"Very soon, news from the trail will overtake the goings-on in Congress. House Democrats won't just have trouble changing laws. They also will have difficulty promoting their message. Especially considering the third and greatest difference between 2007 and 2019: the presence of Donald Trump. There's no evidence that Pelosi has any better an idea of how to deal with him than her predecessors. Whenever Trump focuses his attention on reelection and sets the agenda of cable news coverage by attacking his rivals on Twitter, Pelosi will be less than powerless. She will be irrelevant.

"The partial government shutdown is a prelude to an unpredictable two years of conflict, deadlock, breakdown, acrimony, dissatisfaction, and annoyance. At the end, Democrats will be reminded that, thanks to congressional delegation of authority, the House doesn't count for much. What matters is the presidency. Ask the GOP.

"Even there, Republicans will tell you, be careful what you wish for."

"The US embassy in Havana more than halved its staff in 2017 when diplomats complained of headaches, nausea and other ailments after hearing penetrating noises in their homes and nearby hotels.

"The mysterious wave of illness fuelled speculation that the staff had been targeted by an acoustic weapon. It was an explanation that appeared to gain weight when an audio recording of a persistent, high-pitched drone made by US personnel in Cuba was released to the Associated Press.

"But a fresh analysis of the audio recording has revealed what scientists in the UK and the US now believe is the true source of the piercing din: it is the song of the Indies short-tailed cricket, known formally as Anurogryllus celerinictus.

"'The recording is definitively a cricket that belongs to the same group,' said Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, a professor of sensory biology at the University of Lincoln. 'The call of this Caribbean species is about 7 kHz, and is delivered at an unusually high rate, which gives humans the sensation of a continuous sharp trill.'"

"Thursday was a strange day in Washington. There was the changing, not of the guard but of half of the Congress, and Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats acted as if she were Franklin D. Roosevelt (in drag) and it was 1932 and 'happy days are here again.'

"She told The New York Times that the Constitution considers her to be the president's equal, which was news to everyone else, but, to be fair, Nancy was confused all day long. At the conclusion of what she regarded as her inaugural address before the House of Representatives, she said to herself (caught on an open microphone), 'I think I skipped a couple of pages, I'm not sure.'

"Such slips of pages, tongue and consciousness have become standard fare with Nancy's speeches. She's only 78, but an old 78, and the party's old folks think she's entitled to one last hurrah, but someone will have to take Nancy aside to explain that the Constitution's prescribed equal division of government into executive, congressional and judicial branches does not extend to individual persons, important as they may be, and she is not entitled to a room or sleepover privileges at the White House, nor can she show up at Andrews Air Force Base and expect to hail Air Force One for a weekend trip to San Francisco. It's still commercial air for the peasants in the House.

"Life will only get harder for Nancy and the Democrats as they discover the limits of taking over only one house of Congress, thrilling as Election Night was."

"Democratic lawmakers brought a border security briefing at the White House to a screeching halt Wednesday, refusing to even listen to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, a White House official tells The Daily Caller.

"House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy echoed this version of events to reporters outside the White House immediately after the briefing, saying, 'Once the secretary started, Schumer interrupted her and didn't want to hear it.'

"Republican and Democratic lawmakers after the meeting indicated little progress was made toward ending the partial government shutdown and that they agreed to reconvene Friday. The White House official says there was a consensus in the room that negotiations would be put on hold until Pelosi officially assumed her expected role of Speaker.

"The White House official told TheDC that both Pelosi and Schumer refused to hear out Nielsen's briefing and instead advocated for two solutions to end the government shutdown. Neither of the Democratic options would provide the additional funding for border security requested by The White House."

"This year, the United States government will have spent more than $4 trillion. Right now, the government is shut down for a dispute over funding for the border wall proposed by Trump, amounting to $5 billion, or 0.125 percent of total federal expenditures. The shutdown has been going on for two weeks, and there is as yet no indication of any resolution.

"Normally, government shutdowns are over major disputes on spending. Think of the 1995/96 shutdown, as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich squabbled over the extent to which constraints on Medicare spending were necessary to get the deficit under control. The shutdown in 2013 was due in part to historically unprecedented levels of deficit spending during peacetime, and substantive disagreements about what to do about it. But not in 2018. Right now, nobody in Washington, D.C., seems to care about the deficit. This is all about $5 billion to build a wall. Yet $5 billion is a pittance in terms of overall federal spending. Politicians in recent years have knowingly signed off on much more for purely political purposes.

"This is beyond bizarre -- or at least it would be in any other time except the Age of Trump.

"What to make of all this?

"Far be it from me to predict what will come from any of this. Still, I think this fight is the triumph of symbolism over substance in the squalid politics of our age, and it is a prelude to the brutal fight that awaits us as we near the 2020 presidential election."

We wish you a Merry Christmas filled with holiday cheer and all our Best Wishes for a Happy New Year!

"[T]he problem with Obamacare isn't one federal judge. The problem with Obamacare isn't Republicans. The problem with Obamacare is Obamacare.

"The Affordable Care Act is a clumsy, clunky, ill-begotten legislative program executed with approximately the skill that a team of dead-average chimpanzees would bring to rebuilding the engine of a Ferrari GTC4Lusso. It was a mess, and it remains a mess -- and that is not a view exclusive to Republicans. Democrats began working to get rid of parts of the law -- notably the 'Cadillac' tax that so annoyed their union constituency -- before it was even implemented. (That tax has not been repealed, but its implementation has been delayed until at least 2022, at which point it most likely will be delayed again or removed from the legislation.) Exemptions and special considerations were handed out as freely as condoms at a Marin County kindergarten. Republicans hate the law -- but Democrats have found a lot to dislike about it, too. The distance between Democrats' stated preferences and their revealed preferences vis-a-vis the ACA is almost as wide as the gap between Professor Krugman's reputation as an economist and his reputation as a newspaper columnist.

"As The Editors wrote here after the federal ruling, Obamacare 'addressed real, if sometimes exaggerated, problems, but did so at an unnecessarily high cost.' It also did so in an unnecessarily complicated and destructive fashion, in part because it tried to do too many things at once. The Democrats let political considerations trump considerations of good governance: They believed that if they could just get some kind of national health-care program into place, then they could tinker with it ad infinitum after the fact, believing with good reason that once Americans were hooked on the subsidies then they'd be willing to pay the price to service that addiction. Like the Palestinians, Republicans rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and their contribution to the 2008 health-care debate was simply to repeat in Manchurian Candidate fashion: 'We have the best health-care system in the world.' They never quite got around to asking why so many people were displeased with it."

"WASHINGTON -- President Trump renewed his attacks on the Federal Reserve on Monday in a tweet expressing incredulity that the Fed continues to raise interest rates. While his outbursts have drawn widespread criticism for being impolitic, a growing number of experts think the president has a point.

"As the Fed drives up borrowing costs, there is increasing concern that the central bank is risking a return to recession, and may be preventing workers from claiming a larger share of the American pie.

"As Lawrence H. Summers, formerly President Barack Obama's chief economic adviser, put the matter in a recent interview with Fox Business Network, 'The ways in which the president spoke, I don't think any thoughtful economist would agree with.' Then he made clear that he mostly agreed: 'I do think that there are more risks of overtightening than there are of undertightening right now.'

"The Fed is expected to raise its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday for the fifth consecutive quarter. The unemployment rate sits at the lowest level in half a century, wages are rising and Fed officials say they are raising rates to make sure price inflation remains under control."

"An open records lawsuit filed against the State Department is attempting to uncover whether Russian entities attempted to financially support U.S. environmentalist causes.

"The Institute for Energy Research (IER) -- a free-market energy group based in Washington, D.C. -- filed the lawsuit on Monday. IER has requested that the State Department hand over correspondence concerning hydraulic fracturing, environmental advocacy and Russia that was exchanged to and from high-ranking employees. ...

"'Any foreign attempts to covertly influence U.S. energy policy must be exposed and met with full consequences,' read a Monday statement from IER President Thomas Pyle. 'Particularly given what we have already learned, the State Department's evident lack of interest in examining this issue of obvious concern to congressional oversight, or in bothering with a substantive response to our request even when pressed, is deeply concerning.' ...

"The lawsuit follows mounting questions over Russian support of environmentalist groups that have opposed U.S. fracking. American officials confirmed back in 2017 that RT, a Kremlin-controlled media outlet, ran anti-fracking programming with an intent to protect Russian energy interests. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an audience behind closed doors that Russia's government was propping up 'phony environmental groups' opposed to hydraulic fracturing and pipelines, according to emails released by Wikileaks in 2016."

"A few years ago, I was in Switzerland writing a piece in which I argued that the Confoederatio Helvetica is the world's best-governed country. You may not agree, but it is a country with a remarkable level of accountability -- accountability that is held close to the Swiss people. Around the time I was visiting, Tina Turner, a longtime resident of the country, was in the final stages of becoming a Swiss national. Because of the eccentricities of Switzerland's democratic and radically local governance, the famous singer had to trundle down to the Swiss version of her local city council meeting and prove to them that she could speak German well enough to function as a Swiss citizen and resident of the Canton of Zurich, that she had sufficient financial resources to avoid being a public ward, and that she was an all-around good egg. The local government, not only the national government in Bern, has a say in that. Imagine a United States in which, say, the City of Minneapolis or the representatives of Presidio County, Texas, had a real say over immigration decisions.

"It would look different. Maybe you think that would be an improvement and maybe you don't, but it almost certainly would be more representative of what people actually want -- or, at least, the decisions would be made at a level that is more readily subject to the exercise of democratic accountability. ...

"One model of working toward real accountability would be pressing not only political decision-making but also political administration down to the state and local level as much as possible. In the Nordic welfare states that our progressives admire, many social programs are administered at the local rather than national level -- in Sweden, for example, health care is managed at the county level, not the national level. That means that people can see for themselves how social services are managed, delivered, and consumed. The United States, on the other hand, has been pursuing a program of centralization -- pushed by progressives -- for about a century. Some on the Left have started to see the light on this issue: Faced with a Trump administration, there are many in California who have developed a sudden appreciation for the virtues of federalism. They want to let California be California. If only we could convince them to let Texas be Texas, too.

"If we do not find a way toward more robust accountability, the most likely outcome is not strongman rule: It is chaos, with desultory, emotive, largely symbolic populist episodes producing counterproductive interventions here and there in disorderly and contradictory fashion -- and probably vindictive fashion -- in a way that in effect cedes an ever-larger share of real power to the bureaucracies, which are the institutions least likely to provide real accountability.

"And it is very difficult to take back power from a bureaucracy set on keeping it. Pass all the laws you like, win every election, and you still may not get what you want. Ask the British."

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