I’m avoiding most Christmas music this time around, though I will still post about a few favorites that warm my heart. And I will dutifully watch the same Christmas season movie classics that I always did with my late wife, whose love of Christmas combined with our awful last version of the holiday and her shocking sudden death are three ghosts too many to bear, even after almost two years. I just posted, with wan response so far, the updated Ethics Companion to “White Christmas,” which includes one of our five commenters Michael West’s entertaining analysis of the military sequence that begins the film. [You are welcome to update or re-think any of that, MW, and I’ll add it right in.]

I’ve been appreciating Bing, Danny, Rosemary and Vera-Ellen more with each viewing recently, perhaps because I’ve been taking them for granted. As narrator Frank Sinatra says in “That’s Entertainment,” the great MGM retrospective about the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals, “You can sit around and hope, but you will never see the likes of this ever again.”

Ol’ Blue Eyes was talking about an epic dance duel between Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, but he just as easily could have been talking about The “White Christmas” Four. Or for me, I’m afraid, a sadness-free Christmas.

But enough of that:

1. Yup, she’s a con-artist, a law-breaker and a liar: now what? The Washington Free Beacon mounts an airtight case that Minnesota “Somalia First” Rep. Omar indeed married her brother and has lied about it for years. Why don’t Democrats care about this as much as the conservative press? I thought Democrats were the party of “no one is above the law”? The rubber-stamp response to all legitimate questions about this weird story always rebounds to Omar’s original claim that the issue was just “Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division.”

2. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a GOP embarrassment in the House, has been making a farewell tour apparently aimed at annoying as many Republicans as possible: for example, she cozied up recently to the far left fanatic group “Code Pink.” She seems less interested in principles than in setting herself up to be Liz Cheney,The Sequel, though GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert suggests that her soon to be ex-colleague is flying the metaphorical coop to avoid new regulations stopping House members from trading stocks. MTG executed over 450 stock trades since joining the House and bought $3.89 million in stocks in 2024 alone. She has a better success rate than most hedge funds.

A “Victory Girls” pundit ruefully writes, “I keep thinking about the people who defended her when it wasn’t fashionable. They absorbed the ridicule and trusted that beneath the mess there was something solid. Greene repaid that trust by posing with Code Pink and then turning around to sabotage her own party on the way out.” Funny, I keep thinking how Greene proved that her supporters, when she was an obvious self-promoting Dunning-Kruger victim who had no business being in Congress, were dupes, fools, and marks. It wasn’t hard to see how unqualified and unfit she was, if bias hadn’t made them stupid.

3. Today’s misleading and corrosive op-ed [gift link] is “We Should Teach Our Students How to Think, Not What to Believe” by a documentary maker who apparently hasn’t figured out that most teachers now aren’t capable of attempting to do the former without trying to do the latter. And neither is he. He writes,

Teachers and administrators in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Orange County seem largely aligned with the Palestinian side, believing that it has been underrepresented in schools for years.

Many Jewish parents, by contrast, believe that since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, their children have been indoctrinated, not educated. In response, those parents, with the help of outside groups, pushed for a state law that will further politicize classroom instruction, by limiting what teachers can say about Israel.

What is being lost in the tumult is the basic purpose of education: teaching students to think for themselves.

and, complaining about regulations and rules stopping teachers from discussing critical race theory and Israel as purveyor of “genocide,”

…teachers will simply avoid touching on sensitive arguments, not knowing what is and what is not regarded as discriminatory content. It’s hard to conceive of this, in effect, as anything other than censorship.

Wait a minute. Teachers are free to say whatever they like out of class; they are not free to stuff children’s heads full of their political and social justice pet convictions. Grade school and high school students can be taught critical thinking skills as well as math, science, English composition, logic, social studies and even history without being deliberately programmed to support a partisan viewpoint, and telling teachers to stick to the lesson plans without editorializing is called responsible education policy, not “censorship.”

The writer is unethically pretending to oppose political activism by teachers while claiming that they shouldn’t be stopped from raising issues that the odds say they are probably biased about. “I don’t mind a professor saying Israel is practicing apartheid,” a professor is quoted as saying. “I mind if they’re bad teachers.” In public school, a teacher who says Israel is practicing apartheid is a bad teacher.

4. More Presidential Pardon follies: Tina Peters, the former clerk in Mesa County, Colorad0, was sentenced to nine years in prison last year after she was found guilty of interfering with voting machines in an effort to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election. President Trump said he was going to pardon her, which is odd, since it was a state conviction and a President doesn’t have the power to do that. “There’s no legal merit,” Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado, a Democrat, said in an interview. No there isn’t.

It should drive everyone crazy, MAGA-fied or not, when the President says things like this. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer for Peters and longtime friend of PresidentTrump, said he will argue that Trump has the power to pardon her. Ticktin’s theory is that a President has the power to free Peters under a novel legal theory that the Constitution’s language allowing Presidents to pardon people for offenses “against the United States” applies not just to federal crimes but also to state- charges. “The President of the United States has the power to grant a pardon in any of the states of the United States,” Ticktin wrote Trump in a letter. Yeah, good luck with that. Such theories got Trump’s lawyers who supported his legal opposition to the 2020 election results disbarred, because only Democratic lawyers are allowed to make ridiculous claims in court. Hey, who was it that told President Biden that he could pass the Equal Rights Amendment all by his lonesome?

5. Oh, it’s all because of white privilege, don’t you see that? Sherrone Moore, the first black head coach in Michigan football history, has been fired from his 6 million dollar a year job and is facing prison time. He engaged in a long-time sexual relationship with a subordinate against university rules (Hey! Bil Clinton did it!) and after she filed a complaint against him and he was fired, he broke into her home and said he was going to kill himself in front of her.

Also this week, we learned that Tashella Sheri Amore Dickerson, a Black Lives Matter leader in Oklahoma City has been charged with wire fraud and money laundering. She had access to BLMOKC’s bank, PayPal, and Cash App accounts starting in 2016 and diverted more than $3.15 million in returned bail checks into her personal bank accounts over a five-year period. With that cash she took trips to Jamaica and The Dominican Republic, bought expensive items and ordered about $50,000-dollars worth of Door Dash food deliveries. She also bought a car and six properties.

I have come to believe that these scenarios are the result of a damaged black culture, where blacks are taught that the evil white folks get all sorts of benefits at their expense, then live large because of their privilege. When some of these indoctrinated minority individuals with a victim’s mentality finally get in a position of power, they often feel entitled to break rules and laws they assume (and have been taught) that privileged, undeserving whites get away with breaking as a matter of course. Then they get caught and blame their fate on America’s racism. It’s a tragic cycle. It would be wonderful if the black community acknowledged the problem and tried to address it.