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2016

The climate scam corruption metastasizes By Thomas Lifson

The problem with a giant con game like global warming hysteria is that the baseline dishonesty ends up corrupting other institutions. Academia is pre-eminent among the collateral corruptees, but even a Native American tribe in genuine peril is in on the game. Willis Eschenbach provides the ugly details at Watts Up With That?

He spotted news that a tribe on the seashore of Olympic Peninsula is being touted as the “first climate refugees.” He drily notes eight other separate claims of being the first climate refugees, so he dubs the Quinault Indian Nation the “ninth first climate refugees.”

But that is not the nub of the criticism. It is that the Quinaults are genuinely threatened by tsunamis and in all logic ought to evacuate their current settlement right on the shore, because a major fault is nearby and overdue.

But the money is not in tsunamis; it is in global warming. So, as NPR says:

In the U.S. Northwest, sea-level rise is forcing a Native American tribe to consider abandoning lands it has inhabited for thousands of years.

The Quinault Indian Nation, whose small village lies at the mouth of the Quinault River on the outer coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, now relies on a 2,000-foot-long sea wall to protect it from the encroaching Pacific Ocean. (snip)

The Quinault tribe has developed a $60 million plan to move the entire village of Taholah uphill and out of harm’s way. That will mean relocating the school, the courthouse, the police station and the homes of 700 tribal members a safer distance from the encroaching Pacific.

“It’s a heavy price tag,” Sharp acknowledged, adding that she and others with the Quinault will be turning to Congress, philanthropists and the tribe’s own financial resources to pay for the project.

NPR plays the usual sympathy game:

Mourning Hiroshima While Facilitating the Next Nuclear Disaster By Janet Levy

On a recent visit to Tinian, an island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, I visited North Field, site of the B-29 bomb-loading pits for the famed Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs. Early on the morning of August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima and released Little Boy. Three days later, Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, delivering the final blow to the Japanese that led to the surrender of the imperial government.

A few days later, as part of a follow-up visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Park, I viewed the monument dedicated to the legacy of the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear attack and to the memories of the bomb’s victims. Much to my surprise, I learned that until recently, no sitting American president had visited the site since the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Previous presidents had been wary of a visit that could be misconstrued as an apology for an action that many believe definitively ended the war and potentially saved up to one million lives in the process.

Although, technically, President Obama did not offer a formal apology during his visit in May this year, his remarks could easily have been interpreted as such. He stated that he hoped that his trip to the bombing site would prompt America’s “shared responsibility to look directly in the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”

He ended with a reference to a future “in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening. … I hope that sometime in the future, they will start to realize that this was not the right thing.”

According to news reports, the rationale for Obama’s visit was to remind the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons, highlight the threat of a world that continues to produce nuclear weapons, and call for a nuclear “moral revolution.” The visit was of a piece with Obama’s perceived mantle as a world peacemaker. Yet, in truth, his actions have increased the opportunities for nuclear proliferation among nations hostile to the West while undermining the military strength of the U.S. and our longtime ally, Israel.

Early in his presidency, in Prague in 2009, Obama proclaimed his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. In fact, this declaration was largely responsible for his being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize with the hope that the award might spur his peace efforts. In Prague, Obama told a crowd of 20,000, “Today, the Cold War has disappeared, but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

In light of these facts, it is puzzling to consider the meaning of Obama’s Hiroshima visit after his promoting and signing of the Joint Commission Plan of Action or JCPOA with the Islamic terrorist state of Iran, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal; his ardent push for the treaty known as New START with Russia, thereby relieving the U.S. of nuclear weapons stockpiles; and his apparent tolerance for North Korea’s nuclear testing. This is curious indeed at a time when rogue states and non-state actors have been actively involved in the acquisition of nuclear weapons with little comment from the White House.

In his book, Obamabomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Fraud, Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and senior vice president with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., explained how the JCPOA increased the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and made Iran a greater danger to regional and international security.

1875: The Global Warming Solution By Tony Collins

Let’s assume global warming is real. Correct or not, we will start today with that supposition. Assume with me that there is a problem for a moment so that we may discuss tangible solutions.

Let us start by defining our terminology, as the concept of “climate change” tends to drift to fit the data—the true hallmark of scientific rigor.

The argument at hand is that the earth is warming due to greenhouse gases which man is releasing into the atmosphere; most especially carbon dioxide. This has been culminating since around the time of the post-war industrial boom accompanying and following World War II. Since then, CO2 emissions have continued to expand at an alarming rate. Through this anthropomorphic, man-made increase in warmth the average surface temperature of the earth will continue to climb, the oceans will rise, polar bears will need to learn to surf, and all that jazz. Also, potentially, parts of coastal California will eventually fall into the ocean. This is apparently to be taken as a bad thing, but must depend on one’s perspective.

This is a real problem.

Even if it isn’t, there is the famous “play it safe” argument. If we can’t be positive either way in regards to climate warming, shouldn’t we work to reduce our greenhouse emissions just to be sure? Those that argue in this alternative and don’t take it to the logical extreme are not serious people.

The case for global warming, as straightforward as it is, should be equally easy to solve. We simply need to return to the carbon levels of 1940, the front end of our carbon production explosion, and all the anticipated pain will go away. Any other suggestion from trillion-dollar, jet-setting, pretend-you-aren’t-part-of-the-problem climate summits is a half-measure.

So, problem solved. In 2014 humans emitted 35.69 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere . To solve climate change, we don’t have to take this down to zero; just back to 1940 levels. In that year, according to the Carbon Dioxide Emission Analysis Center, human emission was 1.299 million metric tons.

While we will go with it for today, admittedly this isn’t strictly “apples to apples” in its comparison; though it is also not too far off. Climate activists would, here, bring up solar and wind power, and such, as a key difference from 1940. And I would agree if those not-ready-for-primetime solutions were going to solve the carbon “problem” at any point in the conceivable future. If it were to be practical, I could buy the “play it safe” argument that we switch away from fossil fuels.

As an aside, in this regard I somewhat agree with so-called climate advocates. I have faith that technology will continue to improve on its own accord, fossil fuel use will eventually be replaced with more efficient solutions (a process which can be done without government coercion), and this whole thing will be rendered rather academic within a hundred years. Activists will probably claim a successful victory at this point; having done nothing but hold summits that agree to cripple economies.

But the argument—THE argument—is that this needs to be solved immediately; not that we have a couple hundred years of wiggle room. We are already past the date when New York was supposed to sink and landfall hurricanes would be an annual occurrence. Unless we can switch to solar and wind power tomorrow, an immediate reduction in emissions of 96% should just about suffice in their place.

Well, except for the pesky global population.

Roger Franklin US Letter: The Left Faces Reality

The sense of near-bilious dismay at Trump’s victory is everywhere as I write, a scant twenty-four hours after the votes were tallied. At the D.C. bus station this morning, for example, a young woman emblazoned with Hillary buttons burst spontaneously into tears. It was a beautiful thing to see.
An old joke in New York newspaper circles imagined Armageddon as reported by the city’s rival rags. The pre-Murdoch New York Post, then owned by the genteel leftist Dorothy Schiff, pitched to the interests and sympathies of its core readership: “End of World: Jews and Negroes Suffer Most”. What brings this to mind is the headline that runs across the top of this morning’s ink-and-paper Times:

Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies
Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency

Can’t you just savour the dilemma facing the Times men, women and persons who drafted those few words? So many victims set for the gibbet, so little space on one front page to list them all. What of all the other groups allegedly destined to be ground beneath the Trump jackboot? What of environmentalists and homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans and sundry other swarthy sorts, unionists, bureaucrats, women, the elderly, universities, endangered species, entire cities, the US legal system and perhaps, as any Times editor worth his organic, non-iodised sea-salt would have put it had space permitted, the very fate of the planet itself?

The sense of shock, of appalled and near-bilious dismay that such a man could have beaten Saint Hillary is everywhere as I write, a scant twenty-four hours after the votes were tallied. On yesterday’s bus to New York two of my fellow passengers were very glum girls indeed. They were students most likely, sporting backpacks, Hillary buttons and matching pairs of red and puffy eyes. As we shuffled aboard, the taller laid her head on her friend’s shoulder and heaved a few more tears, the perfect picture of heartbroken misery.

It was lovely to watch.

And it only got better as the shock and horror of democracy’s result on November 8 inflicted its dreadful torments on Generation Snowflake, whose serried brat-allions, summoned by social media, turned out to march down Fifth Avenue that night. I heard about the protest over dinner with my son, a dual-citizen who lives in New York and whose phone was running hot with Facebook messages from contacts variously de-friending him or simply heaping abuse on his tousled head.

“I’ve just been called a fascist again,” he said with a rueful smile after a message from his gender-fluid cousin interrupted the poori and chicken-liver appetiser. His crime against leftist sensibilities? He had observed via Facebook that there might well have been another Democrat destined for the White House if Team Hillary had not rigged the primary system in order to render Bernie Sanders a mere annoyance, rather than a bona fide contender. He had a point. The landscapes of the fulcrum states that went with Trump or swung to him—Michigan, Wisconsin, all of the South—are punctuated by empty factories, silent mills, grim prospects. An old-fashioned, soak-the-rich class warrior might, just might, have won those votes. As it was, those citizens’ blue-collar lot was to be worse than ignored, it was to be loudly scorned. This was the wasteland of the “deplorables”, as Mrs Clinton so ill-advisedly described them.

Self-Censorship: Free Society vs. Fear Society by Giulio Meotti

“The drama and the tragedy is that the only ones to win are the jihadists.” — Flemming Rose, who published the Mohammed cartoons in 2005, as cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

“Why the f*ck did you say yes to appear on stage with this terrorist target, are you stupid? Do you have a secret death wish? You have grandchildren now. Are you completely out of your mind? It’s okay if you want to die yourself, but why are you taking the company though all this?” — The managers of Jyllands-Posten, to Flemming Rose.

“We are also aware that we therefore bow to violence and intimidation.” — Editorial, Jyllands-Posten.

“I do not blame them that they care about the safety of employees. I have bodyguards 24 hours a day. However, I believe that we must stand firm. If Flemming shuts his mouth, democracy will be lost.” — Naser Khader, a liberal Muslim of Syrian origin who lives in Denmark.

In the summer of 2005, the Danish artist Kåre Bluitgen, when he met a journalist from the Ritzaus Bureau news agency, said he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his book on Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Three illustrators he contacted, Bluitgen said, were too scared. A few months later, Bluitgen reported that he had found someone willing to illustrate his book, but only on the condition of anonymity.

Like most Danish newspapers, Jyllands-Posten decided to publish an article about Bluitgen’s case. To test the state of freedom of expression, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor at the time, called twelve cartoonists, and offered them $160 each to draw a caricature of Mohammed. What then happened is a well-known, chilling story.

In the wave of Islamist violence against the cartoons, at least two hundred people were killed. Danish products vanished from shelves in Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, the UAE and Lebanon. Masked gunmen stormed the offices of the European Union in Gaza and warned Danes and Norwegians to leave within 48 hours. In the Libyan city of Benghazi, protesters set fire to the Italian consulate. Political Islam understood what was being achieved and raised the stakes; the West did not.

An Islamic fatwa also forever changed Flemming Rose’s life. In an Islamic caricature, his head was put on a pike. The Taliban offered a bounty to anyone who would kill him. Rose’s office at the newspaper was repeatedly evacuated for bomb threats. And Rose’s name and face entered ISIS’s blacklist, along with that of the murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier.

Less known is the “white fatwa” that the journalistic class imposed on Rose. This brave Danish journalist reveals it in a recently published book, “De Besatte” (“The Obsessed”). “It is the story of how fear devours souls, friendships and the professional community,” says Rose. The book reveals how his own newspaper forced Rose to surrender.

ANDREW HARROD: TURKEY’S NEW ISLAMIC REPUBLIC

“What I just heard seemed to me to like a recipe for fascism.”

So remarked Turkey scholar Gareth Jenkins during a recent lecture on Turkish politics, part of the Middle East Institute’s 2016 annual conference on Turkey. The participants soberly analyzed the dissolution of Turkey’s once superficially vaunted model of Muslim modernity.

The conference focused on the 15-year rule of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) under Recep Tayyip Erdoðan, who became Turkey’s prime minister in 2003 and then president in 2014. The AKP and Erdoðan’s Islamism broke sharply with the secular legacy of modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who established Turkey’s republic after the Ottoman Empire’s demise in World War I. Former American ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey said that the rise of Erdoðan’s AKP presented to Turkish political history the “most dramatic political [event], almost revolution, since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s time.”

Prompting Jenkins’ fascism considerations, John Jay College Professor and Muslim sociologist Mucahit Bilici examined in detail how the AKP had exposed “simplistic clichés” about the Kemalist ideology’s vision of a Western society amidst a Muslim population. “Kemalist secularism was never progressive,” he said. “The Kemalist republic was oppression by a secularist minority and the Kemalist pretense of modernity forced them to allow electoral politics.”

By contrast, Bilici noted that Turkey has been going through a “silent and bloodless revolution” since the rise of the Justice and Development Party. In this “civil war in a civil way, the religious and nationalist masses of Anatolia fulfilled their dream of taking the state back from the Kemalist minority.” He added that the AKP and Fethullah Gülen’s shadowy Islamist movement in a “religious alliance defeated the secular establishment both by legitimate electoral, and illegitimate bureaucratic, means.

General Flynn talks Turkey: David Goldman

With Turkey’s help, Russia is conducting direct negotiations with Syrian rebels, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. The FT wrote that one opposition figure, when asked why he thought Russia would seek a deal with the rebels just as Assad appeared to be winning, said Moscow was “essentially saying: ‘Screw you, Americans.’”

Turkey in effect is saying the same thing to Washington. The London-based newspaper explains:

Four opposition members from rebel-held northern Syria told the Financial Times that Turkey has been brokering talks in Ankara with Moscow, whose military intervention on the side of President Bashar al-Assad has helped turn the five-year civil war in the regime’s favor. Russia is now backing regime efforts to recapture the rebels’ last urban stronghold in Syria’s second city of Aleppo.

“The Russians and Turks are talking without the US now. It [Washington] is completely shut out of these talks, and doesn’t even know what’s going on in Ankara,” said one opposition figure, who asked not to be identified.

This puts into context the kerfuffle over General Michael Flynn’s Election Day recommendation that the United States pay more attention to Turkey’s point of view, especially in relation to a home-grown Islamist movement with terrorist overtones. Flynn, the designated National Security Adviser for the Trump administration, was formerly head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the first senior intelligence official to warn of the emergence of ISIS at a time when President Obama dismissed the Islamist movement as “junior varsity.”

In particular, the general cited the Turkish government’s consternation at America’s refusal to extradite the exiled Islamist leader Fetullah Gülen, who fled a Turkish charge of subversion and has been living in Pennsylvania since 1999. Last July 15 a group of Turkish officers apparently loyal to Gülen attempted to overthrow the government of President Tayyip Recep Erdogan. As early as 2008 Michael Rubin, a Middle East expert now at the American Enterprise Institute, warned that Gülen would use millions of followers and billions of dollars in business assets to launch an Islamist coup. That is what Gülen apparently did last July, and Flynn argued that the United States should back Turkey’s elected leader against the coup plotters.

That seemingly uncontroversial suggestion triggered a sewage storm.
Curiously, Michael Rubin came out as one of the fundamentalist leader’s strongest supporters against the Erdogan government, alongside Commentary Magazine’s Noah Rothman. Both attacked Flynn for supporting the Erdogan government against the Gülenist attempted putsch. Rothman added that Flynn was a “dubious choice” for National Security Adviser because his consulting company had had a Turkish corporate client, suggesting that Flynn’s views on Turkey raised a “conflict of interest.”

Commentary Magazine, formerly a conservative voice in public affairs, backed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy against Donald Trump, and the allegation that Flynn’s views were shaped by a single consulting client might be dismissed as ordinary political slander.

The Lesson of the Arson Jihad in Israel Palestinians would sooner burn down the land than coexist with the Jewish state.By Sohrab Ahmari

“The bigger error would be to treat Arab-Israeli peace like a real-estate deal. An avid deal maker would be inclined to see the conflict as a matter of offering just the right inducements to the parties. But that’s precisely the failed approach that has disappointed successive American presidents for half a century, since it doesn’t take the Palestinian ideology into account.”
Emergency services in Israel combated brush fires across the country for a week beginning Nov. 22, ranging from Haifa to the Galilee to Jerusalem. Hundreds of homes burned down and nearly 16 square miles of forest land were damaged before the fires were contained this week. Dozens of people suffered smoke inhalation, and some 70,000 had to be evacuated.

It was an almost perfect metaphor for the Palestinian national movement.

Of the 39 largest fires—there were 1,700 separate events in all—29 were ignited by Palestinian arsonists. “We have also identified an additional 10 sites where arson was attempted but didn’t succeed,” Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told me in a phone interview Thursday. “In some cases we were able to catch the suspects by camera or drone. In others we found Molotov cocktails at the scene.”

He added: “All the big fires were in Israel or in Jewish towns or near Jewish towns. There was no Arab city where there was a big fire inside.”

Police have arrested 35 suspects on arson and incitement charges so far, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “prosecute anyone committing these acts so that all can see that anyone who tries to burn down the State of Israel will face the fullest punishment.”

Having tried and failed to destroy Israel through violent rioting, all-out invasion, suicide bombings, campus boycotts, and random stabbing and vehicular attacks, Palestinians are now literally setting the Holy Land on fire. The message, evident to all but their friends in Washington and Brussels, is that they would sooner see the land go up in flames than coexist with a Jewish state.

The Palestinian leadership remains Janus-faced as ever. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dispatched 40 firefighters and eight firetrucks to help extinguish the fires, earning justified praise and gratitude from Mr. Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment. Without PA assistance and support from the likes of Egypt, Greece, Jordan, Russia, Spain and Turkey, among many others, the fires could have raged for much longer.

Yet Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement also accused Jerusalem of “exploiting the fire” to blame the Palestinian people. And during a three-hour stemwinder at a Fatah conference on Wednesday, Mr. Abbas lauded the 1980s “intifada of stones” and once more called for unity with Hamas, the Gaza-based terrorist movement constitutionally committed to destroying Israel.

“Our national unity is our safety valve, and I call on Hamas to end the division,” Mr. Abbas said. He also assailed Britain for the 1917 Balfour Declaration that paved the way for Israel’s creation in Mandatory Palestine, demanding that Her Majesty’s Government “declare its apology for making such a promise and repair the damage done to our people, resources and our nation.”

Then there’s the wider atmosphere of online incitement. Arab social-media users cheerfully shared the hashtag #IsraelIsBurning throughout the crisis. They were “happy and supporting it and calling on others to do it,” said Mr. Erdan, the public-security minister. “It’s all based on spreading a culture of hatred in a social network. You don’t need a mosque or school anymore to spread lies and hatred. You can spread your lies globally, 24/7, without effective monitoring.”

There’s a useful lesson here for the incoming Trump administration about the perils of diving into Israeli-Arab peace-processing. Judging by most of his statements, Donald Trump’s instincts are pro-Israel in the conventional sense. But the president-elect is also tempted by the peace-deal El Dorado. CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama’s Giant Student-Loan Con The huge taxpayer bill for buying millennial votes is coming due.

Democrats devised the government takeover of student loans as an entitlement that might never be repaid, though they sold it as a money saver. New evidence of this giant con arrives courtesy of a report this week by the Government Accountability Office that estimates the taxpayer losses at $108 billion and counting.

To help pay for ObamaCare, Democrats simultaneously federalized the student loan market and projected fictitious savings, all while adding more than $1.2 trillion to the federal balance sheet. The amount keeps increasing like the debt clock. Liberals then cited the government “savings” to peddle the fallacy that the feds make money off student loans—a pretext they then used to sweeten debt forgiveness plans that have helped keep default rates artificially low.

The Education Department claims the national student loan default rate is 11.3%, yet only half of all debt is in repayment. Borrowers can seek forbearance or deferment if they are unemployed, return to school or claim financial difficulties. Or they can enroll in income-based repayment plans that let them discharge the debt after making payments equal to 10% of their discretionary income for 20 years. Those who work in “public service”—government or a nonprofit—can wipe out their debt in 10 years without a tax penalty.

Initially, only students who borrowed in 2014 or later were eligible for these generous loan forgiveness plans. Then President Obama retroactively extended the benefits to buy millennial votes. Over the last three years the share of outstanding federal direct loan dollars in income-based repayment plans has doubled to 40%. Costs have exploded.

GAO estimates that 5.3 million borrowers, or 24% of former students, have enrolled in income-based repayment plans. They collectively owe $355 billion, $108 billion of which will eventually be forgiven. But this sum covers only loans through the current school year and will likely grow as more borrowers exploit the entitlement. In April the Administration announced a goal of adding two million to the debt-forgiveness rolls over the next year.

The agency scores the Education Department for repeatedly low-balling the cost, which has made its loan forgiveness look more affordable. Over eight years the Administration’s budget estimates for income-based repayment plans have more than doubled to $53 billion. The department now forecasts that taxpayers will pick up about 21% of the cost for loans in these plans.

GAO warns that the department may still be undershooting the actual cost since it “assumes no borrowers will switch into or out” of the plans. The department’s “quality control practices do not ensure reliable budget estimates,” GAO concludes, with hilarious understatement. A company that was this sloppy with its accounting would be prosecuted.

To sum up: The Obama Democrats used student loans and loan forgiveness to buy votes and dissembled about the cost. Now as they leave town they are handing Republicans the bill. As for millennials, they’ll pay in the end with higher tax rates.

Democrats Send Their Regrets Blowing up the filibuster, keeping Pelosi in charge—the list of mistakes is long. Kimberley Strassel

Regrets? Delaware Sen. Chris Coons has a few—and not too few to mention. At the top of his list is his party’s decision in 2013 to blow up the filibuster for most presidential nominees.

“Many of us will regret that in this Congress,” a dejected Mr. Coons told CNN on Tuesday. “Because it would have been a terrific speed bump, potential emergency brake, to have in our system to slow down the confirmation of extreme nominees.”

Cue Sinatra and “My Way.” That’s how former Senate leader Harry Reid, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and President Obama ruled for eight years. They planned each charted course, each careful step. Now, they’re not finding it so amusing.

Mr. Coons is regretting giving up his tool to stop Donald Trump’s march of reformers. It’s a cabinet parade of charter-school-lovers, and law-and-order prosecutors and tax-cutters and ObamaCare-slayers, of the sort to give a good Delaware liberal night sweats. There was a day when not one of these nominees could have hoped to squeeze past a Senate filibuster. But Mr. Reid did it his way, and Mr. Trump keeps tweeting.

Former veep candidate Tim Kaine in October threatened that Republicans would be really, really sorry if they tried use what filibuster tools were left against a Hillary Clinton Supreme Court nominee. If Republicans “stonewall,” then a “Democratic Senate majority will say we’re not going to let you thwart the law,” he declared in October. Incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is now regretting that belligerence, and insisting that the Supreme Court filibuster is inviolate, and that his party never did kill it, you know, and that should count for something, and . . . blah, blah, regrets.

It would be hard to stall the confirmation process, at least after Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s regretful September news conference, the one where she stood tall and hit Republicans for refusing to confirm Mr. Obama’s end-of-the-road nominee, Merrick Garland. “This is not just some TV show [like] ‘Eight is Enough.’ Eight is not enough on the United States Supreme Court,” she railed. She’s joined in regret by the activists behind those trendy Twitter campaigns: #weneednine. #doyourjob. Bring on Mr. Trump’s own Tweetbomb: #likeyousaid.

Mr. Schumer is also regretting those dozen interviews before the election, the ones he gave as he measured his majority-leader office curtains. He explained to Politico that his party was on the verge of electoral dominance and that this meant it would have “a mandate.” He elsewhere warned all those mulish Republicans that they’d have an obligation to work with his world-dominant party. “If we’re gridlocked for another four years, the anger and sourness in the land will make that of 2016 seem tame,” he lectured.

Some might describe electoral dominance as owning the White House, and the Senate, and the House, and 33 governorships and 68 (of 98) state legislative chambers. But Mr. Schumer now regrets his definition. In a recent ABC News story, he said Mr. Trump’s victory is “not a mandate” and that his Democratic Party remains free to “go after him tooth and nail.” CONTINUE AT SITE