College football’s biggest game of the season features two undefeated teams in Saturday’s latest edition of one of the sport’s great rivalries. Let’s hope for a spirited and competitive contest. Let’s also hope that the loser accepts the result.

The Ohio State Buckeyes visit the Michigan Wolverines and the winner will be a strong contender to play for a national championship. Will the losing team’s partisans become known as championship deniers? The Journal’s Rachel Bachman and Laine Higgins report that “this weekend’s renewal of the fierce rivalry between No. 3 Michigan and No. 2 Ohio State is set to show that the hallmarks of modern political warfare—opposition research and disinformation, conspiracy theories and polarized ideologies—have come full force to college football.” They add:

President Biden’s recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco has been portrayed by both sides as a step forward in relations. But for all the good vibrations, Mr. Xi isn’t giving up his ambition to retake Taiwan, not least by meddling in the island’s January presidential election.

Mr. Xi warned Mr. Biden in California to stop arming Taiwan and not to interfere in the election in favor of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that China dislikes. Mr. Biden said he told Mr. Xi that he “didn’t expect any interference, any at all,” in Taiwan’s campaign.

President Biden’s recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco has been portrayed by both sides as a step forward in relations. But for all the good vibrations, Mr. Xi isn’t giving up his ambition to retake Taiwan, not least by meddling in the island’s January presidential election.

Mr. Xi warned Mr. Biden in California to stop arming Taiwan and not to interfere in the election in favor of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that China dislikes. Mr. Biden said he told Mr. Xi that he “didn’t expect any interference, any at all,” in Taiwan’s campaign.

Democrats fought to elect Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz this spring so she could help them retake control of the state Legislature through a rewrite of the state’s political maps. Now the court’s liberal majority is going through contortions to deliver on that anti-democratic judicial promissory note.

On Tuesday the Justices heard oral arguments in a case that challenges the state’s legislative district maps and would give the Justices broad authority to draw new ones. But the court declined to hear claims that the maps are a partisan gerrymander, agreeing instead to consider the Trojan horse of whether geographically splintered political districts justify throwing out the maps altogether. Wink, wink.

It took 13 years, but Elizabeth Warren is at long last acknowledging that ObamaCare has increased healthcare prices and industry consolidation. Who would have believed it? Government price controls and profit caps have resulted in unintended consequences.

The Massachusetts Senator and Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana this week wrote a letter to the Health and Human Services Department inspector general complaining that the nation’s largest health insurers are dodging ObamaCare’s medical loss ratio (MLR). The result, they say, is higher costs for patients.

It took 13 years, but Elizabeth Warren is at long last acknowledging that ObamaCare has increased healthcare prices and industry consolidation. Who would have believed it? Government price controls and profit caps have resulted in unintended consequences.

The Massachusetts Senator and Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana this week wrote a letter to the Health and Human Services Department inspector general complaining that the nation’s largest health insurers are dodging ObamaCare’s medical loss ratio (MLR). The result, they say, is higher costs for patients.

Democrats fought to elect Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz this spring so she could help them retake control of the state Legislature through a rewrite of the state’s political maps. Now the court’s liberal majority is going through contortions to deliver on that anti-democratic judicial promissory note.

On Tuesday the Justices heard oral arguments in a case that challenges the state’s legislative district maps and would give the Justices broad authority to draw new ones. But the court declined to hear claims that the maps are a partisan gerrymander, agreeing instead to consider the Trojan horse of whether geographically splintered political districts justify throwing out the maps altogether. Wink, wink.

Vladimir Putin likes to stir up trouble with neighbors even when he isn’t invading them. Witness his latest effort to use migration to bedevil Finland.

Finland announced that on Nov. 24 it will close all but one of its border crossings with Russia. Finnish authorities cited Section 16 of the country’s Border Guard Act, which allows closures to prevent a threat to national security and public order.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and 22 Democratic senators recently wrote to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan calling for an investigation into the proposed mergers between Exxon Mobil and Pioneer Natural Resources and Chevron and Hess. The letter argues that these mergers will enable “anticompetitive coordination in the industry” and raise U.S. gasoline prices. The letter, however, is based on dubious economic and legal logic and spurious historical analysis. It’s a mischaracterization of how the oil-and-gas industry operates.

A fair assessment of the proposed mergers and the fossil-fuel market doesn’t reveal a firm legal and economic basis to initiate antitrust enforcement proceedings against these deals. If the senators really want a competitive energy market that supplies American consumers with lower-priced fuel, they should support these mergers, not obstruct them.

Delaware wasn’t always the go-to state for corporate law. And if it escalates its flirtation with environmental, social and governance investment principles, the First State might end up losing its privileged status, just like its neighbor once did.

New Jersey became “the mother of trusts” in the late 19th century by pioneering incorporation laws that gave companies unprecedented freedom. But the Garden State lost that title in 1913 when Gov. Woodrow Wilson set out to correct perceived abuses by making executives liable for corporate “irresponsibility.” Companies responded by fleeing the state.

James Piereson writing in City Journal, Nov. 17:

A recent column observed disconcertingly that election denial appears to have been a successful strategy for Donald Trump. But how exactly? Larry Kudlow, his former White House economic adviser, points out that many voters like Trump policies, which is true. How does “stop the steal” advance their cause? One might also ask how and why collusion continues to work for Democrats. Both began as a set of claims but became something else, a litany, an article of devotion, a thematic glue to hold together a standard stump speech.

My inbox is as revealing about collusion as it is about stop the steal, with some Democrats clinging to whatever they heard first, including the legend of the Moscow hotel room, long since debunked by the U.S. Justice Department. The harder-working insist, “Didn’t Trump do business with Russia, didn’t Russian lobbyist Natalia Veselnitskaya gain entry to a Trump Tower meeting by promising ‘dirt’ on Hillary, didn’t Mike Flynn share confidences with the Russian ambassador, didn’t a report by Senate Democrats claim without citing any source that an ex-Manafort consulting partner was a Russian intelligence officer?”

A recent column observed disconcertingly that election denial appears to have been a successful strategy for Donald Trump. But how exactly? Larry Kudlow, his former White House economic adviser, points out that many voters like Trump policies, which is true. How does “stop the steal” advance their cause? One might also ask how and why collusion continues to work for Democrats. Both began as a set of claims but became something else, a litany, an article of devotion, a thematic glue to hold together a standard stump speech.

My inbox is as revealing about collusion as it is about stop the steal, with some Democrats clinging to whatever they heard first, including the legend of the Moscow hotel room, long since debunked by the U.S. Justice Department. The harder-working insist, “Didn’t Trump do business with Russia, didn’t Russian lobbyist Natalia Veselnitskaya gain entry to a Trump Tower meeting by promising ‘dirt’ on Hillary, didn’t Mike Flynn share confidences with the Russian ambassador, didn’t a report by Senate Democrats claim without citing any source that an ex-Manafort consulting partner was a Russian intelligence officer?”

New York

America’s political class isn’t at its best. Public life lately seems to consist mainly of self-generated disasters, easily preventable crises and media-driven hysteria. Political leaders behave like spoiled children, outrage the public to no purpose, and loudly champion ideas they know to be infeasible. Worst of all are the decisions apparently calculated to achieve the opposite of their stated goals: pandemic measures that didn’t mitigate the virus and shredded the social fabric and inflicted lasting damage on children; climate regulations that punish the poor and working class but don’t affect the climate; a military withdrawal so poorly planned that it provokes a new war; billions sent to a regime that funds genocidal attacks on an American ally; ill-advised, sometimes cockamamie prosecutions of a former president that make him more likely to regain the presidency.

Vladimir Putin has typically presented himself as a Russian nationalist, so his recent foray into the Middle Ages must have surprised his supporters. In a speech on Nov. 3, Mr. Putin lauded the Mongol rulers of the Golden Horde, the successor state to Genghis Khan’s empire, for saving Russian lands from Western influences. Until now, Russians saw the 2½ centuries of Mongol rule as a period of national humiliation, a yoke that arrested the country’s development and accounted for its perennial backwardness. In a dramatic reversal, Mr. Putin spun a new narrative to justify wrenching Russia away from Western values and toward a brutal autocratic rule.

Throughout his 24 years in power, Mr. Putin developed a large imperial wardrobe, donning the mantles of various Russian rulers as it suited the occasion. Shortly into his reign, Mr. Putin presented himself as Pyotr Stolypin, an early 20th-century socially conservative but economically progressive Russian reformer. As the time came to crack down on opposition, he evoked Joseph Stalin and Nicholas I, one of the most repressive Russian czars. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he praised Peter the Great for expanding the Russian empire.

I have never read a more pro-China, pro-Russia, anti-American editorial in the Journal than the one regarding my Foreign Pollution Fee Act (“Republicans for a Carbon Tax,” Nov. 20). The FPFA seeks to recognize the challenges U.S. manufacturers and workers face by placing a tariff on excess Chinese emissions. It puts the U.S. on equal footing with Chinese manufacturers who cheat and pollute to gain a competitive advantage.

China can minimize the fee by adhering to the same environmental standards as U.S.-based manufacturers. Is that too much to ask?

Your editorial “Joe Biden Turns 81 Years Old” (Nov. 18) points out several reasons President Biden shouldn’t run again. Among them is a “strong chance” that Vice President Kamala Harris would become president because Mr. Biden might die before completing a second term. How strong? What are the chances?

If Mr. Biden were to win a second term, he would be slightly older than 82 on inauguration day. Current U.S. life-table data tell us that the probability of an 82-year-old male dying sometime within four years is 33%.

Paul Rahe is wrong on almost every point in the comparison he draws between Athens’s invasion of Syracuse and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Weekend Interview by Tunku Varadrajan, Nov. 18).

The best comparison to the Athenians attacking Syracuse, a city-state 800 nautical miles away at what the Greeks then perceived to be the edge of the civilized world, isn’t the Russians attacking their immediate neighbor, Ukraine, but the U.S. trying to expand its own military alliance, NATO, into distant Eurasia. While it is certainly true that the Athenian invasion of Sicily is a classic example of “greedy overreach,” if there is any country today that is overextended, it isn’t Russia, but the U.S.

Few politicians are willing to touch entitlements these days, but Nikki Haley dared to do so in the recent debate on Medicare. A new study shows her pitch to expand the Medicare Advantage program could lower costs and improve care.

Medicare Advantage plans are growing rapidly and cover about half of the entitlement’s beneficiaries. Private insurers administer the plans and are paid by Medicare per beneficiary. Insurers compete for patients by offering benefits, including vision and dental care that aren’t available in traditional fee-for-service Medicare.

Dutch elections rarely stir much excitement abroad, but the voting in the Netherlands Wednesday marks an exception. The big winner was Geert Wilders, a veteran right-wing campaigner, and the freakout his victory has triggered across Europe is something to behold.

Mr. Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) won a plurality of 37 seats in the 150-seat legislature. His next nearest competitor, a Labor-Green coalition led by Frans Timmermans, won 25 seats. Politicians will now negotiate to form a governing coalition, a process that often takes months in the Netherlands’ highly fragmented electoral system, and Mr. Wilders may not emerge as prime minister. But voters have sent a clear message.

Things have gone from bad to worse in Germany this week after a court ruling that’s forcing the government to do something truly shocking: level with voters about how much the net-zero energy transition will cost. Please pass the smelling salts.

The country’s highest constitutional court ruled this month that one of the coalition government’s main gimmicks for funding green projects violates Germany’s version of a balanced-budged amendment. That amendment, known as the debt brake, caps the government’s fiscal deficit at 0.35% of gross domestic product per year except in emergencies (as defined by special legislation passed with a majority in the Bundestag).

Liza came to my family from Ukraine in 2015 after Russia invaded her homeland. Seeking safety and opportunity in America, she applied for and was accepted into the U.S. au pair program, lived with us for two years and learned to love this country. Her dream is to become a naturalized citizen. Would we welcome someone like Liza into our home again? Absolutely, but we couldn’t do it if the Biden administration finalizes a regulation it proposed on Oct. 30.

The State Department essentially wants to end the au pair program, which connects more than 21,000 foreigners with American families a year. The forthcoming mandate would require employers to treat au pairs more like traditional employees, though the program was designed to combine cultural exchange and child care. Families currently can pay an au pair a weekly stipend of about $200 and pitch in for things like college tuition. They also provide food, housing and transportation, as well as money to cover things like health insurance. An au pair can cost as little as $20,000, a bargain compared with other child-care options for families with several kids.

Washington’s return from Thanksgiving break will feature another go-round on whether to provide vital aid to Israel and Ukraine, and how to pay for it. Here’s a thought: Ask Jigar Shah for a couple hundred billion. He’s got that and more—and is otherwise using it for political “investment.”

Mr. Shah isn’t a household name—unless your household includes lobbyists, financiers or crony capitalists. Those are the clients of Mr. Shah’s fief, the revived Energy Department Loan Programs Office. Last humiliated a decade ago, it’s part of that crack DOE bureaucracy that bet on such green tech ventures as Abound (the failed solar company), Fisker Automotive (the failed electric-car maker) and A123 (the failed battery maker). “This announcement today” is about “investing in the infrastructure and technology of the future,” crowed Vice President Biden in 2009, unveiling a $535 million DOE loan for a solar outfit he promised would power 500,000 homes and create 1,000 jobs. That outfit was Solyndra.

Jerusalem

Why do Jewish lives matter? Why do we suddenly care so much about Israel or Jewish survival? Is it merely from a nativist love of our own or a need to deny posthumous victories to Hitler? Is it only the Jew as eternal victim that we cherish? God forbid. “Never again” is never enough. What matters are not only Jewish lives, but the Jewish way of living.

Right about now Time magazine would be choosing its Person of the Year, a designation I’ve followed from childhood because their choices tend to vary from sound to interesting. Also I almost always know who they’ll choose and enjoy finding out if I’m right. Here I tell you who it will be and must be or I will be displeased.

Miss Taylor Swift is the Person of the Year. She is the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023. This fact makes her a suitably international choice because when something good happens in America, boy is it worldwide news.

Right about now Time magazine would be choosing its Person of the Year, a designation I’ve followed from childhood because their choices tend to vary from sound to interesting. Also I almost always know who they’ll choose and enjoy finding out if I’m right. Here I tell you who it will be and must be or I will be displeased.

Miss Taylor Swift is the Person of the Year. She is the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023. This fact makes her a suitably international choice because when something good happens in America, boy is it worldwide news.

Javier Milei knows how to create a stir. Not only has Argentina’s president-elect shaken up his own country’s politics. He also has sparked a global debate about inflation, economic reform and dollarization—and, even more unusual, an interesting debate about these things. It’s a Thanksgiving-week miracle.

Critics of Mr. Milei’s pledge to ditch the dysfunctional peso and embrace the almighty dollar have focused on relatively narrow questions: whether Argentina holds enough dollar reserves to implement such a policy, whether it is likely to have the fiscal discipline to sustain it, whether the banks could survive it, and so on.

It’s altogether fitting and proper that the quintessential American holiday is devoted to gratitude. Considering all of human history can you think of another people who have more reason to be thankful? What’s remarkable is that the particular woman who willed our modern holiday into being managed to find so many such reasons.

Six years after the end of America’s War of Independence and just one year after New Hampshire brought our republic to life by serving as the critical ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, President George Washington proclaimed on Oct. 3, 1789:

Critics of CEO pay often begin and end with the claim that the CEOs don’t “deserve” their giant salaries, but deserve has nothing to do with it. Large and pre-emptory carrots aren’t about reward after the fact. They are about control before the fact, designed tightly to harness the interests of the key decision maker, especially in a media and legal environment where a loose cannon CEO can do untold damage to organizational interests.

By late Sunday, on the question of the day—why was CEO Sam Altman of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, fired from his job?—ChatGPT had this to say: “The board stated that Altman ‘was not consistently candid in his communications.’ However, specific details surrounding Altman’s departure have not been publicly disclosed.”

The Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7 continues to send shock waves throughout the world—especially in Israel. Some hard choices must be made, and some ugly realities have emerged that weren’t acknowledged until the ground shook.

Israelis are united as rarely before on a fundamental belief: Any conclusion to the war that leaves Hamas in charge of Gaza would be intolerable. Backed by public opinion, the government has made it clear that the war won’t end until Hamas’s capacity to rule Gaza and attack Israel has been destroyed. This will be the case, I suspect, even if the U.S. eventually tries to halt Israel’s military effort before it has achieved its objectives. In conversations with Israelis of varying political backgrounds, I detect a willingness to go it alone, if necessary, until they have restored their security. “Never again” is now more than a reminder of the Holocaust; it has a new resonance.

A loyal reader wonders whether the over-representation (relative to the U.S. population) of anti-Semites on the campuses of elite universities is the fault of the faculty or the admissions departments. Are schools creating haters or recruiting them? Perhaps there is an academic researcher somewhere willing to explore this fascinating question of nature vs. nurture. In the meantime, a responsible adult off campus is giving the kids a free vocabulary lecture.

Don’t laugh, but once again in this topsy-turvy world a message of clarity and good sense is emanating from the podium of the White House press briefing room. Recently National Security Council spokesman John Kirby appropriately addressed the claims of the ironically titled Gaza Ministry of Health. On Monday Mr. Kirby was back at the podium with a helpful instruction on the correct use of a term that is among the political world’s most misused words. He also noted why people must remain free to use it. Here’s the White House transcript, beginning with a reporter’s question:

Is Israel’s war with Hamas a war crime? At a recent (entirely civil and non-confrontational) event at Bard College, a student suggested that this was the case. After all, there have been at least 11,000 casualties since the Oct. 7 terror attack that launched the war, and the majority dead have been civilians. Thousands were children. How, the Bard students and many of their peers around the country and the world ask, could all this not be a war crime? And even if Hamas’s initial attack was itself a war crime and not a “legitimate act of resistance against an occupying power,” isn’t the larger loss of civilian life in Israel’s subsequent attacks just as bad?

I could have turned the session into a debate about the underlying merits of the Palestinian and Israeli causes or a technical discussion of the laws of war. Instead, being a professor, I turned the discussion to the history of war. One night in March 1945, U.S. planes dropped incendiary bombs over Tokyo killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. Incomplete estimates from Japan put the total death toll from allied bombing raids as high as 500,000. All told, there were an estimated 38 million civilian deaths in World War II, more than twice the approximately 15 million deaths of soldiers in combat.

Amid concerns that President Joe Biden is too old and too mendacious to serve another term, some argue that it’s already too late for anyone to mount a serious campaign to deny him the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024. But Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.) is looking more serious every day. His recent foray into a Biden stronghold suggests that he’s ready to compete nationwide.

On the question of presidential mendacity, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, only 39% of U.S. adults think Mr. Biden is honest and trustworthy. Also, despite the President’s years of denials regarding his family’s enrichment schemes, the latest Harvard-Harris Poll finds that a full 60% of respondents believe he helped and participated in Hunter Biden’s business.

The populist revolution against self-perpetuating progressive elites is a global phenomenon. On Sunday Argentina elected Javier Milei president. A Donald Trump-style outsider, Mr. Milei ran against a political class that has presided over a chaotic economy. His victory is a reminder of the continuing potency of the anti-establishment message.

But elsewhere the establishment has been fighting back. There’s no better example than Britain, the country where populism achieved its first big breakthrough with the vote to leave the European Union in 2016, just months before the election of Mr. Trump.