WALTER RUSSELL MEAD:

“…President Trump’s abandonment of democracy promotion and human rights is among the most striking of his departures from the post-Cold War American foreign-policy consensus. To the despair and fury of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike, Mr. Trump often appears determined to conduct American diplomacy as if human rights abroad were not a concern.

But the human-rights recession in U.S. foreign policy was already under way when the president took office. It isn’t hard to see why: Efforts to base America’s foreign policy on human rights and democracy hadn’t been yielding their desired results for some time.

Think back to 2011, when President Obama knew where the arc of history was headed and planned to steer American policy accordingly. As the Arab Spring toppled Hosni Mubarak, Ben Rhodes told reporters the administration believed “there is not going to be a return to the way things were in Egypt.” The people had spoken, tyranny was broken, and Egyptian democracy was here to stay.

Those were heady times. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was creating an “Islamist democracy” in Turkey. Aung San Suu Kyi was being compared to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela for her reformist advocacy in Burma.

Also in 2011, the “international community” proposed a new concept to change the way the world worked: the “responsibility to protect.” The U.S. intervention in Libya, we were told, established a new principle in international law that dictators could no longer massacre their people with impunity.

This sunny worldview couldn’t long withstand the cold realities of geopolitics. After Libya, Mr. Obama’s appetite for human-rights interventions diminished abruptly. Here he was reflecting public sentiment. Americans still believed in human rights and democracy, but they had lost confidence in the ability of policy experts to advance these principles effectively on the world stage.

Meanwhile, the rise of powerful states actively hostile to open societies changed the international calculus. American human-rights sanctions mean less when Russia and China stand ready to lend autocrats a hand. And the U.S. cannot, for example, simultaneously undermine the military leaders of Thailand and ask them to help limit China’s influence.

In a world of heightened geopolitical competition, Wilsonian idealism began to seem at best a distraction and at worst an obstacle to sound strategic thinking. By 2016 many Americans were tired of spending money and sometimes blood on humanitarian interventions and democracy initiatives that rarely went well. This is one reason Mr. Trump, whose “America First” sloganeering seemed to some voters like a refreshing burst of common sense, overthrew both the Republican and Democratic establishments in 2016. The neoconservatives and liberal internationalists who staffed previous administrations were sidelined. The president delights in ostentatiously rejecting their advice.

But pure realpolitik is a strategic dead end. While the mix of overreach and underthink that characterized both parties’ Wilsonian foreign-policy consensus has been rightly repudiated, American foreign policy can’t operate without a moral component. To attract and hold allies, the U.S. must stand for something higher than its own wealth and power, and “Make America Great Again” plays better in Des Moines than Dusseldorf. Henry Kissinger learned in the 1970s that a democratic society cannot sustain a foreign policy that does not defer in some way to its people’s moral aspirations. The Khashoggi affair underscores this enduring truth.

Already, human-rights concerns are insinuating themselves back into the Trump agenda. China’s sins are not limited to mercantilist trade policies and intellectual-property theft. The ugly persecution of minority religious and ethnic groups, the suppression of dissent, and the bullying of smaller nations are also part of the American indictment. U.S. denunciations of human-rights violations in countries like China, Venezuela and Iran ring hollow unless Americans are seen to honor the standards we demand of others.

That said, the human-rights and democracy lobbies need to use their time-out wisely. Mistakes in foreign policy are unavoidable; the question is whether one learns from them. The Wilsonians need to develop a full and serious account of what went wrong over the past 20 years, then put forward a more modest and realistic approach to the moral goals that remain a necessary part of America’s role in the world…”

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GEORGE NEUMAYR:

“…The Comey-Mueller investigation into Trumpworld has proceeded like a Soviet show trial from the start, complete with confessions to crimes its targets didn’t commit. As they brag about these extracted pleas, Mueller and Comey sound less like guardians of democracy than the corrupt commissars of yesteryear, whose victims, as Pravda would duly report, had “incriminated themselves.” Mueller and Comey don’t have Pravda, but they do have CNN, which routinely trots out confirmed perjurer James Clapper to gush about the rectitude of their work. Without the slightest bit of embarrassment, CNN gives a platform to such monumental liars as Clapper to lecture Americans on the gravity of Michael Flynn’s “lying.”

The insufferable fraud Jim Sciutto, whose ludicrously mannered anchorman-ish style conceals his status as a former Obama political appointee, often interviews other Obama political appointees about the awfulness of Michael Flynn. All these weasels spent the Obama years lying their heads off. Yet now they play the shocked innocents, wondering how such a seasoned soldier and spy could do something as low as providing incomplete answers to FBI agents. Oh my, where could an Obama-era spy have learned such evasiveness? Whatever dishonesty Flynn exhibited, it couldn’t have exceeded the dishonesty of his questioners, whose account of the Flynn interview has been marked by nothing if not politicized fiddling, corrupt omissions, and after-the-fact duplicity.

Who interviewed Flynn? That pillar of probity, Peter Strzok, the agent who vowed to “stop” Trump’s candidacy and then spent hours before Congress lying about such biased texts. Every last Obama administration official connected to the Flynn affair is a busted liar, starting with Comey, who sent out perjurer Clapper to deny that the FBI had spied on the Trump campaign even as warrants to spy on Trump Tower sat on his desk…”

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Funny, worth clicking over.

“…From his basement in upstate New York, Herbert MacDonell launched modern bloodstain-pattern analysis, persuading judge after judge of its reliability. Then he trained hundreds of others.

Its path — the steady case-by-case, decision-by-decision acceptance of a new forensic science by the justice system — is one that’s rarely, if ever, been retraced. But it reveals the startling vulnerability of judges, and juries, to forensics techniques, both before, and after, they’ve been debunked.

Although the reliability of blood-spatter analysis was never proven or quantified, its steady admission by courts rarely wavered, even as the technique, along with other forensic sciences, began facing increasing scrutiny.

In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the whole discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.”

Still, judges continued allowing spatter experts to testify.

Subsequent research, funded by the Department of Justice, raised questions about experts’ methods and conclusions. But little changed.

All along, attorneys like Bankston continued challenging the admission of bloodstain-pattern analysts. But they came to learn that a forensic discipline, once unleashed in the system, cannot easily be recalled…”

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“…A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640…”

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Antitrust Issues?

PETER BRIGHT:

“…This is a company that, time and again, has tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google’s online services when used in conjunction with Google’s browser, consolidating Google’s market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage. Each time, pushback has come from the wider community, and so far, at least, the result has been industry standards that wrest control from Google’s hands. This action might already provoke doubts about the wisdom of handing effective control of the Web’s direction to Google, but at least a case could be made that, in the end, the right thing was done.

But other situations have had less satisfactory resolutions. YouTube has been a particular source of problems. Google controls a large fraction of the Web’s streaming video, and the company has, on a number of occasions, made changes to YouTube that make it worse in Edge and/or Firefox. Sometimes these changes have improved the site experience in Chrome, but even that isn’t always the case.

A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge’s fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge’s battery-life performance and took it below Chrome’s. The change didn’t improve Chrome’s performance and didn’t appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome’s battery life was actually superior to Edge’s. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail…”

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 California Drops Plan To Tax Texting.

Comment of the day. Ed Driscoll:

SACRAMENTO HAS A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF DERANGEMENT

Welcome change.

“…Since his death in August, the one-time presidential candidate has been eulogized as a statesman, a lawmaker deeply involved in U.S. policy abroad and known for his often blistering opinions on foreign affairs. McCain played a particularly outsized role in international politics under President Trump, traveling abroad to reassure jumpy allies and publicly critiquing the president’s isolationist doctrine.

Inhofe, an Army veteran who previously had served as ranking minority member of the committee when Democrats last controlled the Senate, sees his role in more narrow terms: ensure that the U.S. military is adequately resourced, and leave foreign policy to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“My job is to make sure that when we get the information from the ones who are smarter than I am as to where our threats are, my job is to make sure we have the resources to build the military to confront that,” he told Defense One in an interview. “I try not to get into debates with people on the threat that they view. What I can do is say, okay, if that threat is correct, these are the resources we need…”

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“…If Congress and the White House don’t make a deal this week to stave off a , Saturday – three days before Christmas – could be the start of the third shutdown since President Trump took office less than two years ago.

It’s a Saturday in the middle of a more than weeklong holiday season. Will you have to worry whether presents and relatives can make the journey without problems?

The U.S. Postal Service anticipates that Monday will be its busiest day online, which would allow most priority and first-class to reach its destination by Thursday before any possibility of a shutdown. If you mail later than that, know that the Postal Service is an independent agency, so it won’t be affected in any government shutdown.

Peak travel is expected to hit Thursday, according to the American Automobile Association. That’s also when Congress members want to get out of town and be finished with their work for the year.

Even if Congress can’t stop another federal shutdown, air-traffic controllers still will be on the job after midnight Friday, and customs and border agents will continue working at border crossings.

Amtrak, a government-owned corporation, also will operate as usual.

The president traditionally decides whether federal workers get a paid holiday on Christmas Eve, this year on a Monday, according to FEDweek newsletter. President George W. Bush did so in 2001 and 2007; President Barack Obama also did in 2012.

If a shutdown occurs, federal employees deemed nonessential could get that day off anyway. Back pay is never guaranteed when the government is shuttered, but Congress previously has included that provision in its debt-ceiling bills…”

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Liz Sheld:

On Friday, a judge ruled that Obamacare or the ACA is unconstitutional.

U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor agreed with a group of 20 states with Republican governors or legislatures that argued the constitutionality of the law’s individual mandate dissolved when Congress removed the tax penalty for the uninsured.

Of course, this will have to work its way through the court system, so there is no immediate change to your policy if you have purchased one. My premiums went up to $1500 monthly this year. What a great system. Thanks, Obama.

The Trump DOJ (that sounds so funny) will not appeal the decision since the administration is not looking to keep the law intact, but some of the states, led by California, will appeal.

Ed Driscoll strung this together:

Chubby Checker, 20-year-old Philadelphia entertainer who started the “Twist” dance craze that has swept the nation, shows just how it’s done with a hip-swiveling demonstration at a press reception in London, England, Dec. 14, 1961. 

Kimberley Strassel:

“…It’s clear that something has concerned the judge—who likely sees obvious parallels to the Stevens case. The media was predicting a quick ruling in the Flynn case. Instead, Judge Sullivan issued new orders Wednesday, demanding to see for himself the McCabe memo and the Flynn 302. He also ordered the special counsel to hand over by Friday any other documents relevant to the Flynn-FBI meeting.

Given his history with the FBI, the judge may also have some questions about the curious date on the Flynn 302—Aug. 22, 2017, seven months after the interview. Texts from Mr. Strzok and testimony from Mr. Comey both suggest the 302 was written long before then. Was the 302 edited in the interim? If so, by whom, and at whose direction? FBI officials initially testified to Congress that the agents did not think Mr. Flynn had lied.

Judges have the ability to reject plea deals and require a prosecutor to make a case at trial. The criminal-justice system isn’t only about holding defendants accountable; trials also provide oversight of investigators and their tactics. And judges are not obliged to follow prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations.

No one knows how Judge Sullivan will rule. His reputation is for being no-nonsense, a straight shooter, an advocate of government transparency. Whatever the outcome, he has done the nation a favor by using his Brady order to hold prosecutors to some account and allow the country a glimpse at how federal law enforcement operates. Which is the very least the country can expect…”

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Mexico Is Closing Its Border . . . With Guatemala

Racism? Hatred of the other? Immoral? This is how some democrats describe America’s attempt to close it’s border. Does it apply to Mexico?