■ We keep hoping for a miracle. Specifically, that our mindless clomping through the Book of Proverbs will come up with something Christmas-relevant. We need to scrunch up our eyes a bit today, but let's say Proverbs 17:14 is good advice to anyone likely to attend a Christmas dinner with people who like to bring up politics:
14 Starting a quarrel is like breaching a dam;
so drop the matter before a dispute breaks out.
For some reason, dinner-table political discussion seems to be more common at Thanksgiving than Christmas. Why is that?
■ George F. Will relates how the little folks are standing up to big-union avariciousness and Washington's state government: Public Workers Could Stand to Benefit from Janus v. AFSCME.
It is protected by Washington state’s lopsidedly Democratic
political class, which knows who butters its bread. It has been
provided with bespoke law, tailored for its comfort. Nevertheless,
the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been so
avaricious in its objectives and so thuggish in its methods that it
has been bested by the Freedom Foundation.
This small conservative outfit, which punches above its weight and
is led by Tom McCabe, relishes the SEIU’s accusation that it has
committed “tortious interference” with “business expectancy.” This
melodious legalese means that the Foundation is guilty of informing
SEIU members and fee-payers — many of them reluctant participants —
of their right not to fill the SEIU’s coffers, from which flow
contributions to Democrats.
The dirty-trick details of how SEIU and its buddies in the state government have fought to maintain the cash flow to the union may raise your blood pressure a bit.
■ The Union Leader reports on the botched prosecution of Cliven Bundy: Mistrial for rancher who led land revolt in Nevada in 2014.
A federal judge on Wednesday declared a mistrial in the criminal
case against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and three others for their
role in a 2014 armed standoff with U.S. government agents, and
rebuked prosecutors for withholding evidence from the
defense.
Bundy, two of his sons and another man were charged with 15 counts of
conspiracy, assault and other offenses stemming from the confrontation,
which galvanized right-wing militia groups challenging federal authority
over vast tracts of public lands in the American West.
U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro told federal prosecutors they had willfully violated evidence rules in failing to turn over pertinent documents to the defense, adding that “the failure is prejudicial” to ensuring a fair trial.
I believe the sole person in jail as a result of the "standoff" remains Rochester, New Hampshire's Jerry DeLemus, 62 years old, serving a six-year sentence at Fort Devens.
I think Jerry's kind of a nut, but President Trump should pardon him. (Previous Pun Salad defense of DeLemus's antics here.)
■ Michael Ramirez on Project Cassandra:
ENABLING HEZBOLLAH DRUG DEALERS #tcothttps://t.co/qNee3zsP0H
— Michael Ramirez (@Ramireztoons) December 24, 2017
Like @ Facebook:https://t.co/WeX1G9jwDl
BOOK:https://t.co/eqyzRdz8nS pic.twitter.com/SaCBrUlS3y
Should you need to be brought up to speed on the subject matter of the cartoon, see the Politico scoop: The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama
administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign
targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group
Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States,
according to a POLITICO investigation.
The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after
the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah
had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and
political organization into an international crime syndicate that
some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from
drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal
activities.
I wonder how many years it will take for an honest assessment of Obama's foreign policy to work its way into general public consciousness? Articles like Politico's will help.
■ @kevinNR has a Christmas reflection worth reading: ‘He Himself Carried the Fire’.
It was impossible. Mary may have lived in a time before science,
before the polite and clinical agents of reason had scrubbed the
angels and demons and desert spirits away from all but the dark
outer edges of our minds, but she was a woman—she knew where babies
came from and how they got made. She knew that she was a virgin and
that she had not become a wife to the man to whom she was engaged.
She also knew what being pregnant and unmarried was likely to mean
to her—socially, religiously, economically, physically—in
first-century Palestine.
She’d probably witnessed her share of stonings.
Religious people sometimes get a pat on the head from their
non-believing friends, who say things like, “All that stuff must
be very comforting. I wish I could believe it.” But why would
Mary have wished to believe it when the angel Gabriel
visited her with that joyous and terrible announcement—“You will
conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus;
He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most
High”—when it would have been so much more comforting to believe
that she’d simply had a strange dream? “Mary was greatly
troubled at his words,” Luke’s gospel says.
“Do not be afraid,” the angel said. Easy for you to say, Gabriel.
I'm not particularly religious myself, but I know it's far from easy.