THE MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY — FINALLY: Obama makes a push for transparency before handing over executive power to Trump.

President Obama is making a push for transparency in his last days in office before handing off the vast counter-terrorism apparatus he has built to President-elect Donald Trump, starting with a major address Tuesday defending his record on national security.

Obama’s speech, at the U.S. military’s Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., will also explain the legal and policy underpinnings that his administration has established over eight years in deciding whether and how to detain, interrogate or kill suspected terrorists. The White House released some details on its legal rationale ahead of the speech.

The efforts at transparency were striking for an administration criticized for being secretive by news and watchdog organizations; Obama has used the Espionage Act more times than all other U.S. presidents combined to investigate leaks of government information. The bid for openness also served to make public additional facts that can be used to hold the Trump administration accountable, though the White House downplayed any message to the president-elect.

“It’s his final message to the nation on what he’s done and how he views these issues,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, told reporters before the president’s speech. “It’s something he would’ve done no matter who won the election.”

It’s something Obama could have done any time after his own election.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Turn Blind Eye To Anti-Semitic Behavior.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1307.

MAD DUCK: Obama actions on public lands may be difficult for Trump to undo.

President Barack Obama could cement his environmental legacy by taking executive action to designate nearly 4 million acres of Western land as national monuments before leaving office next month.

And it may be one legacy of the Obama administration that incoming President Donald Trump will have a hard time unraveling after he takes office.

But whether Obama goes that route is still up in the air. Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake said Monday that “credible sources” within the agencies considering the designation found “significant unresolved issues that prevent their recommending the designation of a new national monument” around the Grand Canyon.

At issue is a call by environmentalists for Obama to use the authority granted by the Antiquities Act to protect areas around the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the Bears Ears site in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada.

If we want to get serious about reducing debt and funding our trillions in unfunded entitlements, selling off western lands (Washington owns nearly 60% of the U.S. from the Front Range to Alaska) would be a good place for a gutsy administration to start.

GEORGE KORDA: The Sevier County fires: beware of passing judgment from a distance.

CHEATING: LCS Shock Trials Were Less Severe Than Navy Standard.

In written testimony for the Senate Armed Services committee, Dr. Michael Gilmore, director of operational testing under the Secretary of Defense, said that the shock trials for the Independence and Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships were conducted at “reduced severity” due to concerns about the possibility of damage.

“The Navy argued that the reduced severity approach was necessary because they lacked specific test data and a general understanding of how the non-Grade A systems . . . would respond to shock,” he wrote.

In addition, for the test on the Freedom-class vessel, the Navy stopped the shock trials at the second of three shots. The third trial would have shocked the ship with a blast one-third less powerful than the vessel is designed to survive, but the Navy still deemed it to be too risky.

Sending improperly tested ships out to sea gets sailors killed.

Heads should roll for this.

MARC THIESSEN: Trump’s Taiwan call wasn’t a blunder. It was brilliant.

Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy.

It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that.

The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Post. It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the “Three Communiques” or unaware of the fiction that there is “One China.” Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. He was serving notice on Beijing that it is dealing with a different kind of president — an outsider who will not be encumbered by the same Lilliputian diplomatic threads that tied down previous administrations. The message, as John Bolton correctly put it, was that “the president of the United States [will] talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it’s in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.”

Amen to that.

And if that message was lost on Beijing, Trump underscored it on Sunday, tweeting: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” He does not need Beijing’s permission to speak to anyone. No more kowtowing in a Trump administration.

Trump promised during the campaign that he would take a tougher stand with China, and supporting Taiwan has always been part of his get-tough approach to Beijing.

Well, that’s one of the things that’s freaking people out. They thought Trump’s campaign promises were like Obama’s “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.”

CIVIL FORFEITURE: After the Government Seized $11K From Him, He Fought Back. Now, He’s Getting His Money Back.

Upon arriving at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Clarke checked two bags and proceeded to the gate. There, the now 26-year-old was approached by law enforcement.

The agents had received a call from a ticketing agent with US Airways who told police Clarke’s luggage smelled like marijuana, according to an affidavit filed with the courts.

Police searched Clarke and his bag, and the student admitted to having cash in his pocket, according to an affidavit filed by William Conrad, a Cincinnati-based agent on the DEA task force.

After talking with Clarke, agents seized the $11,000, his cellphone, and iPad under civil asset forfeiture laws. The phone and iPad were eventually returned.

The officers alleged the money was “the proceeds of drug trafficking or was intended to be used in an illegal transaction,” according to court documents.

But Clarke said the money came from five years worth of savings from different jobs, financial aid, gifts from his family members, and benefits from his mother, who is a disabled veteran. He planned to use the money to pay for living and school expenses upon returning to Florida.

When the officers attempted to take Clarke’s money, Conrad alleged the young man grabbed a second officer’s wrist.

He was subsequently arrested and charged with assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. The charges were ultimately dropped.

The Institute for Justice took Clarke’s case and ultimately succeeded in getting him his money back, but the story doesn’t reveal how many thousands — ten of thousands? more? — IJ had to spend to win.

They do good work. You can donate here.

YOU’RE GETTING TO BE A HABIT WITH ME: Tucker Carlson’s Nightly Takedown of Lib.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hillary Clinton blew the most winnable election in modern American history. And it’s her own fault. And Obama’s.

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COUNTERING TERRORIST BOMBS: Jim Dunnigan analyzes the strategy and tactics of portable barriers and “high-speed sandbags.”

JOHN KERRY ADMITS OBAMA’S SYRIAN RED LINE COST US: No kidding?

The president had blinked at making good on his own threat. Around the globe, US allies and enemies were on notice that America might not live up to its word.

Obama leaves a legacy of reckless fecklessness.

PURGE UPDATE: Greece refuses to extradite officers back to Turkey.

Eight officers have sought asylum in Greece and argued that they would face threats to their personal safety if they were returned to Turkish custody.

The Greek court agreed with their claims, following a massive crackdown on Turkish authorities on suspected government opponents.

Lawyer Stavroula Tomara said the “humiliating” treatment and “torture” meted out to other coup suspects in Turkey had made an impression on the Greek court.

The court said that Turkish authorities have not presented sufficient evidence they were involved in the coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the source said, while Ankara could still appeal the decision.

Extradition would likely be a virtual death sentence for those eight officers, plus the painful indignities they’d first have to endure.

Erdogan’s Turkey brooks very little dissent.

EVOLUTION UPDATE: Caesarean births “affecting human evolution.”

More mothers now need surgery to deliver a baby due to their narrow pelvis size, according to a study.

Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Alabama man loses job for calling Gatlinburg fire victims ‘toothless, pond scum’ Trump supporters.

MICHAEL BARONE: The Supreme Court — out of the redistricting thicket?

Today the Supreme Court heard oral argument in two redistricting cases, one challenging state legislative districts in Virginia and the other congressional districts in North Carolina. Both cases challenge choices made by redistricting state legislators in response to the prevailing interpretation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “The claim made by [lawyers purporting to represent] black voters in both states,” the Associated Press reports, “is that Republicans created districts with more reliably Democratic black voters than necessary to elect their preferred candidates, making neighboring districts whiter and more Republican.”

The prevailing interpretation of the Voting Rights Act has been that redistricters are required to maximize the number of “majority-minority” districts. The idea is to stop the spreading out of black voters into multiple districts where they would be outnumbered by whites; the theory is that whites would oppose the election of legislators who took positions favored by most blacks. The partisan effect, given that overwhelming majorities of blacks tend to vote Democratic and smaller majorities of whites tend to vote Republican, has generally been favorable to Republicans, because corralling blacks into a few districts tends to make the larger number of adjacent districts more Republican.

Both parties figured this out some time ago. A FiveThirtyEight.com article gets the history wrong when it states, “In the 1990s, Republicans fought back against Democrats’ efforts to create more minority-controlled districts.” Nope: I remember being in Tallahassee in the early 1990s, when Democrats held the Florida governorship and majorities in both houses of the legislature, and Republicans put together a coalition with black Democratic legislators to increase the number of black-majority (and Hispanic-majority, in Miami-Dade County) congressional and legislative districts. Republicans in other states then, and much more so after the redistrictings following the 2000 and 2010 Censuses, employed similar tactics.

Such districting, by the way, is almost entirely responsible for the grotesquely shaped districts cited by redistricting “reformers” who want to consign redistricting to supposedly non-partisan commissions (which usually get gamed successfully by Democrats, as happened after the 2010 Census in California and Arizona).

Next, overturn Baker v. Carr.

SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: Web giants to cooperate on removal of extremist content.

Web giants YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft will step up efforts to remove extremist content from their websites by creating a common database.

The companies will share ‘hashes’ – unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos – of extremist content they have removed from their websites to enable their peers to identify the same content on their platforms.

“We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online,” the companies said in a statement on Tuesday.

Multibillion-dollar corporations ganging together to silence particular viewpoints — perhaps an antitrust investigation would be in order.

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON: Why the Mainstream Media Can’t Hold Trump Accountable.

The incident underscores a troubling lack of curiosity in the press that Trump’s election has done nothing to mitigate. Right now, the media should be asking themselves: Why did Trump win white college graduates? Why did he outperform Mitt Romney among blacks and Hispanics? Why did lifelong Democrats in the Rust Belt vote for him?

If the mainstream press wanted to understand and explain Trump’s appeal, they could talk to any one of the millions of ordinary Americans with non-crazy views who voted for him. Instead, the media have gravitated toward fringe supporters and conspiracy theorists—the New Hampshire lawmakers who claimed that millions of people voted illegally, the handful of white supremacists who praised Trump at a recent conference in Washington DC, the malign influence of Alex Jones and readers of Infowars.

By insisting on an ideological narrative at the expense of honest reporting, and by reacting with hysterics every time Trump tweets something provocative, journalists are undermining their credibility. As fun as it is to laugh at hysterical journalists, we actually need them to be credible because they have an important job to do: hold the incoming Trump administration accountable for real abuses of power.

Ultimately it’s really the peoples’ job to hold politicians accountable; all the press needs to do is report fairly. When they won’t or can’t, as Donald Trump pointed out yesterday, the people and politicians will turn to other outlets.

A FRESH NEW FACE FOR THE DEMOCRATS! Biden raises possibility of 2020 presidential bid.

Vice President Biden on Monday raised the possibility of a presidential bid in 2020.

“I am going to run for president in 2020,” Biden told a group of reporters in the Capitol when asked about his political future.

Asked if he was kidding, the 74-year-old Biden paused for four seconds before saying he is “not committing not to run.”

The viral videos are ready.

HEALTH: Alabama researchers announce positive findings of Cannabidiol study.

After one month of treatment with the oil, which contains traces of THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana, 68 percent of patients experienced a 25 percent reduction in the frequency of seizures, according to a press release. More than half of them experienced more than a 50 percent reduction in the number of seizures and 9 percent became seizure free over the course of the study.

More than two-thirds of treated patients experienced a decrease of more than 50 percent in seizure severity, according to the release.

“It is encouraging that both frequency and severity of seizures appear to improve in the majority of patients in our study, patients who have limited treatment options,” said Dr. Jerzy P. Szaflarski, professor in the Department of Neurology and director of the UAB Epilepsy Center, in a statement. “Our research adds to the evidence that CBD may reduce frequency of seizures, but we also found that it appears to decrease the severity of seizures, which is a new finding.”

Researchers also found that Cannabidiol oil could improve mood and cognition for some patients suffering from severe epilepsy. However, researchers also found interactions between the oil and common drugs used to treat epilepsy.

The small study showed improvements for many patients, but researchers still want to find out more about Cannabidiol oil’s effectiveness as an epilepsy treatment.

Criminalization put a huge damper on research like this.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Sexism Didn’t Defeat Hillary: It Was Her Only Chance of Winning.

The Left is trying to find a plausible excuse for Hillary Clinton’s historic loss to Donald Trump. In addition to racism, one common excuse is sexism, the theory that Americans are too misogynistic to put a woman in the White House.

As with many popular myths, this one’s already been scrutinized and the results aren’t what progressives would prefer. Unhappily for the Left, Americans, at least in their voting habits, are about as even-handed as we could ask. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a measure of sexism in the election — there may have been, but not the kind the Left imagines.

Back in 1997, three scholars, Richard Seltzer, Jody Newman and Melissa Voorhees Leighton examined every state legislative race from 1986 to 1994 and every governor’s race, U.S. House race and U.S. Senate race from 1972 to 1994. Combined, they analyzed almost 62,000 candidates. They divided the races into three categories: Male incumbents vs. female challengers, female incumbents vs. male challengers and male non-incumbents vs. female non-incumbents.

The results were unambiguous: When women run, women win just as often as men do.

Hillary’s campaign was the Ghostbusters reboot of politics: A second-rate product you were told you had to love, or be considered sexist.

CLIMATE OF HATE: The Successful Progressive Conspiracy to Burn a ‘Climate Heretic:’ Wikileaks reveals how activists orchestrated a campaign to silence climate researcher Roger Pielke Jr.

Related: “So when I say I agree with the scientific consensus on climate change, I’m endorsing the scientific consensus for the same reason I endorsed Hillary Clinton for the first part of the election – as a strategy to protect myself. I endorse the scientific consensus on climate change to protect my career and reputation. To do otherwise would be dumb.”