How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017?

In the next 12 months, the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in ways he was not able to by adhering to the law.

The media, as it has the past seven years, will not only ignore the illegality, but also rationalize and commend it.

Then comes 2017.

If a Republican is elected president, what will the media and its liberal sympathizers do should the next chief executive decides to follow the Obama modus operandi?

When Obama issued executive-order amnesty and non-enforcement of immigration laws, the media kept silent, happy that the noble end of open borders justified any means necessary to achieve it. In 2017, we will have a precedent that any American president can simply build a wall, close the border, and deport whomever he finds in violation of federal law.

Or, also taking his cue from Obama, he might allow individual municipalities to nullify federal laws as they see fit: The Endangered Species Act null and avoid inside Salt Lake City? Gay marriage illegal within the city limits of Mobile? Gun control mandates too much of a hassle for those living in Laramie? Texas towns free to burn coal as they please?

Marco Rubio has been criticizing Ted Cruz’s stand on immigration, especially regarding where they stood on the “Gang of Eight” bill. Let’s look at the facts.

The Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill passed the Senate after a series of votes in June 2013. Democrats, who controlled the Senate at the time, unanimously supported the bill, while most Republicans opposed it.

The four Republicans on the gang — Marco Rubio, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake — of course voted for it, and also agreed with Democrats on a plan to kill almost all GOP amendments.

Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid allowed just a handful of amendments to reach the Senate floor. One, from Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, would have prohibited the legalization of illegal immigrants in the United States until after the administration could prove it had maintained "effective control" of the borders for six months.

Rubio voted against the Grassley amendment. Sen. Ted Cruz voted for it.

Another week, another study showing that our official climate data gatekeepers have been exaggerating the extent of “global warming” to make it look more scary, more urgent, more desperately in need of extra funding for our official climate data gatekeepers.

This one, co-authored by meteorologist Anthony Watts (of Watts Up With That? fame) shows that at least half of the “global warming” in the US since 1979 has been fabricated by NOAA.

While satellite records have shown no global warming for at least 18 years, the land based data sets like the ones maintained by NOAA for the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) continue to show a warming trend.

One reason for this discrepancy, the study suggests, is that NOAA has been cherry-picking its raw data. That is, it looks like US government scientists and bureaucrats have committed a gargantuan fraud costing US taxpayers countless billions of dollars. Shouldn’t they be criminally prosecuted for doing so?

Sometimes I wonder how the left can remain so woefully ill-informed on the subject of climate change.

Then I read articles like this piece of complete Chait that one of America’s leading liberal commentators has just produced for New York magazine and all becomes clear: because ‘progressive’ journalists who write about the environment don’t do research or due diligence — only fluffy sentiment and green propaganda.

Let me show you, with reference to Jonathan Chait’s article — excerpts from which I’ll put in italics, with my gloss below — what I mean.

 This weekend, leaders from 196 countries approved the first global agreement to limit greenhouse-gas emissions in human history. The pact is a triumph of international diplomacy shared by diplomats across the planet.

The agreement is non-binding, carries no penalties and is entirely voluntary. That’s why everyone signed: because it meant nothing — not because any diplomatic skills were necessary.

 Obama’s climate agenda has lurked quietly on the recesses of the American imagination for most of his presidency. It is also probably the administration’s most important accomplishment.

That last sentence is probably true — but only because from Syria to Russia to Obamacare to Benghazi to Common Core to the proliferation of divisive #blacklivesmatter identity politics lunacy, everything else on the administration’s watch has been an even bigger fail.

And, I'm sorry to say, it is now pointed at you.

We more or less know this, of course. It's been beyond dispute since the Snowden revelations. What most people haven't done, however, is to face the fact.

Before I get into three examples of a Weaponized Internet being pointed at you, I'd like you to understand the most common problem with this material: When I explain these things, it's almost never the intellectual aspects of it that turn people away. Rather it's the psychological aspects, and denial in particular.

If you hold to an imperative that “it can't be that bad,” or, “the US military can never do wrong,” you'll find any number of ways to conclude that I'm going too far, misunderstanding, and so on.

So, make of this as you will, but please do so honestly and do your best to avoid living along that river in Egypt.

Europe has been going demographically bankrupt for awhile now because of its falling birth rates, so the socialists who run it have come up with an absolutely amazing plan they say can't possibly fail.

They're going to solve this demographic bankruptcy and this resulting economic bankruptcy when there's nobody to do the work or pay the bills or even write the welfare checks by bringing in millions and millions of Moslems to fill in the gap.

There's just one, tiny, little, minor problem with it, and I'm not talking about the terrorism, the Sharia, the no-go zones, the attacks on Jews, or all the other fun stuff. There's just one other minor problem, which is that the people coming in don't actually work.

There’s a basic cultural difference between the Western world which is a work ethic culture, and the Moslem world which is a slave culture. And when people from a slave culture come into a country where it has generous socialism, that has generous welfare policies, they're coming there not to work. They are not refugees – they are welfare migrants.

We cannot allow this to happen in America.