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Ruth King

Christie Snags Endorsement of Top N.H. Paper, But Will It Matter? By Bridget Johnson

New Hampshire’s largest newspaper picked from a crowded field to anoint their pick for the first-in-the-nation GOP primary, but didn’t leave the editorial board’s losers unscathed in announcing their favorite.

The Union-Leader endorsement might give a shot to the campaign of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s polling at seventh in New Hampshire but is focusing his attention on the early state 10 weeks away from the vote.

“As a U.S. attorney and then a big-state governor, he is the one candidate who has the range and type of experience the nation desperately needs,” wrote the paper’s publisher, Joseph McQuaid.

“We don’t need another fast-talking, well-meaning freshman U.S. senator trying to run the government. We are still seeing the disastrous effects of the last such choice. Chris Christie is a solid, pro-life conservative who has managed to govern in liberal New Jersey, face down the big public unions, and win a second term. Gov. Christie can work across the aisle, but he won’t get rolled by the bureaucrats. We don’t need as President some well-meaning person from the private sector who has no public experience.”

White House Tries to Have First Word on Visa Waiver ‘Enhancements’ By Bridget Johnson

The Obama administration tried to defuse growing bipartisan discontent with the visa waiver program by announcing enhancements to the program that eases travel from Europe.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Dem on the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced days after the Paris terror attacks that she and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) would be introducing a bill after Thanksgiving to crack down on what she called “the soft underbelly of our national security policies.”

The visa waiver program allows 90 days of travel visa-free to the United States from 38 countries, including European terrorist hotspots such as Belgium. In its lobbying corner: business and tourism industries. Some 20 million travelers use the program to arrive visa-free in the U.S. each year.

Feinstein and Flake quickly got to work crafting a bill to make “several changes” to the program, including the requirement that anyone who has traveled to Iraq or Syria in the past five years must apply for a visa through the traditional process of an interview at a U.S. embassy or consulate.

$450,000 Federal Grant Went to Make Climate-Change Video Game By Bridget Johnson

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has taken up the task of chronicling government waste since notorious pork-fighter Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) retired, today revealed a nearly half-million-dollar video game produced for climate-change education.

The Climate Change Narrative Game Education (CHANGE) is being developed by researchers at the University of South Florida and piloted at Hillsborough County high schools. It received a nearly $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“CHANGE’s goal is to help high school students learn complex Global Climate Change science by making it personally relevant and understandable,” says the USF description of the game, which uses “scientifically realistic text narratives about future Florida residents” about 50-100 years into the future and “simulations & games based on scientific data to help students learn principles of GCC so students can experience and try to cope with potential long term effect of GCC via role-play and science-based simulation.”

In his Waste Report today, Paul slammed the project as “a video game aimed at indoctrinating kids into the climate change way of thinking.”

Hate Rhetoric Spurs U. of Chicago Student to Try to Avenge Police Killing of Chicago Teen By Rick Moran

A University of Chicago engineering student was arrested for making online threats against the school’s students and faculty.

Jabari Dean’s motive was to exact revenge for the killing of 17 year old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer who shot the teen 16 times.

This is my only warning. At 10 a.m. on Monday mourning (sic) I am going to the campus quad of the University of Chicago. I will be armed with a M-4 Carbine and 2 Desert Eagles all fully loaded. I will execute aproximately (sic) 16 white male students and or staff, which is the same number of time (sic) Mcdonald (sic) was killed.

He also threatened to kill white policemen.

“I then will die killing any number of white policemen that I can in the process. This is not a joke. I am to do my part to rid the world of the white devils. I expect you to do the same,” the post read.

The school was shut down in response to the threat:

Climate Change: Last Year’s Fad Goes to Paris :Roger Simon

Someone should tell Barack Obama and all the potential scavengers attempting to make a haul at COP-21 in Paris this week — global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is over.

Any runway model can tell you — Paris is for new fashions. Not last year’s retreads. Climate change is so 2009!

Only the neo-Leninist “useful idiots” on the New York Times editorial board still believe in it. The American public certainly doesn’t. Ninety-seven percent now disbelieve it — or, more accurately, put it far on the back burner. Yes, that’s the same number we used to have shoved down on our throats as the percentage of scientists who supposedly believed in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. That proved to be absurd. Yet still the UN persists with its annual fiesta for moral narcissists, almost always in a luxe venue best accessed by carbon-spewing corporate jets.

Well, where better than Paris? Just watch the cholesterol. And don’t worry about ISIS. They know what’s worth attacking and it’s not this utter balderdash. (At least people pay attention to a soccer game and a rock concert.)

Not even Stalin during the days of Trofim Lysenko tried to pull off something so scandalous (and anti-science!) as the global warming scam. And good old Joe made nowhere near as much money for his lies as Al Gore — the D student in geology — did by running around declaring “The ice is melting! The seas are rising! The storms are raging!” thereby netting himself one billion dollars and an Oscar. That the seas never rose and the ice never melted and the hurricanes didn’t even happen, in fact literally stopped, is beside the point. (Well, maybe that last fact is some sort of climate change.) People felt good about themselves. They believed in Mother Earth, even if they didn’t have anything else to believe in — more likely because they didn’t have anything else to believe in.

Axis of Sophomores: Obama-Hillary-Kerry By James Arlandson

Sophomore literally means “wise fool.”

Though they’re wise in their own eyes, the title’s three leftists – even former Secretary of State Clinton – own America’s diminishment and the predictable subsequent chaos around the world.

Skipping over Cuba and Asia, here’s your evidence that they act foolishly in the Middle East and Central Asia.

1. Hillary’s private email server while secretary of state shows bad judgment.

One exception to our Middle East focus – this folly has gone around the globe.

How dumb can she be?

Be sure that China and Russia and any number of countries have hacked it and now possess compromising secrets about her. This may (and should) disqualify her from the White House.

2. The worst failure: overthinking, peacenik Obama campaigned on withdrawing military from Iraq and did so. Now ISIS has swamped the zone.

This is what happened in Vietnam. We withdrew, and the North overwhelmed and slaughtered countless people in the South. Kerry has a history of bad foreign policy decisions.

Now the Syrian refugees (and others) are naturally streaming into better places. Safe havens in the area would have been adequate and less costly until the conflict cooled down.

Let’s figure out this ISIS swamp by using the logic of history and our knowledge of Islam.

The Pea of Victimization Under Twenty Campus Mattresses By Richard L. Cravatts

As campuses across the country are roiled in paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, groups of black students, perhaps inspired and emboldened by the anarchistic successes at University of Missouri, have formed coalitions and presented elaborate, and breathtakingly audacious, lists of demands which they have nailed to the doors of their respective university administrations.

An ever-growing list of these remarkably outrageous demands is even being archived at a site, The Demands.org, and which, as of this week, comprised the juvenile manifestos of groups on over 60 campuses, including calls for removals of college presidents (as happened at University of Missouri, as the most conspicuous and significant example), the renaming of buildings and schools named for racists and other moral reprobates (as happened at Princeton and indignation over its former president, Woodrow Wilson), and various similar calls for increased recruitment of minority faculty and students, enhanced centers and facilities for minority students, increased financial aid to “students of color” and other underrepresented groups, and a litany of other minority-centric benefits and amenities.

An Obvious, Unused Home For Refugees The Arabian Peninsula’s oil-rich nations are oddly absent in talks about where those fleeing Syria can go. By Douglas J. Feith

Ten thousand Syrian refugees should be brought to the U.S., President Obama says, because that’s “who we are.” Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, have used similar language to explain America’s obligation. More than half of the nation’s state governors have objected. On Nov. 20, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives voted, in effect, to block the administration’s resettlement plan on security grounds.

While the debate rages in the U.S., and as Europe struggles to cope with refugees streaming north, too little attention has been directed to the region where the refugees could best start life anew: the Arabian Peninsula and its Arabic-speaking oil-rich countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Approximately 4.3 million Syrian civil-war refugees are now in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, and registered with the United Nations. Vast camps attest to the refuge these countries have provided even though they struggle without the oil wealth of their neighbors.

Chris Christie’s Second Wind Long before the ISIS strike on Paris, he was making the hard arguments on terror.By William McGurn

Think of Chris Christie as one of 14 Republicans vying for the presidential nomination and the odds appear insurmountable. But think of him as a defensive lineman with a talent for stripping the ball from an opposing quarterback and the race now becomes far more interesting.

Back in the October CNBC debate, the quarterback was Jeb Bush, who fumbled when asked whether the feds should regulate fantasy football. Mr. Christie gave the answer Mr. Bush should have: “Fantasy football? We have ISIS and al Qaeda attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football?”

Cue to Paris, where world leaders are meeting this week to discuss . . . climate change. This time the hapless quarterback is President Obama, who declares the conference a show of “resolve” against Islamic State terrorists.

“This is the president once again living in his fantasy world rather than the world as it actually is,” says Mr. Christie, calling in from the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “He really believes that folks are worried about climate change when what they really care about now is the Islamic State and Syria and terrorism.”

Liberalism’s Imaginary Enemies In Paris, it’s easier to battle a climate crisis than confront jihadists on the streets. By Bret Stephens

Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.

Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy. Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity. The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” But the line gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots.

The campus-rape epidemic—in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault—is an imaginary enemy. Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia, or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about an alleged sexual assault at Harvard Law School. The real question is: If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school? They do because there is no epidemic. But the campus-rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.