Security

• Middle East “peace” deal goes into effect: The Middle East peace agreement between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect overnight, but to what end? Its duration is for 60 days, which perhaps not coincidentally means it’ll expire just days after Donald Trump takes office and Joe Biden has gotten safely out of Dodge. There were celebrations across the besieged country of Lebanon, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that his country was bargaining from a position of strength. As the New York Post reports, “Netanyahu said the agreement comes after Israel decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, ranks, infrastructure and hidden bunkers along the border. The deal allows a five-nation monitoring committee, led by the US, to oversee the de-escalation and allow hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Israel and Lebanon to return to their homes after more than a year of daily missile attacks. The cease-fire deal also includes assurances for Israel to maintain a military presence near the border and retaliate against any future Hezbollah attack.” All this is good, but Hezbollah didn’t abide by the terms of a 2006 peace deal with Israel, so what’s the likelihood that it’ll behave honorably this time around?

• Hamas claims it’s ready for Gaza ceasefire after Hezbollah’s deal with Israel (NY Post)

• Canada braces for immigrant surge ahead of Trump’s crackdown: Canada is scrambling to increase its border enforcement ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration in anticipation of a surge of illegal aliens fearing deportation. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Charles Poirier explained, “We knew that if Mr. Trump came into power, the status quo at the border would change.” Interestingly, Canada’s border security increase comes amid Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recently announced scale-back on the annual total legal immigration numbers — down to 365,000 by 2027. Furthermore, Canada will send asylum seekers back to the U.S. to await adjudication of their requests, similar to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. Suddenly, borders seem to matter again to leftists.

• “Don’t test us”: Trump’s border czar threatens sanctuary city leaders seeking to block mass deportations (NY Post)

• China frees three U.S. prisoners serving harsh sentences ahead of Trump’s return to Washington (NY Post)

• Chinese ship suspected of deliberately dragging anchor for 100 miles to cut Baltic cables (WSJ)

Government & Politics

• Trump’s anti-lockdown NIH pick is karmic gold: During the COVID pandemic, few people were more correct and few people suffered more malicious repercussions than Stanford epidemiologist, health policy professor, and Great Barrington Declaration coauthor Jay Bhattacharya. He steadfastly refused to accept the now-deeply discredited position of both sheeplike lawmakers and the medical establishment that lockdowns were the right thing to do. In fact, the lockdowns were ruinous. Ditto for masking and vaccine mandates. And now, Dr. Bhattacharya has been tapped by Donald Trump to head the National Institutes of Health. As The Blaze reports: “Although he and other principals behind the Great Barrington Declaration were ultimately vindicated, at the time, he faced incredible abuse. President Joe Biden’s former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins conspired to issue a ‘quick and devastating takedown’ of Bhattacharya’s criticism while many of the professor’s peers personally attacked him. Adding injury to insult, Bhattacharya was censored online.” It’s hard to imagine what the good doctor’s first day on the job will be like, but in the words of Jackie Gleason, “How sweet it is.”

• Was Kamala’s video cringeworthy by design? After having abandoned her vice-presidential post for a couple of weeks and heading to Hawaii to lick her electoral wounds, Kamala Harris now appears in a brief video in which she sort of shrugs her shoulders at having tossed $1.5 billion of her supporters’ money into a roaring dumpster fire over the course of 100 days. “I just have to remind you,” she says in the brief clip, “don’t let anybody take your power from you. You have the same power that you did before November 5, and you have the same purpose that you did. And you have the same ability to engage and inspire. So don’t ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you.” The video was part of a longer call that she and her weirdo running mate, Tim Walz, did for their supporters. It’s hard to tell whether Harris had been drinking, but it wasn’t a good look. Maybe that was the point. Maybe the Democrat powers that be are heading off the prospect of another $1.5 billion bonfire in 2028 by letting the failed candidate herself remind the American people why they rejected her in the first place.

• Humor: Kamala’s 2028 campaign already $700 million in debt (Babylon Bee)

• Harris’s internal polls weren’t optimistic: On a recent podcast interview, Kamala Harris’s senior advisor and former Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe admitted that Harris’s internal polling wasn’t great leading up to the election. The election results “surprised people because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” Plouffe noted. “It was just basically a race that in the battlegrounds was 46-47, 47-48.” Plouffe later added, “We were hopeful. I don’t know how optimistic we were.” In other words, the Harris campaign saw the same trend that the aggregate polling averages showed: Donald Trump rising and Harris fading as Election Day approached. Plouffe also tacitly acknowledged that the Harris campaign was essentially doomed from the start: “I think the political atmosphere, the desire for change, all those fundamentals that you’ve spent a lot of time talking about really presented huge challenges for us.”

• Biden’s Rivian loan is the worst form of crony capitalism: If Gavin Newsom is positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run, he has an idiotic way of showing it. This week, the California governor said that if Donald Trump ends the federal government’s $7,500 electric vehicle rebate program, he’ll soak his fellow Californians instead to make up the $7,500. Except in the case of Tesla, the world’s leading manufacturer of EVs. If Newsom gets his way, there’ll be no rebates for Tesla owners, who’ve committed the unpardonable sin of having purchased a vehicle from that notable pro-Trump deplorable, Elon Musk. Against this backdrop, let’s consider an even more brazen act of crony capitalism: a $6 billion loan from Joe Biden’s Department of Energy to Rivian, an EV competitor of Musk’s Tesla, for building an EV plant in Georgia. Talk about picking winners and losers. As Just the News reports, “The plant was expected to bring 7,500 jobs to the area and begin in 2024.” For those of you keeping score at home, that’s around $880,000 per job. And those are your tax dollars at work.

Climate

• John Kerry calls for climate emergency: At the recent UN COP29 climate change confab, John Kerry, Joe Biden’s former climate czar, once again hit on his favorite climate alarmist hobby horse. “We’re on the brink of needing to declare a climate emergency, which is what we really have,” Kerry opined. “We need to get people to behave as if this really is a major transitional challenge to the whole planet, to everybody.” How authoritarian of him. He further argued that America should pay for the developing world’s energy infrastructure: “People in Africa who don’t have electricity need to choose the right kind of electricity, and we need to help them be able to afford it and do it. We have the largest economy in the world — $24 trillion or $23 trillion economy, maybe more by now.” After comparing America’s GDP with that of China, Germany, and Japan, Kerry stated, “You don’t think we have some sort of obligation out of that to be responsible? I think we do.” Kerry exposes the problem with globalists like himself — they don’t value national sovereignty, individual liberty, and personal responsibility. This explains why he makes such sweeping, illiberal, authoritarian, and inherently unjust statements.

• Detroit using eminent domain to plop panels instead of people on vacant lots (Hot Air)

Economy

• Consumer confidence surges post-election: The consumer confidence index has soared in November, rising to 111.7, its highest mark in over a year. Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board, assessed the reason for this jump: “November’s increase was mainly driven by more positive consumer assessments of the present situation, particularly regarding the labor market. Compared to October, consumers were also substantially more optimistic about future job availability, which reached its highest level in almost three years.” While the Conference Board did not point to Donald Trump’s sweeping election victory as the primary cause for the surging consumer optimism since it did not include any questions regarding the election in its survey, it did note “that write-in responses about politics, including the November elections, surged to above 2020 levels.” Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Samuel Tombs said, “The increase in the headline likely was driven by euphoria among Republicans.” We’d say that’s not just Republicans.

• Federal Reserve officials signal cautious path for rate cuts amid still-high inflation (The Hill)

Culture

• California court strips father of all rights in battle to save his boy from being “transitioned” (Not the Bee)

• Canadian town forced to pay $10,000 to LGBT group, send mayor to reeducation course because they didn’t declare June “Pride Month” (Not the Bee)

• Scottish Supreme Court to determine what a “woman” is (Hot Air)

Misc.

• Biden exits at all-time low, Trump in with highest approval (Washington Examiner)

• Ex-CBS News reporter accuses network of “defying” orders to probe Hunter Biden laptop scandal (NY Post)

• Judge rules in favor of Missouri law requiring photo ID to vote (Daily Wire)

• Humor: Nine things public schools won’t tell you about the first Thanksgiving (Babylon Bee)

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.