JIM TREACHER: This Is What America Means To Me.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Be Intoxicated.

HMM: Off duty, black cops in New York feel threat from fellow police. But there’s also this:

“It makes good headlines to say this is occurring, but I don’t think you can validate it until you look into the circumstances they were stopped in,” said Bernard Parks, the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is African American.

“Now if you want to get into the essence of why certain groups are stopped more than others, then you only need to go to the crime reports and see which ethnic groups are listed more as suspects. That’s the crime data the officers are living with.”

Blacks made up 73 percent of the shooting perpetrators in New York in 2011 and were 23 percent of the population.

I’d be interested in hearing whether the non-black minority members of the NYPD have this experience, too, or if it’s just the black cops.

THE MAN BEHIND the Empire State Building’s Christmas Light Show.

A FISH, A BARREL, A SMOKING GUN: Moe Lane On Naomi Klein’s Knowledge of Science Fiction.

AT AMAZON, Deals On Digital Music.

Also, Kindle Daily Deals.

OH GOODY: CDC reports potential Ebola exposure in Atlanta lab. “As many as a dozen scientists may have been exposed to the Ebola virus at a lab of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, agency officials said Wednesday. The potential exposure took place Monday when scientists conducting research on the virus at a high-security lab mistakenly put a sample containing the potentially infectious virus in a place where it was transferred for processing to another CDC lab, also in Atlanta on the CDC campus. The accident comes after a series of incidents earlier this summer involving the mishandling of dangerous pathogens at the nation’s labs, including one in June at a CDC lab that potentially exposed dozens of employees to live anthrax because employees failed to properly inactivate the anthrax when transferring samples.”

This is not a confidence-builder.

ROBERT TRACINSKI: You may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Big Lie of the Anti-Cop Left Turns Lethal: The real story behind the murder of two NYPD officers.

CHANGE: F.D.A. Lifting Lifetime Ban on Gay Blood Donors. “The Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it would scrap a decades-old lifetime prohibition on blood donation by gay and bisexual men, a major stride toward ending what many had seen as a national policy of discrimination. However, the agency will continue to ban men who have been sexually active in the last year, saying that the barrier is necessary to keep the blood supply safe, a move that frustrated rights groups that were pushing for the ban to be removed entirely.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: A New App Is Shattering a Major Myth About Polyamorous Relationships.

HOWIE CARR: LIBERALS LIED, COPS DIED.

Of course no one is supposed to call out any of the protected classes on their irresponsible rhetoric — isn’t that right, Rev. Al?

“The blame game,” Sharpton now says, “will only lead to further kinds of venom and further division.”

Ironic words from the tax deadbeat who invented Tawana Brawley and who has spent a lifetime denouncing “white interlopers,” “diamond merchants” and “fags.” None dares call it hate speech.

Have you ever noticed that when these hate-mongers say, “Stop the finger-pointing,” they’re talking about you accusing them? When they accuse you — of anything — they’re speaking truth to power, and don’t you ever forget it.

Donna Brazile tweeted: “Stop the politics.”

So I guess it wasn’t politics when Barack Obama said the protests/riots were necessary because the “country’s conscience has to be triggered by some inconvenience.”

Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, touted the riots as “momentum to a necessary conversation.”

Holder’s idea of a conversation is himself harshly lecturing other groups of Americans on behalf of “my people,” as he describes blacks. I guess the two murdered NYPD officers are not his people.

Then there’s the mayor of New York, Warren Wilhelm, I mean, William de Blasio. (What is it with these leftist pols and their multiple names?)

This is the bum who was ranting two weeks ago about the “scourge” of alleged police violence. After last week’s brutal assault on two cops (a thug SEIU organizer and Ivy League grad students have been charged) he pooh-poohed one cop’s broken nose as an “alleged attack.”

On Monday, though, Hizzoner takes the last refuge of a scoundrel. He blames the press for the violence.

“Are you going to keep dividing us?” the city’s Divider in Chief asked a reporter.

It gets worse with this bum de Blasio. Two weeks ago, he had the gall to say that he was worried about the safety of his half-black son, Dante.

Read the whole, hurtful, thing. I suspect that this “climate of hate” thing is pinching a bit now that the shoe is on the other foot.

FIRST VERMONT, NOW THIS: “CoOportunity Health, a fledgling Iowa health-insurance company set up under the Affordable Care Act, is being taken over by the state health-insurance division because of a financial crunch. CoOportunity Health is an insurance cooperative set up to give consumers and small businesses an alternative in a market with few choices. The company relied on tens of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees provided under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. It began selling policies in 2013.” It appears that they ran out of other people’s money.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Furries Say They Aren’t A Fetish, They’re A Community, And They’re Ready To Be Taken Seriously.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: If approached by a police officer, do not pull out a revolver and point it at him.

As I have noted here on several occasions, the militarization of the police in the US is a minatory development that should be scrutinized and reversed. American police should not be swaggering about town in armored vehicles and accoutered like a Navy SEAL en route to bin Laden’s Pakastani retreat. In America, the default posture of the police should be like something out of Mayberry, province of sheriff Andy Taylor, protector of the peace on The Andy Griffith Show. Deep down, of course, it is not Andy but the townspeople of Mayberry who are responsible for maintaining order. . . .

Sharpton, no doubt recalling the palmy days when he was peddling lies about Tawana Brawley, Sharpton has done everything he could to stoke the fires of racial hatred and social unrest. Really, though, Sharpton, ridiculous figure though he be, is yesterday’s news. The real news about these protests emanates from the more sinister sources.

This brings me to the core piece of deception that is operating in the protests against supposed police brutality. It is a textbook case of the radical left using and abusing democratic freedoms in order to destroy those freedoms. On the one hand, you have the contention that the protests are simply a healthy expression of peaceful democratic protest. You’re not against free expression of political differences are you? Thus we have “progressive” Mayor de Blasio defending the protests: “Do we tell people they’re not allowed to raise their voice? Do we tell people they’re not allowed to march?”

Then there is the other hand, e.g. the protests Saturday, December 13, when the operative chant was “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” And listen to the voice from Ferguson gleefully chanting “Pigs in a blanket” the night the two NY police officers were murdered by a black Muslim. That is the voice not of democratic protest but of anti-democratic savagery. It is barbarism battling against civilization.

Well, there are commies behind it, working with Al Sharpton, so what else would it be?

UPDATE: Seen on Facebook:

Note, of course — as I suspect the author of this image knew — that “murdering” and “killing” are not identical.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 594.

BUT OF COURSE: Obama’s nominee for Pentagon post implicated in alleged theft of CIA documents.

CLIMATE OF HATE: CUNY Newspaper Editorial Calls For Violent Protests. “A disturbing editorial in a CUNY grad-student newspaper calls for rioters protesting the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown to arm themselves and wage violent war with cops. ‘The time for peace has passed,’ says a revolutionary editorial titled ‘In Support of Violence’ that was penned by editor-in-chief Gordon Barnes in the Dec. 3 issue of The Advocate.”

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Obama’s popularity falls to record low among US troops. Why?

Obama’s sinking popularity among the troops can be traced to a number of factors: budget cuts, falling troop morale, frustrations over the Obama administration’s foreign policy, gay and gender equity initiatives within the military, and US political leaders in general.

According to the Military Times’ poll, troops are more unhappy under Obama than they were under previous commanders-in-chief. Some 91 percent of active duty service members were satisfied with their quality of life in 2009. This year, that figure dropped to 56 percent. . . .

Events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rise of the Islamic State, have also led some in the military to challenge Obama’s foreign policy.

His decision to remove all troops from Iraq in 2011 helped lead to the rise of the militant group ISIS, according to some military experts, who see Obama as a weak leader in foreign policy. The rise of ISIS forced Obama to return US troops to the region, another unpopular decision among troops. When asked whether the US should send a large force of combat troops back to Iraq to fight Islamic State militants, 70 percent of survey respondents said, ‘No.’

Similarly, the report found troops were unhappy with the outcome of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which they blame their commander-in-chief.

Well, all things considered he’s been an even worse commander-in-chief than he has been a President.

BYRON YORK: Will Obama defy Congress on Gitmo prisoners?

PATHETIC: North Korean Embassy Officials So Broke They Run Bootlegging Ops to Make Ends Meet.

SHOCKER: Emails Show UVA Coordinator Hoped To Put ‘Positive People’ In Touch With Rolling Stone Reporter. “The emails, obtained by The Daily Caller through a Freedom of Information request, show UVA campus sexual assault awareness project coordinator Emily Renda informing the university’s PR department about her communications with Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the Rolling Stone reporter.” Yeah, it’s seemed likely for a while that Renda was the key inside mover.

REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD OFFER A BILL ON POLICE VIOLENCE NEXT MONTH, AND THE CENTERPIECE SHOULD BE OUTLAWING POLICE UNIONS: Affidavit Shows Cop Union Targeting Foes. There’s a window of opportunity here if the GOP is smart enough to take it. Never let a crisis go to waste!

TIM CARNEY: Free-market populism opportunity: Resist over-regulation of child care.

The Obama administration, according to Katharine Stevens in the Wall Street Journal, is paving the way for more regulation of child care. This seems like a great place for conservatives to fight for the interests of the poor and working class, against overbearing government.

In other words, it’s an opportunity for free-market populism.

The administration is pushing guidelines for who can get federal grants, but Stevens — who is a fellow research fellow of mine at the American Enterprise Institute — worries that these grant guidelines are a “Trojan horse bearing counterproductive requirements,” on early-childhood educators and daycare providers.

These aren’t rules governing basic health and safety standards, like drinking water, cleanliness or broken glass. Some are micromanaging: “cot placement” for daycare. Others are about requiring credentialing — such as requiring preschool teachers to have bachelor’s degrees. . . .

Excessive regulation of daycare and preschool mostly hurts the poor and working class. For one thing, it makes daycare rarer and more expensive.

Some on the Left will respond and say, “well, let’s just subsidize them more.” That doesn’t address the other problem: curbing work opportunities for women.

More importantly, unnecessary regulation and credentialing requirements take away from many women the best way they could make money: at-home daycare.

The Dems don’t want them to be self-sufficient. They want them to be unionized government employees.