"Congress is often a theater of the absurd, from Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) pulling a fire alarm before a major vote to former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) being, well, a member of Congress at all. However, none of that compares to what unfolded on Wednesday as Hunter Biden stood outside Congress and defied a subpoena as being 'beyond the absurd.' What happens next could be even more bizarre. ...

"It was a no-brainer that someone appears to have radically over-thought on the Hunter Biden legal team.

"Hunter can now be held in contempt of Congress. That will force the hand of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who aggressively pursued Trump figures for contempt, including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Despite some of us writing to the contrary, Bannon claimed his lawyers told him he did not have to appear before a House committee. He was swiftly charged and convicted by Garland's prosecutors.

"In this instance, the contempt case would go to the U.S. Attorney in D.C., Matthew Graves, who previously declined to assist in bringing tax charges against the president's son. Yet by pulling a Bannon, Hunter now faces the expectation in many circles that he will get the full Bannon treatment from Garland."

Read the entire article here.

"On Monday, the White House held a Hanukkah reception. Among those not invited: American families who have relatives currently being held hostage by Hamas.

"CNN reported that: 'Ruby Chen, whose son Itay is a reservist missing since the militant group's October 7 attacks on Israel, said a number of the families of American hostages were in Washington, D.C., this week, and had reached out to the White House asking to attend the reception but were not invited. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.'

"The White House then scrambled to have these families meet President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

"Biden isn't the only one who doesn't seem to care much about these hostages. The press has been weirdly quiet about their plight and seems content to wait for Biden to 'negotiate' their release. If they're even still alive."

Read the entire article here.

"One in five voters who cast mail-in ballots during the November 2020 election admit to committing voter fraud, according to a new poll by The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports.

"The poll of 1,085 likely voters released on Tuesday, which was conducted from November 30 to December 6, asked, 'During the 2020 election, did you fill out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?' A total of 21% of respondents who said they had cast mail-in ballots answered 'yes.'

"All states prohibit filling out a ballot for another person, but many states allow people to provide assistance with voting, The Heartland Institute noted.

"Furthermore, 17% of mail-in voters admitted they voted in a state where they 'were no longer a permanent resident.' Seventeen percent also said they signed a 'ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member.'"

Read the entire article here.

"Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

"In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors -- including two of her colleagues in Harvard University's department of government -- without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay's dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute's Christopher Rufo and Karlstack's Chris Brunet.

"The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard's own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that 'it's not enough to change a few words here and there.'"

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"Now that Liz Magill is about to become the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, the only sensible reaction is to hope she is the first of many college leaders to hit the road.

"Magill's forced resignation, following her sickening tolerance of antisemitism on Penn's campus and her smug, disastrous congressional testimony, is reason to hope America's educational rot has reached peak madness. The test is whether her comeuppance represents a sacrificial one-off or the start of a wholesale house cleaning of administrators who sold their souls to the woke mob.

"That's the moral clarity the nation needs and the moment demands.

"Make no mistake: the outbreak of antisemitism on campuses across America is the virulent result of decades of radical professors whose far-left politics have turned elite institutions into anti-American indoctrination factories."

Read the entire article here.

"Joe Biden made cracking down on tax-cheating millionaires a centerpiece of his presidency, even securing the funds to hire new IRS agents and auditors. On Thursday, his Justice Department branded first son Hunter Biden as a quintessential tax cheat who chose to underwrite an 'extravagant lifestyle' with millions in foreign monies rather than pay his debts to Uncle Sam.

"In a sweeping grand jury indictment that levied three felony and six misdemeanor charges that carry 17 years in prison, Special Counsel David Weiss markedly increased the legal peril for Hunter Biden while also placing a dark cloud over the president's own political fortunes just weeks before the start of the presidential primary elections."

Read the entire article here.

"If they made nothing else clear, elite university presidents testifying Tuesday certainly showed they're not serious about dealing with antisemitism.

"The Harvard, MIT and University of Pennsylvania chiefs all admitted that antisemitism is a problem, but dodged and weaved about confronting the hate.

"All quickly retreated to a 'free speech' defense, claiming their hands are tied by their duty to allow unfettered dialogue.

"Funny: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Harvard the worst school for free speech in 2023, with an 'abysmal' record, and Penn as the second-worst. (MIT is just middling.)"

Read the entire article here.

"It is tempting to dismiss COP28 as the Super Bowl of virtue signaling. But that would be to ignore the massive damage being done to our country by the unrealistic and costly climate policies of the Biden White House. The administration's wrong-headed 'leadership' on phasing out fossil fuels, which currently provide nearly 80% of U.S. energy, is a highlight of COP28; their policies are making Americans poorer and less secure.

"To wit: since Joe Biden took office, electricity prices have soared 24%; during President Trump's four years in office, average electricity prices actually declined.

"COP 28, the annual climate talkathon, has had its light moments. Some 80,000 attendees are participating, a large number of whom are traveling by emissions-spewing private jets. Over the weekend, some of those planes were frozen to icy runways in Munich as global warming was trumped by unseasonal cold and blizzards which blanketed much of Europe."

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"The best-case scenario for one of the most common COVID-19 interventions may be that it has no measurable effect on infection, recent studies suggest.

"A systematic review of studies of mask mandates for children, published Saturday in the British Medical Journal's Archives of Disease in Childhood, found "no association" with infection or transmission in 16 of the 22 observational studies and 'critical' or 'serious' risk of bias in the six countervailing studies. It got the attention of Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.

"Self-reported SARS-CoV-2 infection was higher the more often people said they wore masks, according to a Norwegian study accepted for publication Nov. 13 in the Cambridge University Press journal Epidemiology and Infection.

"The findings cast further doubt on the practice of not only public health authorities but scientists themselves in demonizing science-based skepticism of the effectiveness of COVID interventions, particularly in relation to their potential medical, mental and social harms."

Read the entire article here.

"It's just shoplifting, what's the big deal? Everything is insured. The stores just write it off, right?

"But anyone who has ever stood in front of a locked case of toothpaste, waiting for someone to free the Colgate, knows it's far more than that.

"Worse, anyone who has lived in an area that shops are abandoning en masse due to the shoplifting problem knows what is lost.

"The impulse to dismiss shoplifting as no big deal is wrong. A mass shoplifting problem is evidence of societal decline and degradation."

Read the entire article here.