"In the substantive debate between the American left and right, a debate which really does exist, the basic question is 'What is the proper purpose of government?' Those who are not on the political left object to greater or lesser degrees to the redistribution of wealth from those who earned it to those who didn't.

"I do indeed object to a hard-working middle class (or upper-middle class or upper-upper class) having their earnings raided on behalf of the undeserving. But neither I, nor the dollar taken from me, nor my accountant, nor the IRS agent scanning my tax return, gives a whit whether the recipient of my dollar was white, brown, purple, or plaid. (Well, I do have a big problem with plaid, truth be told.)

"Obama imagines our national political conversation as one in which 'every economic issue is framed' as minorities pilfering whites when in fact no economic issue is framed that way. So what is the purpose of his framing the issue this way? To cause gullible Americans to assume that any objection to income redistribution specifically and big government generally is due to racism. It is the very essence of the 'dog whistle' politics that Democrats so often accuse Republicans of.

"It is past time for Americans of all stripes to stand up to this outrageous demonization. It is past time to call out the left, aggressively and publicly, for this libel which imputes to good people the unacceptable and politically disqualifying trait of racism."

"The Justice Department's inspector general has announced that his office will conduct a review that will focus principally on FBI director James Comey's public statements regarding the Clinton e-mails investigation during the 2016 campaign. ...

"It is undoubtedly appropriate for Michael Horowitz, DOJ's inspector general, to consider whether these actions departed from law-enforcement protocols -- as I have previously explained. But it is worth noting what the IG will not be reviewing: the Justice Department's conduct.

"The IG's press release makes no mention of the Justice Department's decision not to open a grand-jury investigation, despite significant concrete evidence of criminal wrongdoing -- the decision that deprived the FBI of the use of subpoenas to compel the production of evidence. Neither will the IG be reviewing the multiple irregular immunity agreements granted by the Justice Department in a case in which no criminal charges were filed, including agreements that reportedly called for the destruction of evidence (laptop computers of top Clinton aides) after a strangely limited examination of their potentially incriminating contents."

"An old proverb sums up how Donald Trump handled the last two days: 'The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.'

"The dogs of the Democratic media were absolutely howling yesterday over sordid, unverified allegations involving Russia, but the president-elect and his team put on a master class in self-defense. They hit back forcefully, with press secretary Sean Spicer calling publication of the allegations 'disgraceful' and Vice President-elect Mike Pence calling it a case of 'fake news' that aims to 'delegitimize the president-elect.'

"It was a strong warm-up, and Trump then took the stage to completely deny the charges, and repeated the denials in response to numerous questions. By the end of the press conference, he had managed to turn the spotlight away from himself and on to the lack of integrity in both the media and government intelligence agencies -- where it also belongs.

"That was no mean feat, and his performance was a reminder that Trump is not and never will be a pushover. He fights fire with fire and is getting increasingly more disciplined in making his case."

"So the website BuzzFeed decided to publish a series of memos that have been floating around for months alleging all kinds of terrible things about Donald Trump. ...

"Readers of this newspaper know well not to include me among Trump's supporters. But the scurrilousness of what BuzzFeed has done here is so beyond the bounds of what is even remotely acceptable it should compel even those most outraged by Trump's political excesses to come to his defense and to the defense of a few other people mentioned in these papers whose names are also dragged through the mud.

"There is literally no evidence on offer in these memos or from BuzzFeed that any single sentence in these documents is factual or true. What's more, we know most major news organizations in America had seen them and despite their well-known institutional antipathy toward Trump, had chosen not to publish them or even make reference to them after efforts to substantiate their charges had failed."

"Over the next several days, you will see numerous vile efforts to smear Senator Sessions' good name. His opponents will dredge up the bogus, discredited attacks made against him at his judicial confirmation hearing 30 years ago. There will be attempts to re-litigate the presidential campaign. People will bring up votes Sessions has taken over the past 20 years with which they disagree -- and this last bit will be the most telling.

"Trying to taint Senator Sessions with any past votes should be an irrelevant exercise, given that he is being considered for a post that requires him to enforce existing laws, whether he supported their passage or not. Sessions undoubtedly has the integrity to enforce laws he doesn't personally agree with and to stay within proper bounds on laws he does agree with.

"But again, that's actually what scares some people about an Attorney General Jeff Sessions: He's a law-and-order devotee about to enter a lawless DOJ. If I were them -- if I wanted to keep DOJ as a partisan agency unbound by law -- I'd be scared, too."

"Members of the soon-to-be Trump administration are heading into battle this week, as a slew of confirmation hearings for the president-elect's top Cabinet officials begin on Capitol Hill. They will be, in a sense, well-fortified.

"That's because the incoming commander-in-chief has the benefit of not only a Republican Senate majority intent on a swift process but also a simple 51-vote threshold requirement for confirming his executive appointments. For the latter, Donald Trump can thank former Sen. Harry Reid, who in 2013 led fellow Democrats in changing the chamber's filibuster rules to prevent the minority party from blocking the president's nominees (except for Supreme Court appointments).

"But Senate Democrats aren't submitting quietly to that reality. With virtually no recourse to block Trump's designees outright, they first intend to delay the incoming administration from taking shape and thus forestall its plan to unravel much of the work of the outgoing one.

"If they can't prevent Trump from having his Dream Team of players, the opposition party aims to undermine some of the key ones, forcing the new president to spend his political capital defending them early on. The process could also reveal just how much Trump is willing to go to bat for his team."

"House Republicans and Donald Trump's team are coalescing around a multi-billion dollar plan to make good on the president-elect's campaign vows to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, according to top Republican lawmakers and aides.

"Republican leaders, in tandem with Trump's transition staff, are considering using a 2006 law signed by former President George W. Bush that authorized the construction of 700 miles-plus of '€œphysical barrier€' on the southern border. The law was never fully implemented and did not include a sunset provision, allowing Trump to pick up where Bush left off -- with the help of new money from Congress.

"Yet the plan could potentially provoke a showdown with Democrats over government funding. Republicans are considering whether to tuck the border wall funding into a must-pass spending bill that must be enacted by the end of April. GOP lawmakers and aides believe they could win a public relations war over the matter by daring Democrats -- particularly vulnerable red-state senators up for reelection next year -- to shutter the government over one of Trump'€™s most popular campaign pledges."

"Republicans won the first skirmish in the Obamacare fight Wednesday, voting to begin debating fast-track budget procedures that, if successful, would allow the GOP to kill the 2010 health care law without having to face a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

"The 51-48 vote, on the second day of the 115th Congress, underscores how serious Republicans are in making good on their repeal pledge. But it also signaled that Democrats are just as committed to defending the Affordable Care Act and convinced that they have the upper hand politically.

"After years of fruitless repeal votes, Republicans, now in control of Congress and about to take the White House, is firing with live rounds. Democrats said that means Republicans will take the blame for any mistakes."

"If the Democrats' version of the story is true, this represents at most some pretty low-level, apple-stealing stuff in terms of international espionage and post-Soviet dirty tricks. One would almost be disappointed if the Russians weren't up to more serious hijinks than that. No one disputes the legitimacy of the WikiLeaks documents, and they were not exactly chock-full of sensitive national-security secrets, just a lot of back-and-forth that's embarrassing to Democrats and to a few of their media sycophants. There isn't even much evidence that they had a meaningful effect on the election.

"That doesn't mean that we should ignore it, but, in terms of what we are cursed to keep calling 'cyberwar' activities, this is pretty small potatoes. There have been much more serious incursions, many of them linked to China, that present genuine national-security threats. But the Obama administration has for the most part sat on its thumb in response to those. The Chinese hack on the Office of Personnel Management was a much more substantial violation of our security, but so far as the waning Obama administration is concerned, stealing private (and, indeed, classified) information on 20 million people is nothing next to causing Debbie Wasserman Schultz a bit of public consternation.

"By all means, investigate, and do so vigorously. If the Russians are engaged even in bush-league mucking about with our elections, then that should be exposed and responded to. We shouldn't take Assange's word on this one way or the other.

"But in the end, the DNC leak is a jaywalking case that we're prosecuting while our enemies are plotting something more like an electronic 9/11. If it takes embarrassing a few Democrats to get Uncle Stupid moving on this, so be it, but the sorry case of Hillary Rodham Clinton is the beginning of this story, not the end of it."

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"Because nothing involving the U.N. is clean or straightforward, it's hard to even know how much the U.S. pays in total into the U.N. system. But it's probably around $8 billion a year. We should withhold some significant portion of it, and demand an end to the U.N.'s institutional hostility to Israel and the implementation of reforms to increase the organization's accountability. There are individual U.N. agencies that do good work, and we can continue to support those.

"Realistically, though, the U.N. will always be a disappointment. The fact is that the closest thing to what FDR envisioned in the U.N. is NATO, a like-minded group of nations that has been a force for peace, order, and freedom. This is why President-elect Donald Trump should embrace NATO and turn his critical eye to the U.N., where there is the genuine opportunity to, if nothing else, save the U.S. some money and rattle the cages of people taking advantage of our beneficence.

"Charles de Gaulle dismissively called the U.N. 'the thing.' The thing will always stumble on, but maybe Donald Trump can teach it a lesson or two about how we truly value our ally and its nemesis, Israel."