YOU CAN’T ASTROTURF THE BOX OFFICE: Hollywood’s Gun-Control Dud. “Miss Sloane, a highly anticipated movie demonizing the NRA and calling for gun control, has bombed. The movie succeeded only in emphasizing the top-down nature of the gun-control campaign and how little intensity there is for more regulations. The movie seemed to have everything going for it. Liberal movie critics loved it, and it was backed by a hefty ad budget along with heaps of favorable news coverage. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has already nominated the movie’s star, Jessica Chastain, for a prestigious Golden Globe, considered a strong predictor of the Oscars. But two weeks after its national release, it has made only $3.2 million. During its second weekend, it averaged just $102 per movie theater per day. With a ticket price of $10.30 per adult, that comes to an average of only 9.9 people a day seeing the movie in any given theater.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1325.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Aleppo And American Decline.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Amazing Blinkered European Elites.

Reading the article, one simply cannot understand how the European authorities could have worked themselves into such an obvious and massive set of errors. Nothing could be more obvious to a child than that mass immigration to Europe from war-torn regions convulsed by serial waves of radical Islamist ideology would create a massive threat.
Yet the EU essentially went about its business of bureaucratic infighting, process-worshipping, and complex institutional ballets without any real sense of urgency. Even today the EU has not developed an effective method of securing its frontiers. And control over your frontiers is the essence of sovereignty and the first element of any kind of internal security. This isn’t some arcane secret of statecraft; anybody who doesn’t understand this is massively unqualified to participate in governance.

The radical populists across Europe are wrong about many things, but they are right about this: governments that can’t protect their frontiers aren’t worthy of the name. Effective border control is what states are all about. Ask the Romans or the Chinese.

The failure of the Democratic and Republican establishments to understand that public concern over the security of America’s frontiers opened a pathway to victory for Donald Trump; the failure of European leaders to ‘get’ the vital importance of border control and, yes, immigration limitation is opening the door to massive political change in Europe.

European voters, like Americans, are patronized by their inferiors.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Call for church attacks puts Boston clergy on alert.

JOANNE JACOBS: Meritocracy’s losers: No degree, no respect. “The well-educated and well-off who live in or near big cities tend to endorse the notion, explicitly or implicitly, that education determines a person’s value.”

As Mickey Kaus wrote 25 years ago, lefties decry economic inequality even as they buttress social inequality. Because looking down on the working class is a core tenet of modern liberalism.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO SEND AN AMAZON GIFT CARD.

Plus, fresh deals on Bestselling Products, updated every day.

Plus, Coupons Galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Also, today’s Kindle Daily Deals.

And, fresh Digital Deals, updated daily.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN is a bit more personal than usual: Finding the good in my dad’s final days.

EVEN THE WAPO IS AGHAST AT OBAMA’S PARTING FUCK-YOU TO ISRAEL: The Obama administration fires a dangerous parting shot. “Israeli officials charged that the abstention represented a vindictive parting shot by Mr. Obama at Mr. Netanyahu, with whom he has feuded more bitterly than he did with most U.S. adversaries.”

Related: Obama’s Anti-Israel Tantrum: The U.N. resolution is a defining act of Obama’s Presidency. “It defines this President’s extraordinary ability to transform matters of public policy into personal pique at adversaries. And it defines the reality of the international left’s implacable opposition to the Israeli state.”

Meanwhile we’re supposed to worry about Trump. Plus: “For Donald Trump, meet your State Department. This is what State’s permanent bureaucrats believe, this is what they want, and Barack Obama delivered it to them.”

And look at the pic of Samantha Power accompanying the Post piece. The failure, and resulting bitterness, of the last eight years are written all over her.

UPDATE: Richard Fernandez on Facebook:

The most instructive thing about Obama’s Security Council abstention is he didn’t have the guts to do it earlier, when he stood to lose something by doing it. Only after he calculated there was nothing more to squeeze from that particular quarter did he run up the Jolly Roger. Had it cost him it would have meant something, even as a gesture.

But even more interesting was his willingness to damage the Democratic party who he’s leaving with political bill, not to mention the fact that the policy his abstention represents makes little sense.

Israel is likely to emerge as a linchpin in the region, after Obama’s power vacuum bomb reduces the nearby countries to waste. If Turkey and Iran fall apart, which is not inconceivable, then Obama will have antagonized the last man standing.

It was bad timing and pointless, like a punch thrown by a fighter lying on the canvas — at the referee. That would leave his legacy a consistently dysfunctional whole: conceived in delusion, executed in incompetence.

Yeah, that’ pretty much covers it. Though “executed in incompetence and spite” would be more accurate still.

MORE: Andrew McCarthy: Barack Obama’s Betrayal of Israel is a Black Day for American Diplomacy. “It is a disgraceful legacy of Barack Obama that his obsession over settlements and antipathy toward Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — traits he shares with his old radical comrade, Rashid Khalidi — have made the already dim prospects for peace far more remote. . . . Israel did not set out to conquer the disputed territory. The Jewish state took it fair and square when they won the defensive war against enemies that sought Israel’s destruction. Thus the unending pattern that the United States and Western European powers cravenly refuse to address: Islamic factions and nations are free to reserve the right to eradicate Israel, but Israel must pretend the aggression never happened and the continuing threat does not exist.”

Plus: “That, alas, is Obama’s real legacy: There are no good-faith disputes with him; you either agree with him or you are an outlaw.”

And that’s the irony. Trump, who’s about making deals, is cast as the authoritarian. Obama, who demands submission, is not.

Related: Flashback 2009: The Turn Against Israel.

CHRISTMAS EVE IN SPACE AND COMMUNION ON THE MOON:

It happened on Christmas Eve, 48 years ago. Three men took turns reading from the first 10 verses of the Book of Genesis. They were nearly 250,000 miles away from Bethlehem, but since it was the night before Christmas, and there was no chimney from which to hang their stockings, the three astronauts inside the Apollo 8 capsule orbiting the moon thought it would be appropriate. So as Jim Lovell,Frank Borman and Bill Anders looked at the faraway Earth through the small window of the spacecraft, they read the verses: “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the Earth.”

Their distant-sounding voices from far beyond our atmosphere were broadcast live to the whole planet that night over radio and television. It was one of those moments that brought the world together, that helped us to see our common humanity as children of God whom he loves equally, and whom he placed on the beautiful planet that he made.

Seven months after this extraordinary event, in July 1969, another NASA spacecraft, Apollo 11, carried two astronauts to the surface of the moon itself. One of them, Commander Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, thought he might do something similar to mark what was certainly an epochal moment in the history of our race. But what could one do to mark the first time human beings landed on another heavenly body? He asked Dean Woodruff, the pastor of his church in Webster, Texas, who had an idea.

What if he were to take communion? What is more basic to humanity than bread and wine? He could do it as his own way of thanking God—for the Earth and for everyone on it, and for our amazing ability to do things like build spacecraft that could fly to the moon. So the pastor gave him a small amount of consecrated bread and wine and a tiny chalice, and Mr. Aldrin took them with him to the moon. After the Eagle had landed and he and Neil Armstrong sat in the Lunar Module, Mr. Aldrin said this over the radio:

“This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”

He then ended radio communication and there, on the silent surface of the moon, read a Bible verse, and took communion. For reasons he explains in his own account, none of this was made public until Mr. Aldrin wrote about it in Guideposts magazine the following year:

“In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup.”

Then Mr. Aldrin read Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.” He explained that he had wanted to read this over the radio back to Earth, but at the last minute NASA asked him not to because the agency was in a legal battle with the outspoken atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. As it happened, she was suing over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis on Christmas Eve. And that of course is why so few people have heard of this amazing story.

I sometimes wonder what’s more amazing, this story—or the fact that so few people know about it.

Huh. I didn’t know this, and I’ve known Buzz since the ’80s.

THIS DUMB, SELF-CONGRATULATORY EFFORT SHOULD BE KILLED OFF. First world problems: Trump and the Correspondents’ Dinner.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Return Of Street-Corner Conservatism: Donald Trump and the political philosophy of the Deplorables. “Trump is a conservative—of a particular type that is rare in intellectual circles. His conservatism is ignored or dismissed or opposed because, while it often reaches the same conclusions as more prevalent versions of conservatism, its impulses, emphases, and forms are different from those of traditionalism, anti-Communism, classical liberalism, Leo Strauss conservatism in its East and West Coast varieties, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol as well as the neoconservatism of William Kristol, religious conservatism, paleo-conservatism, compassionate conservatism, constitutional conservatism, and all the other shaggy inhabitants of the conservative zoo.”

MORE ANTI-TRUMP HATE AIMED AT IVANKA, this time in the form of attack-reviews on her fashion products at Amazon.

THIS SHOULD GO VIRAL: An Open Letter To The Democratic National Committee From A Rural Democrat.

FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Proof that a new ice age has already started is stronger than ever, and we couldn’t be less prepared.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: President Obama signs defense bill that could spur new space-based arms race.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Everyone should be treated with respect — unless you’re a Republican. “The Trump hate has gone around the bend when the family of the president-elect is gleefully harassed. . . . This disassociation isn’t convincing the millions of Americans who voted for Trump that he’s any less legitimate. It hasn’t taken away any of the president’s power, or changed one of his policies. It’s just made liberals look more rude and out of touch. The left is trying to turn the whole country into a liberal safe space — safe for them, dangerous for anyone who disagrees with them. They’ve lost their minds.”

Related: Why conservatives could be the biggest winners of the Left’s post-election freak-out.

WHY IS BRYN MAWR COLLEGE SUCH A CESSPIT OF HATRED? Bryn Mawr student hounded after asking to share ride to Trump event.

Andi Moritz couldn’t get the comments out of her head. A Facebook post the Bryn Mawr College freshman made on the school’s ride share page earlier that September day had drawn harsh backlash from dozens of other students, most of whom she didn’t know.

She was looking for someone to share a ride to a campaign event for Donald Trump.

“Nobody has the right to an opinion of bigotry. 0 tolerance for fascists!”

“You want to go campaign for a man who has systematically oppressed entire ethnic/racial groups not to mention the LGBTQIA+ community and many others.”

“Why y’all doing this free labor for white supremacists tho.”

Moritz called the college’s suicide hotline.

“I just needed to talk to someone,” said Moritz, 18, of Hershey. “I was very sad. I wanted out of that college.”

Two days later she dropped out.

Sounds like a hostile educational environment.

Cost of attending Bryn Mawr College: $66,610 per year.

YEAH, IT’S TRUE, WE’RE: Divided.  And it’s a good thing.

ONLY A FEW BILLION YEARS TO PREVENT DISASTER: In the future we’ll all have to live like Martians.

I LIVE IN DENVER.  I KNOW HOW HE FEELS: This gorilla hates tourists just as much as you.  Of course our tourists are often impaired…

IN THE EMAIL FROM MARK WANDREY: Cartwright’s Cavaliers.

SAME OLD SAME OLD, NOW DRESSED IN FEMINIST CLOTHES: Modern Tupperware Parties.