TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1320: How The GOP Establishment Teamed With Nancy Pelosi To Table Impeachment Vote On IRS Commissioner.

CHINA KIDNAPS A SEA DROID: Jim Dunnigan assesses the “grand theft droid” caper. The post is packed with information.

Sample:

Until the recent incident with China most of the AUV incidents were accidents and curiosities, not diplomatic showdowns. For example, in November, for the second time in 2016, Filipino fishermen in the South China Sea have caught an American AUVs in their nets. These torpedo like devices are clearly marked as to what they are and the American embassy will send someone to pick them up if found. These AUVs are silent, very small, and able to operate on their own for up to a year. The first models were two meters (six feet) long and weighed 59 kg (130 pounds) and built to operate completely on its own collecting valuable information about underwater “weather”. What this AUV does is automatically move slowly (30-70 kilometers a day) underwater, collecting data on salinity and temperature and transmitting back via a satellite link every hour or so as the AUV briefly reaches the surface. This data improves the effectiveness of sonars used by friendly forces, making it easier to detect and track enemy submarines.

OBAMA ENDS WITH A WHIMPER: Michael Goodwin is having fun.

So this is how it ends — in a whimper wrapped in self-pity and recriminations. With President Obama on the defensive at his final press conference and Hillary Clinton’s last campaign event resembling a wake, the Democratic Party is limping off the stage and into the political winter.

It was supposed to sit atop the national power pyramid for decades, a new paradigm of liberals, progressives, the young, the old, the unions and blacks, Latinos, Muslims and Asians.

The torch would be passed from Obama to Clinton, a liberal Supreme Court would vastly expand executive power and the regulatory state would enforce climate-change orthodoxy on all industry and elitist dictates on every American. Globalism would be the new patriotism.

But a funny thing happened on the way to one-party dominance: The people who work for a living said no, hell no. Their revolt brings Donald Trump to the White House amid hopes of a revival of the economy and of the American spirit.

Yes.

BREXIT BLUES: An orderly separation from the EU should not be taken for granted.

Gideon Rachman:

If there was great goodwill on both sides, the negotiations could doubtless be accelerated. But that is where the politics come into it. There is already plenty of simmering ill will on both sides of the Channel. The British are hoping that, when the talks actually begin, things will calm down. In reality, it is more likely that the opposite will happen. The negotiating process will reveal the immense gap between the operating assumptions of the two sides. As a result, mutual acrimony will quickly increase — and talks could break down irretrievably.

The flashpoint is likely to be the EU’s estimate of Britain’s financial liabilities following Brexit, covering everything from money already pledged to the union’s budget to the pensions of retired bureaucrats. The estimates in Brussels are that the UK will be facing a bill of €50bn-€60bn.

That figure is likely to be greeted with outrage in the UK. The initial reaction will be to treat the EU’s financial demands as a bad joke or a clumsy attempt at blackmail. But the European Commission, which is running the negotiations, is highly legalistic and will be able to justify its figure. It will not yield easily.

What happens to the EU’s debts if the whole thing comes apart?

RACE RELATIONS: White Nationalists Target Montana Jews in Name of Alt-Right Richard Spencer.

CONGRESS AND THE COMING PENSIONS CRISIS:

There are lots of problems with blue model governance, but the one that is about to upend the status quo around the country is the financial irresponsibility of public sector unions and politicians. The latest headlines this weekend: “Public pension costs projected to reach 30 percent of payroll” and “Across Texas, Public Pensions Face Billions In Shortfalls“. With trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, the problem will only grow worse.
Congress has a responsibility to hold hearings into this problem and develop a coherent approach for the inevitable moment when irresponsible, spendthrift cities and states come to Washington hat in hand, looking for bailouts.

The federal government has zero legal or even moral responsibility for the consequences of the foolish and shortsighted choices that local officials have made, but as a matter of both pragmatism and compassion, Congress won’t want the harshest punishment to fall on those who had the least power in the system—the millions of public employees who were told by their lying union leaders and lying politicians that their pensions were safe.

Any kind of pension relief needs to be tied to reforms that ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. Those reforms will include both the way pensions are funded and accounted for, shifting to defined benefit pensions for the future, and reforms in the status and powers of public sector unions. Generous help for needy victims of public pension Ponzi scams, serious reform to protect the public from any repetition of what’s happened here.

I think defined-contribution plans are safer than defined-benefit plans. Or at least less subject to jiggery-pokery. And I don’t know if we can afford “generous help” for all the victims here, because there will be a lot.

FAKE NEWS: Nate Silver: ‘Narrative-driven coverage’ ignored election data. “Data was clear that white noncollege voters were overrepresented in swing states, helping Trump in [the Electoral College]. Narrative-driven coverage ignored it.”

RECORD SETTING BRITISH AIRCRAFT TO FLY AGAIN: In 1957 this special version of the Canberra set an aircraft altitude record. As the article points out, the Canberra was designed near the end of WW2. Here’s the wiki on the U.S. B-57 version.

FACT-CHECK: There’s more propaganda than news coming out of Aleppo this week.

It has just become more dangerous to be a foreign correspondent reporting on the civil war in Syria. This is because the jihadis holding power in east Aleppo were able to exclude Western journalists, who would be abducted and very likely killed if they went there, and replace them as news sources with highly partisan “local activists” who cannot escape being under jihadi control.

The foreign media has allowed – through naivety or self-interest – people who could only operate with the permission of al-Qaeda-type groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham to dominate the news agenda.

The precedent set in Aleppo means that participants in any future conflict will have an interest in deterring foreign journalists who might report objectively. By kidnapping and killing them, it is easy to create a vacuum of information that is in great demand and will, in future, be supplied by informants sympathetic to or at the mercy of the very same people (in this case the jihadi rulers of east Aleppo) who have kept out the foreign journalists. Killing or abducting the latter turns out to have been a smart move by the jihadis because it enabled them to establish substantial control of news reaching the outside world. This is bad news for any independent journalist entering their territory and threatening their monopoly of information.

You might also have noticed that jihadi propaganda films are much better than they used to be. al Qaeda’s stuff looked like it was put together on the cheap, sloppily edited together out of old VHS tapes. ISIS propaganda looks like it came straight out of Hollywood.

I’ve often wondered where ISIS got the skills and the money for such efforts.

NEWS FROM AN ALTERNATE TIMELINE WHERE THINGS DIDN’T TURN OUT NEARLY AS WELL: Kurt Schlichter: The Terrifying Aftermath Of Hillary’s Election Victory.

AND SO THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE DRAWS TO A CLOSE: Deaths from synthetic opioids up 72%, CDC says.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Title IX is ‘bureaucratic sex creep’ gone wild.

PEACEFUL TRANSITION: Pennsylvania Electors Getting Police Protection For Monday’s Vote.

One elector, Ash Khare, said he and each of the 19 others have been assigned a plainclothes state police trooper for protection.

“I’m a big boy,” said Khare, an India-born engineer and a longtime Republican from Warren County, who estimates he receives 3,000 to 5,000 emails, letters, and phone calls a day from as far away as France, Germany, and Australia. “But this is stupid. Nobody is standing up and telling these people, ‘Enough, knock it off.’ ”

It’s going to be a long four years — at least — of battling Democrats’ uncivil behavior.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Why They Oppose Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. “Groups like the Leadership Conference and American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP are no longer about civil rights. They are about enforcing an orthodoxy of identity politics. Identity politics helps Democrats win elections. The only way Hillary had a hope to win the White House was to ride intense racial polarization among black and Hispanic voters. The groups opposing Jeff Sessions now exist to divide Americans along the skin color lines. . . . They also want to cash out. Leading the opposition to Jeff Sessions is Nancy Zirkin from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. The activists at the Leadership Conference live large on the struggle. The most recent IRS form 990s from this organization show Wade Henderson, the President, raked in $360,080 in compensation. But that’s just the start.”

ROADX: Elon Musk Got Sick Of Traffic And Decided To Build Underground Tunnels For It.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The Shameful Truth Is That Many Law Schools Have Admitted Students With Low LSAT Scores To Prop Up Tuition Revenue And Now Seek To Avoid Accountability For The Ensuing Poor Bar Passage Results.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Media Move To Delegitimize Trump’s Win.

Many in the national press have taken on the role of discrediting President-elect Trump’s victory, just days before the Electoral College is set to meet and officially make Trump the next president of the United States.

Because of mounting evidence that Russian hackers stole the emails of Democratic leaders and the FBI’s public condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the election was “illegitimate.”

“So this was a tainted election,” he said in an op-ed this week. “It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.”

Last weekend on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” liberal Slate writer Jamelle Bouie also said the hacking had cast a shadow on Trump’s win, rendering it a farce.

Well, if Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie think the election of a Republican was illegitimate. . . .

Flashback: “As a journalist of my acquaintance joked on Twitter this week, I’m so old that I remember when it was dangerous and unpatriotic to question the validity of election results.”

YOU WENT FULL SALON. MAN, NEVER GO FULL SALON. The dirty deplorables: Who’s who on Donald Trump’s team and how they’ll destroy the environment.

Bonus: Salon Celebrates Christmas With TV’s Top 10 Abortions Of 2016.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY EDITION: The University of Kentucky has punished me in a “sexual misconduct” case, in part, for singing a Beach Boys tune covered by Alvin and the Chipmunks.

UPDATE: So I got an email from University of Kentucky spokesperson Jay Barstow, saying that the column I linked above doesn’t accurately reflect the facts. He included this redacted summary letter of charges, but I’m not convinced. There may be something juicy under the redactions, of course, but I can’t tell that because they’re redactions. That aside, there’s a mention of the song, that other faculty were unhappy with him, and that he doesn’t think he did anything wrong. His version seems consistent with this article from the Herald-Leader, and I kind of doubt they’d let him make materially false statements in a column in their paper, on a matter that they’ve covered.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more from Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

SELF-DEFENSE: Uber Driver Thwarts Robbery Attempt by Fatally Shooting Would-Be Thief on Florida Causeway.

The driver, who had a passenger in his vehicle, was travelling to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

“At approximately 5:50 a.m. today, there was a gentleman operating an Uber and picked up a fare here in Aventura at one of the local condos,” Aventura police Sgt. Chris Goranitis told reporters Sunday, according to ABC affiliate WPLG.

The Uber driver’s vehicle was then cut off by a Dodge Caravan minivan on the William Lehman Causeway.

“The driver of the Caravan exited the vehicle and he had two firearms in his hands and he pointed them at the Uber driver and demanded items from the driver,” Goranitis said. “This was an attempted robbery. We don’t believe it was road rage.”

But the unidentified Uber driver was also armed, and he proceeded to fire at the would-be thief, police said. The suspect, who was not identified, was pronounced dead at the scene.

I get the feeling Uber won’t treat their driver kindly, but I hope I’m wrong.

Although the driver was licensed to concealed-carry, Uber bans firearms for riders and drivers alike.

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: How To Make Feminism Great Again.

Today’s feminism is not merely out of touch with everyday Americans; it’s out of touch with reality. To survive, it’s going to have to come back to planet Earth.

First of all, it’s time to stop calling the United States a patriarchy. A patriarchy is a system where men hold the power and women do not. Women do hold power in the United States — they lead major universities and giant corporations, write influential books, serve as state and federal judges and even manage winning presidential campaigns. American women, especially college-educated women, are the freest and most self-determining in human history. Why pretend otherwise?

Feminism is drowning in myth-information. Advocates never tire of telling us that women are cheated out of nearly a quarter of their salary; that one in four college women is sexually assaulted, or that women are facing an epidemic of online abuse and violence.

Such claims are hugely distorted, but they have been repeated so often that they have taken on the aura of truth.

Fake news.

PEACE IN OUR TIME: Iran to land first Airbus jet within weeks under sanctions pact.

“We have finalised negotiations with Airbus and any day we will be able to sign the deal in Tehran,” Deputy Roads and Urban Development Minister Asghar Fakhrieh Kashan told Reuters in a telephone interview. “We are expecting some final clearances and expect to sign today or tomorrow.”

The first Airbus A321 could arrive before the Jan. 20 inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has opposed the deal to lift most sanctions on Iran in exchange for curbs on its nuclear activities, and well ahead of Iranian presidential elections in May next year.

What could go wrong?

EMILY RODEN: What jury duty with Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson was like. “Humbly, delicately, and without an ounce of condescension toward those who disagreed, he began walking us all through the details of the case. I even recall being moved by his thorough explanation about the nature of doubt and the standards set forth by our justice system.”

NOT. GONNA. HAPPEN. Electoral college rebels speak out on a last-ditch hope to stop Trump.