Read it.

Video footage tweeted Friday appears to show a crowd surrounding and harassing Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham at the Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C.

Video footage Mindy Robertson tweeted appears to show law enforcement escorting Graham through the airport as a crowd seems to be harassing and following the South Carolina senator.

Read it.

A review of the events of January 7, 2020, reported by C4ISRNET indicates that the newly created Space Force’s early warning system allowed hundreds of Americans to quickly shelter in bunkers as Iran fired over a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. military installations.

Read it.

Between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, as all the broadcast evening and morning news casts informed viewers of the news that the Kenosha police officer who shot Jacob Blake in August would not be charged in the incident, most shows ignored one of the most critical details given for why his actions were considered justifiable self-defense.

ABC’s Good Morning America was the only show on the broadcast networks that explained that the officer in the case, Rusten Shevskey, was trying to prevent Blake from kidnapping his three children who were in the vehicle that Blake himself had allegedly admitted that he intended to steal from his ex-girlfriend.

ZMan’s weekly podcast.

The storming of the Capitol opened a lot of eyes. The people in the media demanding mass executions of Trump supporters were just six months ago gloating over left-wing mobs burning cities. Six months ago, official Washington was telling us the cops were a problem and now they are demanding they open fire on protestors. When a black criminal died in police custody, they demanded vengeance. When a white veteran is murdered by a cop on video, they think it great fun.

Highly recommended.

Making tracks for Florida solves a lot of problems.

Read it.

And now for something completely different….

Read it.

The report suggests that Apple is in negotiations with Hyundai Motor Group to manufacture an ?Apple Car?. Apple is said to be planning to work with Hyundai to produce electric vehicles and develop batteries due to the “enormous costs” of the technology and the necessary production facilities.

They could do worse. Hyundai makes great, inexpensive cars.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie.

You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded.

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters.

New York Times tries to justify racial discrimination in Oregon

Deranged: Joy Reid Goes on Hateful, Venomous Rant Against Police, Tying GOP to al-Qaeda

Homicides, Shootings Spiked In New York City During 2020 Despite Overall Crime Being Down

REPORT: Man Charged With Crashing Into White Motorcyclist In Hate Crime Found Mentally Incompetent

Biden Says Black Lives Matter Protesters Would ‘Have Been Treated Very Differently’ Than Capitol Rioters  Yeah – none of them would have been shot or charged criminally within days.

ABC News Stokes Racial, Anti-Police Hatred With BLM Co-Founder

Yet Another Affirmative Action Faker Exposed

The Left’s New Cult Obsession Is Stacey Abrams

Mob Breaches Gate At Washington State Governor’s Mansion

State and Federal Laws Move To Erase Biology and Women

Stephanopoulos Bristles When GOP Congressman Brings Up Media’s Role in Angry Mob

‘You Open The F*cking Doors For Them’: Joe Scarborough Accuses Capitol Police Of Allowing Insurrection, Calls For Trump’s Arrest

MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship

Snowden: Zuckerberg’s Decision To Silence Trump Is “The Turning Point In The Battle For Control Of Digital Speech”

Pipe Bombs Found Near RNC, DNC Offices ‘Real Deal’: Official

Joy Behar Wants Matt Gaetz ‘Taken Down,’ Calls For Sanctions On Right-Leaning Media

MSNBC Dismisses GOP Denunciation of Violence, Whole Party Is Now ‘Violent,’ ‘Fascist’

Former ‘Jeopardy!’ Champion Arthur Chu Calls Death Of Woman At Capitol One Of The ‘Good Things’ About The Riots

Man Fired From Job After Wearing Work Badge While Storming The Capitol Building

‘Domino Effect’: Elon Musk Shares Meme Blaming Facebook For Capitol Riot

CNN Gravely Reports On ‘First Violent Protest In Recent Memory’

Chinese propaganda hits U.S. after Capitol takeover

Democracy In Action: Kamala Harris Performed Poorly As A Candidate. Now She’s The Most Powerful Person In The Party

Biden Wants To Racialize The COVID-19 Vaccine. The CDC Beat Him To It — And It’s Bad News

Medical Errors And The Cult Of Expertise In The Age Of COVID

Norwegian Nursing Home Patients Dead After Receiving First Dose Of Pfizer COVID Vaccine

Watch These Police Officers Arrest, Almost Tase A Hockey Player On Ice Over Lockdown Rules

Clifford A. Brown: Deep State Normal: FDA edition

How Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Americans

Green Matters: Humans are Responsible for 110% of Global Warming

Pontifical Academy of Science Emails Document Vatican Hostility to Climate Change Skepticism

Climate Change Is Turning Cities Into Ovens  (Wired ‘Science’) Cities have always been ovens.

Scientists Warn of an ‘Imminent’ Stratospheric Warming Event Around The North Pole

The Long, Troubling Decline of Arctic Sea Ice

Big Tech Silences President Trump After DC Riots — Some Indefinitely

Omar, Pressley, & Pritzker Push Impeachment As Lobbyists Float 25th Amendment Counter-Coup

Twitter Has Locked President Trump’s Account For 12 Hours, Threatens “Permanent Suspension”  An action they never took regarding a Democrat politician even at the height of the BLM/Antifa rioting. Bias? What bias?

Cuomo, Lemon: ‘Mistake’ Not to Show Trump Supporter Bleed to Death

NBC ‘Historian’ Suggests Police Wanted Violence to Happen, Trump Will Use Nukes

The Return of American Fascism  Somebody doesn’t know what ‘fascism’ means.

Joe Scarborough: ‘Arrest,’ ‘Jail’ Trump ‘Today’  Except that they won’t.

House Judiciary Democrats Call On Pence To Invoke 25th Amendment, Remove Trump From Office  Except that won’t happen.

Shopify Terminates Trump-Related eCommerce Sites In Response To Riots  Action they did not take against BLM/Antifa. Bias? What bias?

Flight Attendants Union Wants To Ban Pro-Trump Mob From Future Flights  Action they did not try against BLM/Antifa. Bias? What bias?

FBI Seeking Tips to Identify Members of Mob Who Stormed Capitol  Something they’ve never done with the BLM/Antifa mobs. Bias? What bias?

Ignorant Republicans Riot And Don’t Even Get Any Big-Screen TVs  Babylon Bee.

Schumer Calls For Trump To Be Removed From Office Immediately Which isn’t going to happen.

Twitch disables Trump’s account indefinitely

Emily Ratajkowski Criticizes Facebook’s Decision To Ban President Trump From The Platform

After Mob Storms Capitol, Kathy Griffin Re-Posts Scandalous Photo of Her Holding Up Trump’s ‘Severed Head’  i guess it’s safe to be an asshole again.

Read it.

Financial institutions are pushing back against a proposed rule change that would force them to work with the firearms industry, citing concerns over the legality of the measure.

Introduced by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in November, the measure would block financial institutions from refusing to do business with companies the banks believe may hurt their image. The rule requires that banks base decisions on financial risk assessment: As long as the numbers are financially sound, banks will be unable to deny services to a lawful business.

Read it.

Have you ever seen ANY criminal charges filed over BLM/Antifa riots that occupied almost all of last summer, much less ones within days?

Read it.

That’s kinda obvious.

Read it.

Nearly 24 hours have passed since yesterday’s chaos on Capitol Hill, which left one individual dead from a gunshot wound, and three others dead from unrelated medical emergencies on the Capitol grounds, and finally the Capitol Police have published a statement.

In it, Chief of Police Steven Sund denounced the thousands of demonstrators who later participated in the storming of the Capitol as criminals, condemning their “criminally riotous behavior.”

I guess that’s why the police let them through the barricades.

ZMan sums it up.

Yesterday, Ashli Babbitt was shot in the neck and died while protesting inside the Capitol with other protestors. A group of angry Trump supporters had got into the building and were making a racket. This is not an unusual occurrence. During the Kavanaugh hearings, Democrats organized mobs of screeching women to harass Republicans in the halls of the Capitol. Party media was there to celebrate it as the purest expression of democracy. It was power to the people time.

That was not the case yesterday, according to the media. Instead, it was a direct threat to “our” democracy. This is a bit ironic in that the protests are over the obvious corruption in the election system. The direct threat to democracy is the people demanding their elections be fair and honest. That’s why Ashli Babbitt was inside the Capitol making a racket. Her whole life she had been told this was how citizens angry at their government demand redress when the system fails.

Victor Davis Hanson.

The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876.

What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.

Read it.

n fact, more than 1 in 10 people that grew up with English as their first language are said to have dyslexia, with wide consensus pointing towards a person’s genetic history as the leading cause. One, it would appear, is either born dyslexic or not.

So, how then have we ended up with the phenomenon that some people who speak both English and another language can be dyslexic in one, but not the other?

The answer, it seems, is hidden in the characteristics of a language and its writing system.

Read it.

MATERIALS SCIENTISTS have long sought to emulate biology’s trick of joining materials that have wildly different properties into seamless functional units with no weak points, in the way that bones, connective tissue and skin are joined into limbs. Conventional manufacturing techniques, in which components of different composition are first created, and only then fitted together, make such emulation hard. However, three-dimensional (3D) printing, which permits materials to be blended as they are applied to a growing structure, offers a way to do this in principle. And a group of researchers at America’s Army Research Laboratory and Texas A&M University, in College Station, now think they have turned principle into practice.

The materials they are interested in are called interbonding polymer networks, and those they have lighted on in particular share the same underlying chemistry. A simple polymer is a molecular chain, the links of which are called monomers. Interbonding polymer networks involve a second set of monomers that form chemical links with the first. Crucially, these second monomers are symmetrical molecules, so both ends can make such links. This means they can bind polymer chains together by forming cross-links at numerous places between chains, to create a structure resembling a net. The physical properties of this net will depend on the density of cross-links. And that density is under the control of the chemists doing the mixing.

Read it.

So for the new study, researchers at Tohoku and Osaka City Universities set out to find a new catalyst that could break plastics down at lower temperatures. The team found that combining ruthenium and cerium dioxide worked most effectively, creating a catalyst able to recycle polyolefinic plastics at just 200 °C (392 °F).

Read it.

According to Ryan Field, a nurse from the Erie County Medical Center is getting his ticket, and he won’t be going to because he has to focus on his State of the State speech. His speech is scheduled to take place January 11.

Read it.

National Review cuck confirms that the Capotol riot was a put-up job by Antifa.

Read it.

A law enforcement official told NPR that the alleged shooter of the woman was a senior U.S. Capitol Police officer and that she was unarmed.

Betcha there won’t be any riots because of this. She was the wrong color.

Read it.

That article is not about today in Washington, that’s about 9 years ago in Madison, from the Wisconsin State Journal…

These kind of mob actions in Madison went on for months in 2011. But they’ve disappeared down the memoryhole because the mob was Democratic. So, therefore, they were the Good Guys, not the Bad Guys. It’s hard to remember facts that contradict The Narrative.

Two Women Reportedly Harass Men On Train For Not Wearing Masks While Drinking Coffee

Delays in US COVID Vaccine Due to Tech Glitches, Website Crashes

Mask Mania

Vietnamese Woman Dubbed Early “Super Spreader” Starts Her Own Line Of Hygiene And Self-Care Products  ‘Super spreader’ is the new Hitler.

Epidemiologist Says Influenza Cases Are Being Counted As COVID-19

WHO Virus Mission to China in Disarray as Entry Denied

A New Year’s Roundup of Coronanews in Germany

This Is Why The New Mutant COVID Strain That Is Ravaging South Africa Has Scientists Extremely Worried…

BBC Urges NYT to Correct “Misleading” Coronavirus Article

Are Climate Nuremberg Trials On The Way?

NY Times Celebrates Communist China Conquering Corona: ‘Enviably Free’

China Again Denies Pathetic WHO Access To Investigate COVID Outbreak

Is indoor dining safe? Five health experts weigh in. (Popular ‘Science’)

You can test positive for COVID-19 after a vaccine—but that doesn’t mean the shots don’t work

Newsom Includes $1.5 Billion for Electric Cars in Proposed Coronavirus Relief Bill

Kylie Jenner Releases New Hand Sanitizer, Immediately Accused Of Making A ‘Profit’ Off COVID-19 Pandemic

US Reports 29 Cases Of Confirmed Severe Allergic Reaction To Pfizer Coronavirus Vaccine Among Nearly 5 Million Vaccinated

COVID is Political Everywhere

Dany Shoham: Virus likely unnatural

London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

Financial Review: Companies, Directors face a Wave of Climate Lawfare in 2021

Climate change caused mangrove collapse in Oman

Changing Climate Debate History

Human Rights Group Exposes China’s Network Of Secret Political Prisons Where 2 Canadians Are Being Held

Leaked Documents Reveal Chinese Regime’s Orders to Steal Foreign Technologies

50 Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Figures Arrested

College Officials Find New Ways to Silence Unwanted Professors

Fundraiser Seeks To Hire Journalist To Hold San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin ‘Accountable’ After Two Women Killed By Suspected Criminal

‘Burn It Down’: Rioters Threaten To Light Portland Precinct On Fire, Damage Police Cruisers

Germany Approves Law Requiring Companies To Hire Female Executives

REPORT: Border Crossings Skyrocketed After Biden Win

Georgia Voter Super Excited About Being Represented By The Preferred Candidates Of California Political Donors  Babylon Bee.

Liberals Pushing for Breyer to Retire From SCOTUS  And so it starts.

Chicago Public School District Blames Teachers’ Union For Staff Absences

San Fran. Progressive Prosecutor’s Reforms Lead to Hit-and-Run Deaths

REPORT: Two Pipe Bombs Detonated At RNC Headquarters, Suspicious Package At DNC

Rioters Breach Pelosi’s Office  Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Chuck Todd Trashes ‘Empty Concern,’ ‘Empty Rhetoric’ of GOPers Denouncing Violence  Unlike the Democrats who refuse to denounce violence from their side.

CBS Claims Trump Supporters Plan to ‘Storm the Capitol’ With ‘Weapons

Top Tech Writer Already Assuming Trump Will Be Kicked Off Twitter

WashPost’s Milbank Pushes Harebrained Smear Against Trump Budget Chief

Twitter Restricts President Trump’s Call for ‘Peace’

Rep. Ilhan Omar To Introduce Articles Of Impeachment Following Mob Violence At Capitol  Pure virtue-signalling. There isn’t enough time for an impeachment, even if people agreed to do it.

Nicole Wallace Says Trump Is Probably Readying To Pre-Pardon Capitol Rioters  Somebody is actually paying her to be an idiot.

Anderson Cooper: Republicans Are Like A ‘Nihilistic Death Cult’ If They Continue To Follow Trump

‘Clear Acts Of Sedition And Violence And Terrorism’: Jake Tapper Blasts Trump Statement During Riots  Which he refused to do during the BLM/Antifa riots. Bias? What bias?

‘Look In The Mirror’: Ari Fleischer Compares Resistance To Trump In 2016 To DC Protests Before They Turned Into Riots

Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones to Newsmax TV: Black Men Will Be Face of GOP

Kamala’s Unchallenged Life Stories

Washington Post Forced To Correct Article, Tweet Describing Jacob Blake As ‘Unarmed’ Despite Evidence Showing He Had Knife

Will the Real Racists in America Raise Their Hands?

2 Detectives Involved in Breonna Taylor Raid Are Fired

Race-Baiting CNN: Loeffler Lost Because She Made Warnock ‘a Radical Negro’ ‘Scary Black Man’

Proof That White Women Are Out-Woking Black People

Law Enforcement Supervisory Board Says Cop Phones, Social Media And Computers Should Be Checked For Racist Tendencies

Steve Sailer.

The results are now in on The Establishment’s vast gamble of declaring 2020 to be the year of the Racial Reckoning. Did sacralizing Black Lives Matter as our culture’s highest value even succeed at saving black lives?

No.

My new data shows that elites’ frantic push since Memorial Day for Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) got thousands more Americans murdered in 2020 than in 2019.

The Other McCain.

Mail-in voting has proven to be an unbeatable trick for Democrats, who captured both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia in Tuesday’s runoff, thus making Chuck Schumer the de facto Senate Majority Leader.

It happened almost exactly as predicted last night. At 11 p.m., Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler held small but significant leads. Then the metro Atlanta counties of Fulton and DeKalb suddenly reported gigantic batches of ballots, which gave Democrats the victory — Jon Osoff by about 16,000 votes, Raphael Warnock by about 50,000.
The machine-like precision of this operation was wondrous to behold. Give Democrats unlimited mail-in ballots, and they’ll do it every time.

Read it.

The FBI and FAA are investigating an audio threat, broadcast on air traffic control frequencies Monday, that threatened to fly an airplane into the U.S. Capitol to avenge the death of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, CBS News reports.

Read it.

Nature often offers promising inspiration for biomimetic man-made materials. In a new report now published in Advanced Science, Faheng Wang and a team of scientists in advanced materials, engineering and science in China developed new cement materials based on unidirectionally porous architectures to replicate the designs of natural wood. The resulting wood-like cement material showed higher strength at equal densities, alongside multifunctional properties for effective thermal insulation, water permeability and easy adjustment for water repulsion. The team simultaneously achieved high strength and multifunctionality to make the wood-like cement a promising new building material for wood-mimetic designs with high performance. They presented a simple fabrication procedure to promote better efficiency during mass production with applications suited across other material systems.

Read it.

Delgado had approached the victim at a bar restroom Labor Day Weekend Sept. 2, 2019, the Los Angeles Daily News reported. Delgado kept punching the victim after he inquired what the wording on the hat meant, which caused the victim to fall to the floor, Hermosa Beach police Sgt. Robert Higgins said, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.

‘A new low’: Republicans chastise Trump over his Raffensperger call (Politico)

‘It’s a dark place’: Trump’s call a window into a President consumed (CNN)

Trump is a buffoon – but the next aspiring autocrat won’t be so incompetent (The Guardian)

It’s impeachable. It’s likely illegal. It’s a coup. (Washington Post)

CNN: Will Pence Serve the Constitution or ‘Devil’ Trump?

Iran Seeking Trump’s Arrest for Death of Soleimani  Good luck with that.

‘Let’s Not Do That To Indiana’: Sara Haines Says Sending Mike Pence Home Would Punish His State

Iran Asks Interpol To Help Arrest Trump For Killing Qasem Soleimani  I shouldn’t think that they would want to go down that particular road, considering that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism.

House GOP Admits It Opposes Democracy, Not Voter Fraud (New York Magazine) Except that they didn’t, of course.

Hawley Says ‘Antifa Scumbags’ Showed Up To His Front Door And Threatened His Wife, New Born Daughter

Soros Soars, GOP Cowards Cower

FLASHBACK: When the Media Championed Election Objectors

Election Challenges: The Barbara Boxer Precedent

Ambulances In LA Ordered Not To Transport Patients With Slim Survival Chances

Defund the Police Group Donor MacKenzie Scott Named ‘Philanthropist of the Year’

Abrams Claims Without Evidence She ‘Never Challenged’ Results of 2018 Election

Facebook Won’t Shut Down Activists Who Harass Senator Josh Hawley

With Caveats, NBC Reports On Study Showing ‘Trans’ Male Athletes Out-perform Women

Apple Maps Cancels Directions To DC As City Gears Up For Protests

MSNBC Eagerly Hopes for ‘Death’ of Republican Party

Ron Paul: The ‘Great Reset’ Is About Expanding Government Power And Suppressing Liberty

Deputy District Attorneys Sue L.A.’s Top Prosecutor Over ‘Radical’ New Rules

Kamala Harris’s Childhood Story About Calling For ‘Fweedom’ Is Almost Identical To A Story Told By MLK

Why I Used My Startup’s Techstars Demo Day To Advocate For Other Black Founders  Because I’m Really Woke! And you’re all racists!

Kamala Harris Recalls How As A Little Girl She Helped Slaves Escape On The Undewgwound Wailwoad  Babylon Bee.

Did Kamala Harris Plagiarize Martin Luther King Jr.?  Hey, if Biden can do it….

Portland State Professor Assails University President’s Social Justice Message

REPORT: 26-Year-Old Mom Kills Self And Toddler After Jumping From Overpass

No Charges For Officers Involved In Jacob Blake Shooting

FWEEDOM RIDER: The Secret Life of Kamala Harris

Literal White Knighting: Children’s Artists Decline Grammy Noms Due To Their Whiteness

‘Iwwegal Dwugs!’ Kamala Harris Recalls Busting People For Pot Possession As A Child  Babylon Bee.

Police Use Red Flag Law To Seize Guns From Black Panther Member Who Allegedly Plotted To Kill Colorado Officials

Chaos erupts in LA mall as anti-maskers storm inside to protest

COVID vaccines “might not” work as well on South African strain, scientists warn

Mask protests continue as coronavirus cases surge with one leading a California Trader Joe’s to close early

FDA Admits PCR Tests Give False Results, Prepares Ground For Biden To “Crush” Casedemic

Did Coronavirus Come From A Lab? Ten Key Takeaways From A Shocking New Report

COVID-19 Vending Machine Tests Offered At California College

Queensland Cops Pay Home Visit To Author Who Bragged On Twitter About COVID-Violating Jog

Statistician: Lockdowns Don’t Work Because They Force People To Congregate In Fewer Places

New York Times Columnist Kurt Streeter Says UConn Is The Real National Champs For Canceling The Season

REPORT: The NBA Will Mandate Masks For Players Who Haven’t Entered The Game  Pure virtue-signalling.

Rabobank: Here’s How We Could Be Stuck With COVID Forever

De Blasio Blasts Cuomo For ‘Arrogance’ After The Governor Threatens To Fine NYC Hospitals For Vaccine Mishaps  Like being called ugly by a frog.

Facebook Fact-Checker Won’t Acknowledge Possible Origins for COVID-19

Canadians Crossing US Border Via Helicopter Despite Travel Ban

Extreme New Show Has Bear Grylls Try To Survive A Day In A New York Nursing Home  Babylon Bee.

WaPo Editorial Board Calls For Investigation Into Chinese Lab Theory After Dismissing It As ‘Conspiracy Theory’

Rate Of Adverse Reactions To COVID Vaccines Already 50x Higher Than Flu Shot

The politics of Covid just got even more hellish

REPORT: LA Fitness Manager Tackles Patron Who Pulled Gun Over People Not Wearing Masks

Newsom Expresses Frustration Over California’s COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout, Tries To Shift Blame

The US Has Lost More Than 110,000 Restaurants, Setting Stage For Commercial Real Estate Collapse Of Epic Proportions

Future Zero-Emissions Power Plants: Scientists Collaborate on Development of Commercial Fusion Energy

Claim: AI Will Help Solve Climate Change

Surprising News: Drylands Are Not Getting Drier As Predicted by Climate Scientists  Can you think of ANY prediction by ‘climate scientists’ that has actually happened?

Huge Database Of Studies Documenting Meters-Higher Mid-Holocene Sea Levels Swells Again In 2020

Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Turns 18, Can Be Tried as Adult

World Medical Association Wants Worldwide ‘Climate Emergency’ Declared

Eleven Years Ago Today Al Gore Predicted the Pole Completely ICE Free in 5 Years

Study: “Baked In” Global Warming of 2.3C Means International Climate Goals have Already Failed

Read it.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards repeatedly have seized ships in international waters off Iran’s coast as a means of taking hostages to use as bargaining leverage in disputes with foreign countries or companies.

Read it.

During their first day back in session, Pennsylvania Senate Republicans refused to acknowledge and seat a Democratic state senator who is facing a contested election over his small margin of victory.

Republicans and Democrats began to have a yelling match Tuesday after Republicans refused to allow Democratic Pennsylvania State Sen. Jim Brewster from Allegheny County after his win was certified by the state but is being contested by his opponent, CBS Pittsburgh reported.

Finally, Republican elected officials are getting their thumbs out of their asses and starting to play hardball.

Read it.

The Post went on to explain that Team Biden is worried that “easing up too quickly on Trump’s enforcement system could trigger a new migration surge at the border.” No kidding.

But it turns out that Biden’s campaign promises are enough to trigger a “migration surge at the border,” now that he is about to become president.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine.

“Respectable opinion” holds that gridlock in Washington is a terrible thing, because it means Washington “can’t get anything done.” To the contrary, gridlock is the next best thing to having constitutional government! Put a little more seriously, gridlock has replaced the separation of powers as a chief constraint on the impetuosity of central government, and it is precisely the separation of powers embedded in the logic of the Constitution that Progressivism openly set out to destroy more than a century ago.

Progressives have been largely successful in this object through the gradual and insidious concentration of power in the administrative state, but funny thing—the voters don’t seem to like it too much, and continue to vote for “divided government,” when they aren’t in fact voting for Republican presidents—starting with Nixon—who promised to challenge this state of affairs, but who then usually fell short of mounting an effective challenge once in office. (More on this point some other time.)

Read it.

The Trump administration seized $7 million in Iranian assets after busting a money-laundering operation and plans to use the funds to pay victims of state-sponsored terrorism and their families.

Department of Justice officials took the funds from an American citizen and three Iranians attempting to circumvent American sanctions on Iran in a global criminal effort. Kenneth Zong and three unnamed Iranians are believed to have helped launder $1 billion in Iranian assets worldwide between 2011 and 2014, according to a Department of Justice press release.

Read it.

Her name was Hanako Abe. Raised in Fukushima, Japan, she lived through the devastating 2011 tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster and emigrated to America to attend university. After graduation in 2018, she settled in San Francisco and worked in commercial real estate. She posted a smiling selfie on Instagram Thursday, announcing her excitement for a new year she would not live to see. Shortly after 4 PM Thursday, she was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking in the SOMA district of San Francisco, just 27 years old. Another woman, Elizabeth Platt, 60, was killed alongside Abe.

The driver, Troy McAlister, was intoxicated and driving a car he stole in Daly City two days earlier, from a woman he met on a dating app. Paroled in April after serving time for armed robbery, McAlister had been arrested several times since his release for various crimes including car theft, most recently on December 20. (He may in fact have been fleeing his latest burglary when he struck the women last Thursday, according to police). But none of these recent arrests resulted in any new charges brought by District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office.