing so, the film had to show various forms of bullying. But the bullying was not the point — the vindication was the point. The moral was to teach both bullies and kids who were bullied that being different can be a good thing, and that bullying is wrong. 

In other words, it was a social justice warrior movie, long before there were social justice warriors — or rather, it was what social justice warriors should be.

John Stossel on how far the New York Times has sunk.

The main point of Ben Shapiro's latest NRO piece - that "we've stopped thinking of ourselves as citizens and begun to think of ourselves as subjects" - is important, but so is the instance he uses to substantiate it: the Conyers dynasty in Detroit:

The city of Detroit shall not go without a Conyers. The Old Man appointed his son, 27-year-old John Conyers III, to run in his stead. Conyers III was a longtime defender of his father: “It’s very unfortunate to see him fight so long for so many people and to automatically have the allegations assumed to be true.” Unfortunately, a few years back, Conyers III also tweeted about his dad’s penchant for the ladies: “My dad is a f***ing player and reckless as hell! He just got at this doods wife super low-key.”

Yeah.

John will run against grand-nephew and state senator Ian Conyers in an internecine war that could end with John locking Ian up in the Tower of London and then having him assassinated, if history holds true to form.

Then there's Mrs. Conyers:

The king’s queen, Monica, served on the Detroit City Council — before she was convicted of bribery for taking cash in exchange for voting on a $47 million waste contract. The king mysteriously reversed his opposition to that project; according to Judicial Watch, in 2009 “Conyers even wrote the federal government a letter supporting the plan and pushing for the permit transfers required for the hazardous waste injection well in the city of Romulus, Michigan. The letter, addressed to the Environmental Protection Agency, explained that ‘many things had changed’ in favor of the project since he stood in opposition to it.” 

Great piece by humorist Robert Cormack at Medium on the self-sabotage that aspiring writers who don't like to read impose on themselves.

Another huge and destructive fire ripping through the Lost Angeles area. Pray.

The Jerusalem announcement: a no-brainer

I'm going to quote at considerable length from David Harsanyi's piece at The Federalist about this, because it says all that needs to be said about it:

Later today Donald Trump is expected to make a largely symbolic but important gesture, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — not as an international capital or shared capital or capital in flux or as any of the other fantasies anti-Israel types have harbored since 1967. The most consequential long-term benefit of the move is that it begins to undercut a myth that’s stood for years.

Palestinian leadership might have deluded their own people for decades, but there is no conceivable peace deal that includes a truly divided Jerusalem. Like the Right of Return, the notion that a part of Jerusalem proper will be handed over to an antagonistic government, much less the remnants of the PLO and their on-and-off political partners Hamas, is a fantasy. This is not a radical Likud position, it’s one of the few issues that all major political parties, left and right, agree on in Israel.

Jerusalem, after all, is not some concocted modern capital. The place itself is the affirmation of the Jewish claim on Israel. Consequently, the coming protests over Trump’s move are not merely about a city, they are about challenging the right of Israel to exist — a self-destructive position that most Palestinians still embrace. This isn’t new. There has been a destructive effort within the Muslim world — although it has been taken up by others, including the United Nations — to deny the religious and historic connection between the city and the Jews. Moving the embassy, even if it entails nothing more than hanging a sign on a new building, is a pushback against attack on an ally.

That is, if you still view Israel as a close ally. Most do. Over the past 30 years, in fact, politicians keep telling voters that an undivided Jerusalem is the capital of Israel then doing nothing about it once they’re elected — and not some of them, but virtually all of them.

And the money's already there for the move. In 1995, Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the the Jerusalem Embassy Act.

None of this is to say Trump is some kind of visionary or hero for the announcement. He's merely following through on what nearly all US presidents and legislators have stated as their position for decades.

When Lady Justice sets down her scales so she can peek over her blindfold

It's not a super-frequent topic here at LITD, but some space has been given to the general question of the extent to which the DoJ and the FBI might be tainted by ideology, partisan tribalism, and / or career ambition.

In particular, I've looked at what can be ascertained about James Comey's character and personality from his record, his testimony before Congress, his writings and the way he comports himself publicly. Until the last couple of years, he enjoyed the respect of a number of respectable people. One doesn't get any inkling of brashness or cockiness in him. Without digressing into a rehash of the details surrounding his handling of the Clinton email situation, it appears he was leaned on, hard enough to show very confounding behavior at the July 4, 2016 press conference. That' of course, leads to a whole discussion of who did the leaning. Again, we'll not digress here, but recall who the president was at the time, and that the Democrats' presidential candidate was part of a notoriously hardball political machine.

Then there is Robert Mueller. His story is not exactly one of hoisting himself solely by his own bootstraps - he was born with the advantage of a well-credentialed family tree - but he set a pattern of remarkable accomplishment early on. Star athlete at his prep school, a Purple Heart for his Vietnam service, prosecutions of Manuel Noriega, the Pan Am Flight 102 Lockerbie bombers, and John Gotti.

During his tenure as FBI director, he appears to have been motivated by principle in his opposition to extension of the Terrorist Surveillance Program's domestic-wiretapping feature, to the point of being willing to submit his resignation if it came to that. (He was joined in that stance by the above-mentioned Comey.) He came nose-to-nose with President Bush on the matter of his agency not rounding up more stateside terrorists than it did. One can make legitimate arguments for both points of view in that standoff, but Mueller's position was that suspects had to be known to have committed an arrest-worthy offense.

Cut to the present, and what is becoming known about the team Mueller has assembled as special prosecutor. (LITD is not fond of the whole notion of special prosecutors, but, again, in the interest of focus, we'll reserve that discussion for another day.)

The fact is, it is comprised in significant part by partisan Democrats who have it in for Trump.

Most egregiously, there is the case of one Andrew Weissmann:

A lot of questions have been raised about the partisanship of Mueller’s team of attorneys. Nine of fifteen are known to be Democrat donors, apparently apolitical and GOP talent is hard to come-by. In particular, one guy, Andrew Weissmann has drawn a lot of attention. Not only is he an Obama and DNC donor, he has a reputation of being perfectly willing to destroy the lives of innocent people in order to claim a scalp:

Weissmann, as deputy and later director of the Enron Task Force, destroyed the venerable accounting firm of Arthur Andersen LLP and its 85,000 jobs worldwide — only to be reversed several years later by a unanimous Supreme Court.

Next, Weissmann creatively criminalized a business transaction between Merrill Lynch and Enron. Four Merrill executives went to prison for as long as a year. Weissmann’s team made sure they did not even get bail pending their appeals, even though the charges Weissmann concocted, like those against Andersen, were literally unprecedented.

Weissmann’s prosecution devastated the lives and families of the Merrill executives, causing enormous defense costs, unimaginable stress and torturous prison time. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the mass of the case.

Weissmann quietly resigned from the Enron Task Force just as the judge in the Enron Broadband prosecution began excoriating Weissmann’s team and the press began catching on to Weissmann’s modus operandi.

By the way, he is replicating this behavior with Paul Manafort. I don’t carry any brief for Manafort (see my coverage of him) but carrying out a pre-dawn, no-knock raid on a white collar suspect and then trying to prevent him from getting bail is just bullying of the type that deserves a righteous ass-whipping.

But more to the point is his enthusiasm for the stance of Obama holdover Sally Yates:

Merely being an egregious ass and a partisan Democrat is not a bar from being a DoJ lawyer, rather in that agency those are features, not bugs. What makes Weissmann stand out is that he’s very obviously an rabid anti-Trump kind of partisan, the kind you’d hire to do damage to the Trump administration and White House if that was your objective.

Case in point. One of the first crises to hit the Trump White House was the issuance of an executive order restricting the ability of people from six failed states and one state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, to travel to the United States. It was dishonestly portrayed as a “travel ban” and a “Muslim ban” but, in reality, if affected a handful of people and was clearly legal. Sally Yates, who was an Obama holdover acting as attorney general until Jeff Sessions could be confirmed. She refused to defend the executive order in court and expressed doubt as to its legality.

Judicial Watch has just received Sally Yates’s email and in it you find all kinds of career Justice people sucking up to her in the most disgusting manner:

The emails, several sent from official Justice Department email addresses, show strong support for Yates, who was fired for disobeying a direct order from the President:

• Thomas Delahanty, then the United States Attorney for Maine wrote: “You are my hero.”

• Liz Aloi, a career service employee and Chief of the Justice Department’s Special Financial Investigations Unit told Yates she was “Inspirational and heroic.”

• Emily Gray Rice, then the U.S. Attorney for New Hampshire and an Obama appointee said: “AAG Yates, thank you, as always, for making us proud. It is truly an honor to work for you.”

• Obama appointee Barbara McQuade, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan told Yates, “Thank you for your courage and leadership. This is wonderful news.”

• DOJ Civil Division Appellate Attorney Jeffrey Clair wrote: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law. The President’s order is an unconstitutional embarrassment and I applaud you for taking a principled stand against defending it.”

There's one particularly noteworthy correspondence in this gush-fest: an email from Weissmann to Yates. Terse, but pungent with praise: " . . . in awe. Thank you so much."

So one of Mueller’s top deputies was “in awe” of Sally Yates for refusing to do her Constitutional duty? And we really think this guy is going to treat the people on the Trump campaign he interacts with as anything but roadkill on his way to damage the Trump administration? Do we really believe he doesn’t carry a personal animus towards Trump for having kicked Yates to the curb? And if private text messages were grounds to kick the now famous Peter Storzok off the investigation team, wouldn’t praising someone fired by Trump for acting illegally using government email raise red flags?

This whole situation is full of arcane palace-intrigue details, and it's coming to this boiling point at the same time as a number of front-burner issues - renewed rising of Mideast tensions, the North Korean threat, the sad and spiritually rotten Alabama Senate race, the continuing revelations about the prevalence of sexual harassment in America, the tax bill making is way through Congress - rightfully claim our attention.

But consider for a moment that what is supposed to be the most impartial department in our federal government is pursuing a special-prosecutor investigation originally set up over supposed Russian collusion with the Trump campaign (a charge for which not one shred of evidence has been found) but now morphing into a sprawling look into all kinds of unrelated matters, and that that investigation team is staffed with rank partisans.

Deep Constitutional questions are before us. If this investigation throws the entire administration off-kilter at a time when the above-mentioned issues are on the national plate, we'll be perilously vulnerable.

That's what's at stake here.

UPDATE: There's another one:

Jeannie Rhee, who was hired by Mueller last summer to work on the probe, was the personal attorney of Ben Rhodes and also represented the Clinton Foundation, Ingraham revealed. "This information will put further pressure on Special Prosecutor Bob Mueller to resign."

Rhee is the third member of the Mueller team this week who has been shown to be brazenly partisan. Two other members of the team have been revealed as highly questionable hires in recent days as well — Peter Strzok, an anti-Trumper who helped exonerate Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Weissmann, an unscrupulous prosecutor who told outgoing acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email that he was "proud" of her for defying President Trump's travel ban.

Rhodes had it in for Michale Flynn over Flynn's opposition to patty-cake with Iran the JCPOA.

Pray for Jack Phillips

As you know, he gets his day in court - as in SCOTUS - today.

This one's huge. On the legal level, it's about freedom. On the cultural level, it's about post-America thrusting up yet another middle finger to God.

He has the best in the business, the Alliance Defending Freedom, representing him.

As anyone being honest with himself or herself knows, the free market handles these situations elegantly, with a win-win for all parties involved. The Christian baker says to the same-sex couple, "I'm sorry, I can't provide this particular kind of cake for you." The couple goes down the street to a baker perfectly willing to provide it, and everyone's happy.

Any attempt to make Phillips bake a same-sex "wedding" cake is sinister in the extreme. If a citizen can't conduct business in accordance with God's law in this country, it truly is post-America.

So pray hard, but remember, even if SCOTUS reaches a decision that plunges us further into darkness, Jesus is still Lord and King.

The geostrategic vulnerability of post-America

Jerry Hendrix, writing at NRO,  has his personal account of attending this year's Reagan National Defense Forum at the Reagan library in Simi Valley, California. His overall set of observations just reinforces my notion that it would be supremely cool to attend that gathering some day. Panel discussions and speakers of the highest caliber.

He ends on somewhat of a downer, though. This nation is not adequately prepared for the world in which it's situated:

Budgets and force readiness were the dual themes that ran throughout the day. Everyone, except Representative Adam Smith (D., Calif.), bemoaned Congress’s inability to overturn the 2011 Budget Control Act. Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer observed that the nearly endless string of continuing resolutions that has characterized the post–Budget Control Act era had cost the Navy and Marine Corps over $4 billion in stop-and-start expenses. Despite a broad consensus among attendees, it was clear that internal disputes with “fiscal hawks” who viewed rising deficits as significant national-security threats in and of themselves were going to block any Republican attempts to do away with the Budget Control Act in the near future. There was a palpable sense of frustration in the room, especially among the Republican members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Despite having a Republican president who wants a larger military, and majorities in the House and the Senate, there was no real sense of energy or forward movement on strengthening the nation’s defense.

Force readiness was the other bogeyman in the room, with speakers from McMaster to former Obama appointee Kathleen Hicks highlighting the need to invest in readiness and modernization. Readiness and modernization, the latter in the form of investments in new “offsetting” capabilities, seem to represent the major hurdles that the Department of Defense needs to clear before it can begin to grow the force. Both seem to suggest false choices, as no real dollar amount has been advanced to answer the question of how much it would cost to achieve high “readiness,” and investments in modernization can coexist with investments in growing the force by following a traditional acquisition strategy consisting of a “high-low” mix. The desire by some to pursue only those high-end capabilities that are viewed as essential to winning the next great-power war carries with it the potential to diminish the day-to-day force that is critical to preserving the peace.

In the end, this year’s Reagan National Defense Forum highlighted the fact that the new administration, despite some irregularities in its strategic messaging, is attempting to reverse the passive strategic course of the past and to chart once again a more assertive role both both here on earth and out in space. However, problems within the legislative budgetary process are threatening to hamper these efforts and could further erode the United States’ position on the global stage. Lastly, there was a general sense of ennui throughout the Forum, a persistent intrusion of the overused boilerplate answers to longstanding problems in various panels, and few conversations containing innovative ideas or an energetic sense of forward motion. Actors within the defense community, and even within the Republican party itself, still seem pitted against each other. At the end of the day, as I stood next to Ronald Reagan’s grave while the sun set behind the western foothills he loved, I came away with the sense that somehow the nation’s defense community was beset by challenges and had accepted just standing still. Reagan would not be pleased.

Gary J. Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, writing at The Weekly Standard, echoes the theme:

Expectations among those serving in the military were that Trump’s plans were Reaganesque in scope.

Yet when President Trump put forward his first budget in March for the 2018 fiscal year, it was anything but. The administration’s budget called for only a 3 percent increase over Obama’s plans for 2018. It was nowhere near the levels required for beginning the defense build-up touted by candidate Trump and, indeed, was more than $100 billion short of what the bipartisan National Defense Panel, co-chaired by William Perry and John Abizaid, had recommended as necessary to match America’s means with its strategic goals.

Why is this the case? Budget stalemate. Various factions can't abide by cuts elsewhere that would "offset" an increase in military spending.

The upshot is that we're instilling a false sense of confidence in those on the front lines of the defense of our nation:

What’s worrisome is not only that when it comes to goals like deterring Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran and defeating Islamist terrorism we’re betting with (military) chips we don’t have, but that we keep telling the men and women of the military that help is on the way when it isn’t. If the nation wants an all-volunteer force that excels at doing its job in all kinds of godforsaken lands, it can’t continue to have its elected officials overlook the state of the military. Going in harm’s way is one thing; going in harm’s way repeatedly with equipment and platforms worn thin by age and use is something else entirely. That experienced pilots, sailors, and soldiers have begun to walk is no surprise given the promises made and the promises not kept by Congress and their commander in chief.

Perhaps if the world were a little less volatile right now, this would be merely concerning rather than flat-out alarming.

The balance sheet for DJT as of early December 2017 is not favorable

I realize that a number of people who basically see things my way are giving the first ten and a half months a pretty good grade, and they've done a commendable job of applying objectivity to arriving at their assessment. Recently, National Review editor Rich Lowry, who oversaw the dedicating of an entire issue of his magazine in the spring of 2016 to opposition to a Trump presidential candidacy, wrote a Politico piece entitled "The Trump Presidency Isn't Nearly As Bad As It Sounds,"  which starts out the way one would expect a Lowry piece on Trump to start:

The president of the United States wakes up some mornings seemingly determined to convince as many people as possible that he’s unsuited to high office.

Fortunately for him, he has a Twitter account allowing him to act on this impulse immediately and without any filter.

He then coins the phrase "presidency on a separate track from his Twitter feed" and makes a compelling case for things going in a way that ought to please any actual three-pillar conservative: judicial appointments, rollback of the Clean Power Plan, and the push for a lower corporate tax rate, to name a few. But he ends on the kind of note that all of us in his camp have to end such observations on: It's mainly by virtue of great people that Trump has surrounded himself with that some good things have been accomplished.

But that piece was published nearly a week ago. Now the line of demarcation between Trump's Twitter life and the policy-level robustness of his administration is not so clear:

A series of tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump about the investigation into contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia prompted concerns on Sunday among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham saying Trump could be wading into “peril” by commenting on the probe.

“I would just say this with the president: There’s an ongoing criminal investigation,” Graham said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” 

“You tweet and comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations at your own peril,” he added.

On Sunday morning, Trump wrote on Twitter that he never asked former FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser - a statement at odds with an account Comey himself has given. 

That tweet followed one on Saturday in which Trump said: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President (Mike Pence) and the FBI.” 

Legal experts and some Democratic lawmakers said if Trump knew Flynn lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and then pressured Comey not to investigate him, that could bolster a charge of obstruction of justice. 

Then there is a column in today's New York Times by Billy Bush, the Access Hollywood  correspondent who conducted the notorious 2005 "grab 'em by the p----" interview with Trump. Many years later, Bush looked into some allegations that Trump was doing more than bloviating during that conversation, and found some pretty detailed substantiation:

Some of what Natasha Stoynoff, Rachel Crooks, Jessica Leeds and Jill Harth alleged involved forceful kissing. Ms. Harth said he pushed her up against a wall, with his hands all over her, trying to kiss her.

“He was relentless,” she said. “I didn’t know how to handle it.” Her story makes the whole “better use some Tic Tacs” and “just start kissing them” routine real. I believe her.

Kristin Anderson said that Mr. Trump reached under her skirt and “touched her vagina through her underwear” while they were at a New York nightclub in the 1990s. That makes the “grab ’em by the pussy” routine real. I believe her.

I suspect a significant portion of the Trump base is going to see names like Lindsey Graham and New York Times and dismiss them as, respectively, a RINO squish and an organ of fake news out of hand. Let us hope that at least some, when honest with themselves, will muster some curiosity about the veracity of all this.

No doubt radio personalities who have succumbed to the raw tribalism that characterizes our age will devote today's programs to the yet another indulgence in the long-knives-of-the-'Establishment'-are-out-for-our-hero theme that makes their output of the last two years so predictable.

Yesterday, I shared a Susan Wright piece at Red State on Facebook about Vice President Pence's lame attempts to portray Trump as a man of sincere and substantive faith during a recent interview on a Christian television network. I hesitated before hitting "post," because I was well aware I was providing fodder for leftists to paint the entire right side of the spectrum in a disparaging light, so conflated has Trumpism become with actual conservatism. Also, the piece comes down pretty hard on Pence for his the way he's compromised what he's always professed to be about as a human being, and, since Pence is an actual conservative, that provides some rich material for the enemy indeed.

I haven't been over there yet this morning to see if anything is going on in the comment thread, but I know I don't regret sharing it.

Lowry, in the course of making his point at Politico, says that the laudable accomplishments are pretty much what we would have seen with a Cruz presidency. Well, yes, which bolsters the point that we could have had a fine 2017 without the social-media baggage that may well cause real trouble for the administration, and the unanswered assertions of a number of women who claim Trump is of a piece with all the lechers whose careers have nosedived in recent weeks.

No, on balance, it doesn't add up to a positive scorecard.

We chose someone whose character is accurately described thusly:

I don’t mean somebody who stumbles. I mean somebody who has built his reputation on being hateful, adulterous, and abusive, and who routinely flaunts arrogance, attacking anyone who doesn’t cater to his whims, showing absolutely no grace or self-control.

I’m talking about someone who works in profanity and disrespect for others. This is not the fruit of a believer . . .

And it's beginning to bleed over into the realm that the water-carriers want to see as impervious to it.

Now, just who is crafting Mideast policy - the State Department or Kushner?

Kushner figures into the post below rather prominently, and the whole matter of his contact with Russians during the transition period a year ago bears watching.

But step back a level and consider what the overall situation is. He and his wife Ivanka are known to lean left of center on enough issues - the Paris Accord, family leave - to merit a left-of-center classification generally. He is a Washington newbie, a product of the New York skyscraper-buyning-and-selling crowd from which his father-in-law comes. And he gets to D.C. and is given this bulging portfolio that includes all kinds of things, including responsibilities that ought to be the purview of the State Department.

I'm speaking in particular of Mideast policy.

Which gets us back to the previous post. He is a practicing Jew, even got his wife to convert. Evidence points to his spearheading an effort a year ago to get major UN players to hold off on a vote condemning Israel for building "settlements" neighborhoods in the greater Jerusalem area.

So what's up with this?

The biggest indicator that Rex Tillerson should probably just walk, due to a lack of respect for his position is the continued existence of Jared Kushner as senior White House adviser.

One of many huge indicators that Jared Kushner is in over his head and that nepotism is really bad policy is the negotiations going on right now between Kushner and the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

So what are they talking about?

According to Bloomberg:

The central goal of the Kushner-Prince Mohammed negotiations, as described by two people with knowledge of the talks, is for an historic agreement featuring the creation of a Palestinian state or territory backed financially by a number of countries including Saudi Arabia, which could put tens of billions of dollars toward the effort.

A lasting Middle East peace treaty has been a U.S. goal for decades, and at the start of his administration Trump assigned the 36-year-old Kushner to head up the effort to make it happen.

Because nepotism…

Meanwhile, Tillerson is [rightly] freaking out. For starters, they’re not keeping the nation’s top diplomat in the loop. This is Kushner taking off on his own, doing his own thing. Daddy Trump gave him the green light.

Secondly, this is an incredibly sensitive issue, and that region is volatile, on its good days. Tillerson is afraid Kushner is going to bungle it so bad that all hell breaks loose.

And, once again, DJT's penchant for shooting off his mouth proves to have lasting and counterproductive reverberations:

Tillerson doesn’t believe Trump is even being informed about what Kushner is doing.
Kushner has grown close to the Saudi prince, so there’s this fear that he’s promised him things that he doesn’t have the authority to promise.

The State Department officials’ skepticism about the Middle East discussions also reveals ongoing frustration at the president’s decision to go around them and the U.S. diplomatic corps he frequently disparages. Instead, Trump placed delicate peace negotiations in the hands of Kushner, who has no experience in diplomacy and little background in the complexities of one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Yet Trump, who has long spoken of Mideast peace as the ultimate trophy for a career dealmaker, has shown unwavering faith in his son-in-law’s ability to deliver.“If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” the president told Kushner onstage at a black-tie event celebrating his inauguration in January. “All my life I’ve been hearing that’s the toughest deal to make, but I have a feeling Jared is going to do a great job.”

I don’t know if that’s more naïve, reckless, ignorant, or a dangerous combination of all three. It most certainly shows an alarming lack of understanding of the region.

But, hey. Nepotism. 

Yesterday, both Tillerson and Trump reacted dismissively to published reports that Tillerson is on his way out. But do you really think the former CEO of Exxon Mobil is going to be willingly reduced to playing cleanup crew for a skyscraper-buyer who is winging it in the conduct of some of the world's most volatile relationships?

The big question presently before us: Was the outreach to UN members illegal?

Everybody has the Flynn guilty plea on the front burner. It's the big dog of the hour at Memeorandum. A lot of people and outlets are preoccupied with the question of how vulnerable Jared Kushner is.

Kushner, it appears, told Flynn to contact the big players at try UN and persuade them to hold off on voting on the resolution condemning Israel for building "settlements" in "occupied areas" - in late 2016, when the previous administration was still in power. It further appears that Kushner's father-in-law was on board with this outreach effort.

I think Susan Wright at Red State focuses on the more important question:

The big question now seems to be: Was it illegal?

Trump had already won the election. This was the transition period, with only a month left to the horrendous Obama administration.
As a final knife in the back to our Middle East allies [sic], Israel, Obama instructed his ambassador to the UN to abstain from the vote – something that hasn’t been done since 1980.
Before that happened, however, Kushner reportedly told Flynn to get every ambassador or foreign minister from a nation represented on the UN Security Council he could reach and ask them to delay or vote against the resolution.
It is also reported that this was under coordination with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

For now it’s unclear what to make of all of this. Lying to the FBI is a felony and always a serious matter. We also know from Flynn’s “statement of the offense” that he lied to FBI agents as the bureau was investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and any links between Russia and the Trump campaign in this period. Nonetheless, nothing in the Flynn plea sheds any light on whether the Trump campaign actually colluded with Russia to influence the election.

So is that all there is?

ABC News reported Friday that Flynn is prepared to tell Mueller’s team that Trump had instructed him to make contact with Russia during the campaign itself. If those contacts involved the emails the U.S. intelligence community charges Russia stole from leading Democrats, then Mueller will have uncovered evidence of actual collusion between the president and a foreign adversary during the election. Impeachment could then be in the cards.

The reports coming out earlier today were that Flynn is saying Trump asked him to set up a backchannel line of communication with Russia, in order to work together on stopping ISIS in Russia.

One stretch is possibly the Logan Act, which makes it illegal for a private citizen to contact a foreign government, attempting to undermine the foreign policies of a sitting president.

A Logan Act investigation would explain the bureau’s interest in Flynn’s conversations about the U.N. Security Council resolution on Israel. This is what Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Friday: “This shows a Trump associate negotiating with the Russians against U.S. policy and interests before Donald Trump took office and after it was announced that Russia had interfered in our election. That’s a stunning revelation and could be a violation of the Logan Act, which forbids unauthorized U.S. citizens from negotiating with a foreign power.”

This thing seems to be branching out in a lot of little tributaries. Will it ultimately lead to a bigger pond, with bigger fish?

Questionable. 

It appears that Kushner, an at-least-somewhat-devout Jew, wanted to get a jump on heading off a late-in-the-game anti-Israel move by the outgoing administration. But there's the related issue of the degree and nature of Russian meddling in last year's US election. Did one or more of these transition people work to enlist Russia in this effort knowing full well the concurrent adversarial move regarding US politics?

One to watch as further unfoldings come along.

The GOP tax bill in its current form: still not simple enough for LITD, but far more consideration-worthy than the NYT wants you to believe

There are a lot of good things in it: the Rubio-Lee child tax credit, reduction of the corporate tax rate, removing federal-level subsidy of high state-level income tax.

But it's still awfully arcane. And that's because no one in Washington has the spine to take an approach driven by basic prioritization of freedom. The starting premise ought to be that every penny of an American citizen's money is his or hers, and that government at any level ought to have to puke all over itself to justify forcibly taking any of it.

(There's going to be a certain kind of reader who, at this point, is going to be saying, "You sound like a wild-eyed libertarian." My rejoinder is that libertarians are actually spot on when it comes to the matter of taxation. If one doesn't cling to principle as the storm gales of special interests whip and toss one about, one will fly away and never be able to find that principle again.)

But then there is the New York Times spin on the bill, as discussed by Michael Barone:

"The Republican tax bill hurtling through Congress is increasingly tilting the United States tax code to benefit wealthy Americans." That's the beginning of a 37-word first sentence in a stage-setting front-page story in The New York Times on the tax bill under consideration in the Senate this week.

It's a nice illustration of creatively phrased advocacy journalism. "Hurtling" suggests irrational, uncontrolled, threatening movement; "tilting" suggests abandoning upstanding fairness; spelling out "the United States tax code" suggests an ominous attack on a respected national institution. And all this "to benefit wealthy Americans."

This is less reportage than it is advocacy journalism, written to advance the argument, with which many people agree, that Republican tax bills are harmful because they make federal taxation less progressive. But it's also an argument against any tax cut at any time. After all, if you start off with a progressive system that imposes higher rates on high earners and doesn't tax low earners at all -- as is the case with the current federal income tax -- then every tax cut takes that shape.

Acela-Corridor pointy-heads take it as a given that the leviathan state is entitled to a given portion of a citizen's assets, a portion much higher than what is required to finance government's constitutionally-specified functions.

The Grey Lady's arrogance is once again on full display.

The Kate Steinle case verdict - initial thoughts

I'm not attorney, nor am I a forensics expert, and there are hard questions in this matter.

We can, though, at this point, distill the voluminous amount of fact to a few conclusions:

• Zarate had been deported five times before.
• He had a drug history, but no record of violent crime.
• The SIG Sauer is designed to fire within a split second
• The bullet ricocheted off the ground before hitting Steinle.
• Whether he committed a murder and what degree thereof depends on an accurate parsing of his motive.
• Whatever his thought process was in those seconds before the gun went off, San Francisco's sanctuary-city policy bears much of the culpability for this tragedy.